Joy: Editor’s Discussion, September 2022

Dear Reader,

September marks the beginning of fall, which in my head bursts as orange-leafed trees, pumpkins, ghouls, and whispers of “back to school” by excited parents. September is perhaps the one month of the year when students are maybe a little excited to be back in the school building, and for those who are able to physically be together amidst the pandemic, presence becomes an important part of learning, growing up, and developing community. Part of the excitement of being together - other than new school supplies, which, to risk putting a date on my childhood, had to include an exciting new set of erasers - revolves around the simplicity of possibility. 

As children get older and progress from grade to grade, new ideas come into their developing minds, some of which are truly worldview-forming. It isn’t all the time that adults get to share in the wonderment of brand-new ideas, of first-time thoughts, like, so that’s what multiplication is or I had no idea there was such a thing as unrhymed poetry! One thing the Poem of the Day newsletter gets to explore is wonderment in poetry. I want to share with you some wonderings I’ve had in the last month as an informal provocation to go out into the leaves and pumpkins and, as the year wanes, become fresh, again, to the world around you.

• I had never read the poem “Renascence” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. You’ll see this poem appear in September’s Poem of the Day newsletter, and when you do, I hope you feel moved again by language and the beauty of rhythm - also picture me tearing up at my desk, remembering why I initially started to love language magic.
  • After picturing that cry-fest, also picture my giddy link-sharing of “Renascence” with my colleague Winshen, who shares a side of the office desks with me and visits to share poems (which she said is like giving a hug) or cherry tomatoes. Go share a poem that made you smile! Read poems and cry!
• Poet Ross Gay takes his office hours in his garden and is often unreachable by technology. Imagine the delight (little delights, perhaps, in his Book of Delights) of being unreachable among the dirt and the plants, or of smiling in discussion with a friend, student, or colleague among the smell of apples trees. Go try it!
  • Poetry magazine editor Adrian Matejka played basketball with Ross Gay at Indiana University. Will wonders never cease!
• Sit still. Avoid the “parade of the world.” Difficult? Read this blog post about being alone by the now newly-laureated U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón (congratulations!). Don’t miss the comments, either - we all need “lifelines” (perhaps especially informal blog posts).

It’s not easy to seize wonder. There are impossibly numerous voices telling us, adults with responsibilities beyond learning multiplication, to focus and to work and to produce. There are so many reasons in the modern world to despair, to protect, to fear, and to ignore human impulses to share and love and hold one another. Because of these reasons, and not in spite of them, we need to take care of one another. Offering care is radical. Go be a radical today!

• Radical #1: One of the most exciting poets to be in a room with today is Gabrielle Civil, a performer and scholar who writes poetry on many edges: edges of blackness, gender, form, and recently, the edges of time itself (don’t miss a special VS. podcast episode on that topic). Gabrielle was a visiting artist at Naropa during my MFA, and I’ll never forget how bizarre and wonderful it felt to hear her speak on the theme of radical joy. Joy, specifically Black joy as she explored it with others in Experiments in Joy, is not an evasion of the world but a way of fighting back with love. Being kind to ourselves and to each other, to everyone to whom we can extend kindness (which often means extending critique or offering evolution and not pleasantries) is vital to our survival as people and as a species.
• Radical #2: I’ve been raving about the A24 film Everything Everywhere All At Once directed by Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) largely because of this one devastating/enlightening monologue that Ke Huy Quan as Waymond Wang gives midway through the movie. Wang says, "When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It is strategic and necessary.” Wang is kind to the point of exasperation for his wife Evelyn until this moment, when she sees that kindness is, for Waymond, a survival method to fight against the pain and difficulty that life inevitably dispenses. Later in the film, I again wept (both viewings, and probably the third, and so on) when Evelyn begins to fight with kindness, raining googly eyes on her attackers, as she looks back and gently tells her husband, “I’m learning to fight like you.”

We have to learn joy and kindness. Joy is not easy, and just as Waymond and Evelyn’s daughter Joy in EEAAO indicates, the world’s goal is not to make you joyful. Existence, like a black hole in the shape of a bagel, is draining. Like the falling leaves, seasons and sorrow and joy are cyclical; joy has a way of coming back around. But unlike seasons, we can encourage joy to return more quickly with small acts of kindness, small openings of our minds to the wonder around us - maybe, today, through a poem.

Power to you, to your loved ones, and to joy in the world,

Eric