Joy and Poetry for National Poetry month

"We need joy as we need air." Maya Angelou

Joy. Joy is my motivation, my desire and object in sharing some poetry with you in this episode. Joy---gladness, pleasure, delight, and rejoicing. Joy, a very precious freedom.

How can you, how can we, build our capacity for joy? The belief that suffering alone lends you depth and nobility seems pretty common, and I wonder about this. Is familiarity with hardship sufficient to grow in compassion and resilience? Or does joy expand our humanity and understanding of life as well as lift us up? 

There are valuable clues to these questions in poems, the fruits of a poet's devoted attention. I have 13 poems for you, a baker's dozen of poems that speak about or gesture toward, joy.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Myth Matters, an exploration at the intersection of mythology, creativity and consciousness. I’m your host Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide beautiful crazy world of ours, I’m glad that you decided to join me here today.

April is National Poetry Month here in the United States and I always celebrate by making poetry the subject of an episode or two of Myth Matters. Shaped from metaphor and symbol, myth and poetry are linked forms of expression. Many of the old myths were first recorded as poems, and for centuries poets have found the creative inspiration for new poetic forms and meanings in mythology.

Poetry like myth, can meet the needs of the human heart and reunite the soul with its truth. Poetry, like myth, can refresh a lost sense of wonder and beauty. It can stop time. It can instigate a moment of joy.

Joy. Joy is my motivation, my desire and object in sharing some poetry with you today. Joy---gladness, pleasure, delight, and rejoicing. Joy, a very precious freedom.

How can you, how can we, build our capacity for joy? The belief that suffering alone lends you depth and nobility seems pretty common, and I wonder about this. Is familiarity with hardship sufficient to grow in compassion and resilience? Or does joy expand our humanity and understanding of life as well as lift us up? There are valuable clues to these questions in poems, the fruits of a poet's devoted attention.

So, I have a 13 poems for you today, a baker's dozen of poems that speak about or gesture toward, joy. I invite you to be with the words, to be with the feelings that arise. Take a breath. Take a moment to be with yourself and these reflections.

A Blessing by James Wright

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46481/a-blessing 

Although peach season here in Colorado is some months away- mention of

blossoming in our first poem brings to mind this evocation of the sweetness of that summer fruit.

From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee from Rose

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43012/from-blossoms

Black Cherries by W.S. Merwin

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/POEMS/1586491/BLACK-CHERRIES

What I notice about these poems is the close attention and appreciation of the details of earthly things and earthly experience. There is often a sensual quality to joy, a bodily response of delight and awareness of being alive right here, right now. Joy arises from an aesthetic response to the world. The word "aesthetic"  typically means a sensory perception. It comes from the ancient Greek aisthetikos meaning "perceptible by the senses or the mind."  

I love that conflation of the senses or the mind, capacities that today we so ofetn think are separate, right? The root meaning takes us to something that is pleasing to the senses, pleasing by virtue of how it fits together, the enjoyment of that sense of "rightness." Everything in this moment is exactly as it should be-- including me and my presence-- and I am in this. That type of realization.

Is joy the same thing as happiness? Does this distinction matter? In a way, no. But perhaps it helps us develop our vocabulary of joy, so I'll offer this to the question. The old roots of the word "joy" lead back to "rejoicing." Rejoicing. While the roots of our word "happiness" lead back to "good luck or good fortune." Good fortune is a cause for rejoicing, right, no wonder the distinction between these words is blurred. And yet, if happiness arises from the grateful realization of one's good fortune, I suggest that joy springs from a sudden, blessed moment of connection with the world. 

How about some more poetry?

Patience by Ross Gay from Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

https://solsticelitmag.org/content/patience/ 

Welcome Morning by Ann Sexton, from The Awful Rowing Toward God
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-sexton

For Keeps by Joy Harjo from Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings 

https://poets.org/anthology/poems-joy-hope-and-community-bring-us-together

A Narrative by George Oppen

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1588745/a-narrative11

Again, the sensory detail and immediacy, the "be here now" quality, in the words of Ram Dass. A profundity too, don't you think, even a solemnity. Joy connected to a network of feeling, like the mushroom that pops up above the surface of the ground, a small, transitory expression of  a much larger and more complex underground network that is its intelligence and contains the nourishment.

Which leads me to a seeming contradiction, one that you may have noticed in response to "Welcome Morning" by Ann Sexton. Ann Sexton was a contemporary of Sylvia Plath and like Plath, she died by suicide. Sexton began writing poetry as therapy. She had a difficult childhood and wrote about forbidden things. And she wrote that poem about joy.

What do we make of this? Does knowing how her life ended diminish her poem? Does it diminish the power of joy to transform your sense of life? Honestly, when I started assembling this episode, there was a part of me that wanted to leave that poem out and avoid the complications this raises, but we can’t do that, can we? Life is complex and we have to accept this and sit with it to find any real understanding. 

For me, well, first I thought "wow she knew joy and yet...." Something in me was disappointed.  And then I realized another perspective; Sexton was well acquainted with soul crushing despair and yet she knew joy too. In his book of essays, Inciting Joy, Ross Gay writes: 

“What happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?”

I think these next poems explore the shared territory of joy and sorrow. This first one is kind of a classic,

 On Joy and Sorrow by Kahlil Gibran   (This poem is in the public domain).

Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.
And he answered:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

So Much Happiness by Naomi Shihab Nye from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye

https://poets.org/anthology/poems-joy-hope-and-community-bring-us-together

The Language of Joy by Jacqueline Allen Trimble

There's also an audio recording of the poet reading this poem at this link! 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/156065/the-language-of-joy

Don't hesitate by Mary Oliver from Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.”

Joy is not made to be a crumb. Joy is a moment of grace and mystery that rises up in us. Do we allow it space? Do we live knowing the necessity of joy? If we're confused sometimes about the place of joy in our lives, are we also confused about the potential joy brings into the world?

I'm turning to Ross Gay again. Gay is one of our experts on joy in my opinion, someone brave enough to explore the territory of joy. In another passage from Inciting Joy he writes:

"My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow — which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow — might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival." 

That's Ross Gay in his collection of essays titled Inciting Joy, which I very much recommend.

I have two more poems for you but I want to pause for something that gives me joy-- the arrival of new email subscribers to the Myth Matters community. A big welcome to  Carrie, Cozy, Arlene, Anne, Matthew, Dee, Jennifer, Liz, and Dan. Welcome to Myth Matters!

If you're new to Myth Matters, I invite you to visit my Mythic Mojo website. You'll find a transcript of this episode with links to poems and poetry resources. You'll also find information about the 1:1 mentorship and creativity coaching that I offer. And you can join the email list if you'd like to receive links to new Myth Matters episodes in your inbox.

I can keep creating Myth Matters for you because I have some financial support  from amazing Patreon patrons and supporters on Bandcamp. A big shout out of thanks to patrons Lydia, Johnny, and Kim--Thank you so much my friends, for your support! 

If you're finding something of value in this podcast and can afford to send a few dollars a month my way, I hope you will consider doing that. Thank you so much for your support of Myth Matters in whatever form makes sense for you. 

Now, back to our poetry.

The Last Thing by Ada Limón from The Carrying 

https://poets.org/anthology/poems-joy-hope-and-community-bring-us-together

And now, for our last poem. I began this episode with a poem about a blessing and I'd like to end with another. This is from "Vacillation" by William Butler Yeats:

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

A blessing is a beautiful gift, one that each of us has the power to bestow.  And so my friend, I wish you joy in the coming days. Joy as a gateway to all good things. May you breathe in joy and breathe out happiness.

If we have a better understanding of our need for poetry and myth, and all that these forms offer, we can live more satisfying lives. We can inhabit a better story and create a more beautiful, just and sustainable world.

And that's it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Find some wonderful poetry, share it all around-- send some to me-- and until next time, keep the mystery in your life alive.