Category Archives: Blog Post 2: Using Literature to Navigate Life

Delights, Poems, and Bears… Oh My!

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There are a lot of things that delight me. A sunset, a sunrise, petting a dog, playing video games, or an ice cold beer after a long day. These are all temporary and will not make your day, however. In thinking about a true delight, one that affects my day, I found myself hard struck to find one… until earlier today.

Upon sweating through my original shirt due to the sweltering heat, I found myself rushing home to change my shirt and avoid the embarassment of a sweat stained shirt. Sadly, as I entered my personal domicile I was reminded of the horrifying fact that it was laundry day. Searching through my stack of shirts I never wear, I found my dads old ‘The Descendants‘ shirt which has the characteristics of being from the ’90s. Old, grey, and strangely loose.

As I left the house to walk to my local convenience store in search of an Arizona and a bag of chips, I heard an older voice say, “Hey man where’d you get that shirt?”. Stopping my usual stare at the ground style of gander, I looked up to see a man about the age of my dad with a smile. “Really cool shirt man.”, he said with generosity. My natural preoccupation with hating anyone I don’t know was quickly disarmed.

Through a slightly lengthy conversation that I do not see the need to reiterate I talked to this man about my dads love of punk music and my subsequent music taste due to the tutelage my father had bestowed upon me. His departure after this conversation left me with a smile. Not only was I complimented but I was given a chance to talk about my dad, someone who I look up to and see someone else who appreciates him for the way he raised me.

It is in this moment that I realized what a delight truly was. It does not need to be an outward exertion of dopamine into your brain, but just a simple act of kindness. Something that makes your day not because it was trying to but because it meant something special to you. Whether you are reminded of someone you love or something you love there is an importance in love.

As Ross Gay says, “my delight grows — much like love and joy — when I share it.”

This poem is long but good so you should read it.

Either peace or happiness, let it enfold you

When I was a young man, I felt that these things were dumb, unsophisticated. I had bad blood, a twisted mind, a precarious upbringing. I was hard as granite, I leered at the sun.  I trusted no man and especially no woman. I was living a hell in small rooms, I broke things, smashed things, walked through the glass, cursed. I challenged everything, was continually being evicted, jailed. In and out fights, in and out my mind. 

Women were something to screw and rail at. I had no male friends. I changed jobs and cities, I hated holidays, babies, history, newspapers, museums, grandmothers, marriage, movies, spiders, garbagemen, English accents, Spain, France, Italy, walnuts, and the color orange. Algebra angered me, opera sickened me, Charlie Chaplin was a fake and flowers were for pansies. Peace and happiness were to me sign of inferiority. Tenants of the weak and addled mind. 

But as I went on with  my alley fights, my suicidal years,  my passage through any number of women, it gradually begun to occur to me that I wasn’t different from the others, I was the same. They were all fullsome with hatred, glossed over with petty grievances . the man I fought in alleys had hearts of stone. Everybody was nudging, inching, cheating from some insignificant advantage. The lie was the weapon and the plot was empty, darkness was the dictator. 

Cautiously, I allowed myself to feel good at times, I found moments of peace in cheap rooms just staring at the knobs of some dresser or listening to the rain in the dark. The less I needed, the better I felt. Maybe the other life had worn me down, I no longer found glamour in topping somebody in conversation or in mounting the body of some poor, drunken female whose life had slipped away into sorrow. I could never accept life as it was. I could never gobble down all its poisons.

But there were parts, tenuous magic parts open for the asking. I reformulated. I don’t know when, date, time, all that. But the change occured, something in me relaxed, smoothed out, I no longer had to prove that I was a man. I didn’t have to prove anything, I begun to see things. Coffee cups lined up behind a counter in a café or a dog walking along a sidewalk or the way the mouse on my dresser top stopped there, really stopped there with its body, its ears, its nose, it was fixed, a bit of life caught within itself, and its eyes were looked at me and they were beautiful. 

Then it was gone. I began to feel good, I began to feel good in worst situations and there were plenty of those, like say, the boss behind his desk, he is going to have to fire me, I’ve missed too many days, he’s dressed in a suit, necktie, glasses, he says “I’m going to have to let you go”, “it’s alright” I tell him. He must do what he must do, he has a wife, a house, children, expenses, most probably a girlfriend. I’m sorry for him. He’s caught.

I walked out into the blazing sushine, the whole day is mine, temporarily anyhow. The whole world is at the throat of the world, everybody feels angry ,short-changed, cheated. Everybody is despondent, disillusioned. I welcomed shots of piece, tattered shards of happines, I embraced that stuff like the hottest number, like high heels, breasts, singing, the works. 

Don’t get me wrong, there is such a thing as cockeyed optimism that overlook all basic problems just for the sake itself. This is a shield, a sickness. 

The knife got near my throat again, I almost turned on the gas again, but when the good moments arrived again, I didn’t fight them off like an alley adversary, I let them take me, I luxuriated them, I bade them welcome home, I even looked into the mirror once having thought myself to be ugly, I now liked what I saw. almost handsome, yet a bit ripped and ragged, scars, lumps, odd turns, but all in all, not too bad, almost handsome. Better at least than some of those movie star faces like the cheeks of a baby’s butt.

And finally I discovered real feelings for others, unheralded, like lately like this morning, as I was leaving for the track, I saw my wife in bed, just the shape of her head there covers pulled high, just the shape of her head there, not forgetting centuries of the living and the dead and the dying, and pyramids, mozart dead but his music still there in the room, weeds growing, the earth turning, the tote board waiting for me. I saw the shape of my wife’s head, she so still, I ached for her life just being there under covers, I kissed her on the forehead, got down the stairway, got outside, got into my marvelous car, fixed the seat belt, backed out the drive, feeling warm to the finger tips, down to my foot on the gas pedal, I entered the world once more, drove down the hill pass the houses full and empty of people. I saw the mailman, honked, he waved back at me.

That is my favorite poem of all time. For reasons that I do not feel like divulging and reasons that anyone reading does not care about.

I do not love apathy yet I find myself constantly surrounded by it. In most worldly affairs, I do not care. For those I do care about, I care too much. In earlier years I found myself consistently angry at the world for better or for worse. I do not know if I hated as much as Mr. Bukowski, but I did hate. I never gained anything from this hatred nor did I find any inner happiness.

There is a danger in hoping against hope. An inside dialogue of wanting things to go wrong because they must.

As we read through lines such as, “I felt that these things were dumb, unsophisticated. I had bad blood, a twisted mind, a precarious upbringing. I was hard as granite, I leered at the sun.  I trusted no man and especially no woman.“. There is an internalization of not just outward hatred but inward hatred. Flakes of misogyny slip between the lines as a heterosexual man begins to divulge a leering towards woman. This hatred while not tied to woman is thus attributed. To read this, however as an indictment of woman by Bukowski would be reckless. It serves moreso as an indictment of self and the destructive hatred that is perverting Bukowski’s mind.

In my opinion, Bukowski’s most powerful lines are, “I went on with  my alley fights, my suicidal years,  my passage through any number of women, it gradually begun to occur to me that I wasn’t different from the others, I was the same. They were all fullsome with hatred, glossed over with petty grievances . the man I fought in alleys had hearts of stone. Everybody was nudging, inching, cheating from some insignificant advantage. The lie was the weapon and the plot was empty, darkness was the dictator. “. In this we see the penultimate cause of the problem. Allowing yourself to be enveloped by a hatred. Allowing others to further feel this darkness instead of attempting to garner an empathetic aura into the world. To continue the cycle is to harm the world.

“When the good moments arrived again, I didn’t fight them off like an alley adversary, I let them take me, I luxuriated them, I bade them welcome home, I even looked into the mirror once having thought myself to be ugly, I now liked what I saw” As we allow ourselves to love not only each other but ourselves we will be filled with happiness comparable to no other. To look around and enjoy without a guise of needing to be smarter or better we internalize a sense of love so desperately missing in apathy we forego knowing for understanding.

Black Milk Tea, Hold the Boba & Nature’s Delight

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Part 1: One of My Many Delights

Reading Ross Gay’s ‘Book of Delights’ truly changed my perspective on the simple day-to-day occurrences of happiness in my life. Like most recently, it’s been a little challenging adapting to living on campus this semester in a dorm. For the entirety of my college career, I’ve lived off campus with my family. However, this semester I needed to move on campus because my partner separated from the Air Force and moved back where their family is in Texas. So, I’m not only living in an entirely new environment, but I’m also experiencing a familial lack for what feels like the first time in a while. Not an ideal situation for the last semester of my undergraduate studies but I’m making do, and this awesome tea house in North Charleston where I used to live called Gong Cha gives me comfort.

Lately, I’ve found myself making a fun little trip over there to get a large black milk tea (hold the boba; yeah I know that’s weird, the texture just doesn’t agree with me, don’t judge me) whenever I have a bit of free time. It’s not only the drink itself that’s a delight for me. It’s the entire process. I just recently bought a new car (my first “big girl” purchase) and get this… IT HAS A SUNROOF. I cannot tell you how much this delights me. So, I let the Charleston breeze waft through my car while I’m blasting my favorite tunes (using Apple CarPlay, which is a first for me) on my way to Gong Cha. Sometimes I’ll take a detour over the Ravenel Bridge because there’s something about that gigantic bridge overlooking Cooper River that makes me feel a little giddy. The drink tops off the whole experience. The blend of creamy, earthy goodness pleases me and I often find myself gulping slowly to let each taste bud in my mouth capture the flavor. Occasionally I’ll head across the street to Books-a-Million to peruse through the aisles, each book cover reminding me why I chose to be an English major in the first place. The stories. Anywhere there’s a plethora of books feels like home. I gently run my fingers across the covers, once in a while picking a book off its shelf to flip through the pages and inhale that fresh paper scent while peeking at its contents. On the ride back downtown to my dorm, I peacefully sit with my thoughts. Each time, the entire experience offers me a unique sense of calm and quiet that’s much needed in my busy day-to-day as an undergraduate senior.

Part 2: Podcast Narrative

For the first fourteen years of my life I lived in Southeast Michigan with my mom and older brother. I frequented local parks while growing up there since my childhood was before the explosion of technology we know today, and also because my older brother Shawn played baseball throughout his childhood. My mom would sit in her camping chair on the sidelines during his games while I’d playfully stomp through the playground and surrounding grassy fields with my best friend at the time named Katie, whose older brother also played baseball. Back then, I didn’t embody the profound realization that death was looming over all of us. I instead had a childlike wonder towards the tickling feeling of grass beneath my bare feet, the breeze of the wild tangling my long, brown hair. As I’ve experienced life however, and after reading Ross Gay’s poem ‘Thank You’ for the first time, I recognize there have been many times I’ve walked through a grassy area with my bare feet and felt an enduring sense of melancholy that comes with the realization of death which Gay criticizes in this poem. 

‘Thank You’ by Ross Gay

“If you find yourself half naked

and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,

again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says

you are the air of the now and gone, that says

all you love will turn to dust,

and will meet you there, do not

raise your fist. Do not raise

your small voice against it. And do not

take cover. Instead, curl your toes

into the grass, watch the cloud

ascending from your lips. Walk

through the garden’s dormant splendor.

Say only, thank you.

Thank you.”

I’m a new consumer of Ross Gay’s work. I first read his 2019 collection of essays titled ‘Book of Delights,’ and this poem gives me the same sense of delight he highlights in that work, specifically gathering delight in things which remind us of our mortality. His personification of the earth using “sonorous moan” is an interesting tool and I think it connects the reader to mother earth in a profound way. The feeling of grass beneath one’s feet and wind, ground the reader in a sort of spectacular moment of realization that all things are one and impermanent. Gay suggests, however, to not allow our human emotion to ruin a moment in nature like this. Instead of feeling sorrowful or angry with mother earth, we should embrace her. Revel in the feeling of the grass tickling our bare feet, find consolation in observing the wind, the clouds, and the overall landscape. To be alive is to experience, and as such we must be grateful for this chance.

I think it’s interesting that this poem is fourteen lines, making it a sonnet, but it doesn’t adhere to an end-rhyme or iambic pentameter. This sort of narrative-like, lyrical quality to the poem, in my opinion, allows the reader to ruminate with what each word and line represents. There’s a wisdom Gay wants us to take away from the poem and apply to our everyday lives. When I think back on my childhood and other times when I’ve wandered through nature barefoot, there’s a strong contrast between the experiences. In childhood, there was a playful approach, yet in adulthood, I’ve been more inclined to associate nature with death. However, I think what Gay is trying to convey is that nature is playful and each time we experience it we should keep that experience as just that. We shouldn’t associate negative connotations with such an experience because to do so takes away from the present. We have no control over the inevitable future of loved ones passing away, of everything before us disappearing eventually. To savor the present is to be grateful for the now. And we’re the lucky ones.

‘Thank You’ by Ross Gay

“If you find yourself half naked

and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,

again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says

you are the air of the now and gone, that says

all you love will turn to dust,

and will meet you there, do not

raise your fist. Do not raise

your small voice against it. And do not

take cover. Instead, curl your toes

into the grass, watch the cloud

ascending from your lips. Walk

through the garden’s dormant splendor.

Say only, thank you.

Thank you.”

Hannah’s Second Blog Post

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In Search of the Delight in the Present

Part 1: Finding my Own Delights: Inspired by Ross Gay’s “Book of Delights”

One particular delight that resonates with me is rain: the way it falls, collects, creates a ripple effect. The way that the rain requires that we wear our favorite rain boots (that we don’t regularly) have the opportunity to wear. Or pull out our umbrellas, or just find delight and joy in jumping in the puddles that grow around me.

As English majors, we are trained to analyze texts with precision and depth, but we can also be inspired by our environments and translate these small delights into text. In this delight, the minute details serve as a lens through which we can explore empathy, understanding, and the shared joy of things out of our control, like the weather.

This delight encourages me to interact in new ways with my surroundings and to recognize old things as being delightful, rather than inhibiting or tiring. Finding delights, such as the rain drops in a puddle of water help me to foster a richer engagement with the world around me.

Part 2

[Podcast Intro]

Host: Welcome to a special episode of our literary journey, inspired by the immersive style of Poetry Unbound. Today, we’ll be unraveling the enigmatic beauty of E.E. Cummings‘ poem, “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond.”

[Analysis]

Host: First we dive into the first lines of the poem, where Cummings takes us into uncharted emotional territory with the words, “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond.” The juxtaposition of the unknown and the embrace of it sets the tone for a poetic exploration of love’s transformative power.

In his poem, we see the deliberate manipulation of language through his use of all lower case words. The absence of capitalization could be understood as unconventional, statement-making. The spacing could also be understood as unconventional. The unconventional spacing emerge as a testament to the poem’s experimental nature, which can be understood as being synonymous with the unpredictability of the journey of love, the topic in the poem.

Cummings crafts a vivid and intimate image. The mention of “your most frail gesture” and “my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly” creates a delicate dance between vulnerability and the awe-inspiring nature of love. The poet captures the essence of surrender, as if the heart willingly travels to uncharted realms, embracing the unknown with open arms.

There seems to be an almost paradoxical tension. For example, between “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” evokes a sense of tenderness and fragility, revealing the profound impact of love on the poet’s perception of the world. In this way, the poem intertwines and juxtaposes a sense of vulnerability and strength.

[Closing] 

Host: In the spirit of Poetry Unbound, we hope this exploration of E.E. Cummings’ “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond” has allowed you to delve into the intricate tapestry of emotions that poetry can weave. Remember, literature has the power to transport us to unexplored realms, and in its verses, we often discover the nuances of our own emotional landscapes.

Thank you for joining us on this poetic excursion.

[End of Podcast]

Delighted by the Present

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Part I

Oh God, Not This Again.

This afternoon I am extremely hungover, hunched backed, scraping my stiff, overflowing, hamper across the kitchen into the laundry room/pantry/shoe dump/ cat bathroom. The early afternoon light is screaming through the closed blinds. I’m fluctuating between searing head pains and nausea and Ella is still asleep. Opening the washing machine, (making sure to check for cats before I dump, of course) my fingers are tangled under the pressure of this really heavy hamper. I think to myself, didn’t I just do this.

God, it never ends.

Doing the laundry is typically a task for my girlfriend, Ella. But since she is sleepy, warm, and mushy in our bed, I remember that the key to a happy relationship is doing the chores. So, I rolled out of bed, banging and knocking into various furniture with this godforsaken hamper, hangover hunched, and headed towards the laundry room. Since reading the Book of Delights, I have really been trying to get into the whole spirit of embracing mundane tasks, but holy God, I hate doing laundry hungover.

Somewhere between the moments of dumping the clothes in the machine resentfully, and balancing the hamper on my knee while reaching for a Tide Pod, I was flung into the realization that a full week had passed. It’s funny how doing the laundry is my marker that seven days, each day different with its own story, have been violently torn from an imaginary book in my mind and I’m watching the pages fly away in the wind as I try to grab for them. Anyway, here I am, cranking these knobs to “regular cycle,” annoyed that I have to choose between “normal” and “regular” cycle (because it seems like there would be absolutely no difference, right?).

Part II Billy Collins “The Present”

My name is Brooke DiMarzio and since I’ve gotten to college, I’ve struggled with living in the present. There are so many times throughout the day when I catch myself thinking about how I should be spending my time. Am I enjoying these years to the fullest? Have I missed out on opportunities because I didn’t join a sorority? Should I be living with my girlfriend in college? Should I see my family more? Why do I have three cats at 21 years old?

I suffer from obsessive compulsive comparing my life to other people’s disorder. I hate how these thoughts sometimes torment the beautiful reality I live. I think it’s fairly common though– to believe the grass is greener on the other side.

In a world where we are microscopically viewing the lives of others through pictures and videos, how could you not?

[music: “patterns” by Z-bone]

“The Present” by Billy Collins

"Much has been said about being in the present.
It’s the place to be, according to the gurus, 
like the latest club on the downtown scene,
but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions.

It doesn’t seem desirable or even possible
to wake up every morning and begin
leaping from one second into the next 
until you fall exhausted back into bed.

Plus, there’d be no past
with so many scenes to savor and regret,
and no future, the place you will die
but not before flying around with a jet pack.

The trouble with the present is 
that its always in a state of vanishing.
Take the second it takes to end 
this sentence with a period—already gone.

What about the moment that exists
between banging your thumb
with a hammer and realizing 
you are in a whole lot of pain? 

What about the one that occurs after you hear the punch line 
but before you get the joke? 
Is that where the wise men want us to live

in that intervening tick, the tiny slot 
that occurs after you have spent hours 
searching downtown for that new club
and just before you give up and head back home?"

Billy Collins

[music: “My Little Brown Book” John Coltrane and Duke Ellington]

Cozy in bed at 9:40 on a Sunday night, lying next to my partner, Ella, this poem literally made me laugh out loud. The first time I read this poem at 14 years old, it went right over my head. Billy Collins was a little too sophisticated for me as a sophomore in high school.

After needing to find a poem to string together some sort of response to this assignment, I fished through my bookshelf and caught Billy Collins’ The Rain in Portugal.

What a delight it was to connect with this work again, seven years later and just a few months away from a degree in English.

In “The Present,” Collins grapples with the idea of living in the moment. In many ways, he challenges the way living in the present is pushed upon us. It seems like Collins wants us to, from time to time, exist in the past and future—live in our memories and fantasies.

I thought it was really clever– the way he freezes us in that moment of time where we experience moments before the uninhibited forces of life. I love how he has these two contrasting physiological responses to demonstrate the present—physical pain and physical laughter. It’s great how he barely uses imagery, but the jarring feeling of hitting your finger with a hammer causes you to flinch while reading.

I get a sense that Collins is struggling with the feeling that life is happening to him. As someone who sometimes feels like I have no real control over my life, I caught onto these suggestions throughout the poem.

Is the speaker of this poem suggesting that life just happens to us, before we can even process what is actually happening?

I think that there is something so humorous about this poem that makes me feel recognized in many ways. Maybe it’s the idea that we do not always have control over the moments that make up our lives and sometimes life just happens to us.

A Little Delight and A Poem

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Part I: The Horror/Purity of Accidentally Calling Your Teacher ‘Mom’

[ Photo of James Island County Dog Park on their official website]

I went to James Island County Park on Saturday. My destination was the dog park, which is located inside the whole facility. It really was gorgeous that day, with the sky being a clear blue and the weather being cool but hot enough for me to roll the windows down without catching a chill. It was a day made for being outside. The only downside of the park is that it costs two dollars per person. While not the end of the world, two dollars to a broke college student is equivalent to one hundred dollars. Nevertheless, I was there for my dog, so I reluctantly handed over my two crumpled dollars to the older employee working the booth. I was then rewarded with a bright smile and a dog treat for my pup in the back.

The exchange was so happy and pure that my mind went blank for a moment. The person turned to me with the same smile and said, “Enjoy your time!” I replied with the same amount of enthusiasm, “You too!” It was not until a few seconds after I drove away that I caught my slip-up and felt my cheeks flush. That was not the first time I said something like that to an employee when I was the customer; most likely it would not be the last as well. But instead of letting the little incident go, I let it fester some more and thought about why that is a common occurrence in society. It’s almost on the same level as accidentally calling your teacher ‘mom’, not on an embarrassing scale (in my opinion, the latter takes the cake by a mile), but in how often it occurs in society.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that when I have that slip-up, it is usually when I am interacting with a person that I genuinely feel comfortable around. This conclusion came from me realizing that when I would call a teacher ‘mom’, it would be because I felt safe around them. The interaction with the park worker was so pure that I felt genuine about wanting them to have a great time, whatever that might look like.

Part II: Little Exercise by Elizabeth Bishop

My name is Mallery McKay, and I was completely clueless as to which piece of prose or poetry truly spoke to me to analyze. I decided to choose a piece of work that dealt with the struggles of mental health, mainly anxiety, as I struggle with a great deal of it. I thought it was so interesting develing into a writer’s mindset of anxiety and how the struggles from it play out in the work itself, format-wise and symbolic.

[ Play Ballerina: Yehezkel Raz]

I love how metaphorical this poem truly gets; it really makes you work for the true meaning of these lines through symbols mainly relating to the natural world. Bishop uses our knowledge and usage of the natural world as a vessel to reflect on one’s personal mental struggles living in our society today.

 Bishop starts the first stanza off with immediate tension through the imagery of an approaching storm; this could be symbolizing worries that a person can deal with, looming in the person’s mind, making it all they think about. Then describing the storm as a dog seems to derive the storm from its power, almost domesticating it for the reader.

Bishop uses elements of the sea as the main symbols of her metaphors, like when she mentions the strengths of a mangrove. That refers to a type of tropical tree that is adapted to live on the shoreline and thrive on saltwater when the tide comes and floods its roots. I believe Bishop uses the roots to symbolize how a person can find strength in another, and the beauty of that statement is that it does not have to be just a human. I think the second stanza can be read as finding solace in the natural world or finding something that makes you stronger, whether it be a human or anything else.

I think the most interesting part of this poem for me is how Bishop shows this mental health battle through the storm and how the natural world around it reacts. How the different elements’ reactions showcase different people with their different struggles, like the mangroves and their tough support system or the heron, who flies away but the water still shines behind it, implies that it looks for the best in the worst circumstances. To me, Bishop’s work showcases how people of the same environment can deal with struggles differently because of their own mindset and their own advantages.

Delight.

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  1. Daylist

To be honest with you, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last two days crying. That sounds so silly when I write it out like that, but it’s true. This last week has been anything but easy. Having this assignment in the back of my head since Monday, I have tried so desperately to think of delights. They are, after all, happening around me all the time. As much as I have wanted to see them, it seems that every day, they illude me.

In my time thinking about the delights of my life, I found myself researching “What is a delight?” and reading several articles on Ross Gay’s definition of it (from his book, The Book of Delights). In one article by Sage Van Wing, where he presents the transcript of an interview between Ross Gay and Dave Miller. In this, Gay explains what “delight” means to him, how it typically forms in each day of his life, and how writing this book made him realize that delight grows when it is shared. He states:

“I feel like, actually the sort of inclination of the gift, like the way that the gift… the true gift actually happens is when we give it away. Maybe that’s a measure of how that’s a measure of what kind of a gift something is actually. In the process of writing this book, I did notice two things. I think how often the thing that delighted me would be some kind of exchange of sharing and how often my inclination, almost immediately upon witnessing the exchanges sharing, which is the exchange of gifting, is to immediately tell someone else. It wasn’t like I had to think hard about it. It was just I was inclined to be like, yo! you see this thing happening?“

This answer of his really seemed to stick out to me. I had thought over and over of the things in the last couple of days that have given me delight, been a delight, but the only real things I thought of were just the ways I have attempted to help other people. And I am not truly sure that, in the very specific definition of a delight, those count.

The other night, on a day when my tears had finally run out, my friend called me crying. And so, of course, without a second thought, I got into my car and drove to her. As the night progressed, we just talked, and I mostly listened to everything she had to say. And when I think back on that, on times when my role in my friendships is to listen, I love it more than anything. And, truly, a delight of mine is to hold space.

To me, holding space for someone is allowing them to be exactly as they are. But not in a way like, “Oh, I am not judging,” it’s a physical thing. The world around us is made of energy, right? I have energy, and everyone else has it too. And so, while in my energy field, I imagine space for this person – for her, while we talk. And although it really only happens in my head, it seems to work, and I can see evidence of it in the physical. I truly believe that when she is in my presence, she feels safe enough to be exactly as she is at that moment. And when it comes to delight, my ability to do this for the people, the people that I love so deeply in my life, is, in fact, a delight.

To be the person she calls when she is crying, to be the person she feels comfortable snot sobbing in front of, to be the person she can tell the truth to is such a delight of mine that all the time I had spent in the last couple of days crying (myself) was worth feeling and releasing so that I would have the capacity to hold that space for her when she needed it.

I sat down yesterday to write about this in more detail, but I just couldn’t get the words out. I began to wonder if that really was a delight at all. And maybe it isn’t- not in the true sense of the word, anyway.

And so here I am, again, thinking about delight. While blowing out my hair and rolling up its pieces in rollers, it hit me. Music. Every single day I have woken up this week, I have been oddly excited to find out what my “daylist” on Spotify is. From my understanding, a “daylist” is a playlist made by Spotify based on your listening history at certain times each day. They come up with a theme that represents it, and they create a playlist that includes songs you already enjoy and songs that they recommend based off of your listening history. I am not sure if I explained that well at all, but you get the point (or maybe you don’t, and I am sorry).

As someone who absolutely adores listening to new music and has a serious appreciation for ambient vibes, this playlist has been such an exciting experience. I not only find new music so easily but the vibe of that time of day is already set for me (which I love). Although this week has been a tough one, hopping on my Spotify to find out what new playlist they have curated for me has definitely been a daily delight.

2. Another Delight

My name is Madison McMahon, and for a while now, I have been thinking a lot about the word “delight.” Not only have I spent a significant amount of time reading and discussing Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, which is linked above, but I have been attempting to figure out what exactly it means. Obviously, it means one thing to Gay, and it shows up in my life very differently from his, but it got me thinking about what delight meant for other people.

“DELIGHT” – Lawrence Kearney (1978):

As I was looking for poems that I could potentially connect to The Book of Delights and the meaning of delight, I came across this work. And upon my first time reading it, it felt as if all the air in the room had been sucked up and swallowed.

To me, reading this poem felt very similar to jumping from a ledge. The walk up, the looking over, the leap, and the sharpness of the fall. This poem feels like a heavy weight but also the pinching of the air that surrounds you on your way down, whistling in your ears and ripping the air out of your lungs.

It got me thinking about a whole new world of “delight.” One where the delight is not something beautiful or good but something like a failure. That maybe delight is not only found in those pretty special moments in life, but in the “evasions” and “losses” that we all experience daily. And then the “fall” of the poem, “And occasionally, / something larger…anything / you think you can’t get back.”

And then, as I thought about it more, perhaps delight is always beautiful, but just not in the way we assume it to be. In moments of deep loss, there are strange tingles of delight, of beauty. Like the beautiful human reaction to blame other people or to wish grief had hands. Or the realization that you hold the power to push and direct your life in any direction you desire. Or the simple act of crying and having someone stand there and cry with you.

I’m Rooting For You

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One of the best compliments I’ve ever heard is “I’m rooting for you.” I was playing a game of Bananagrams at Felix (the best words come out after your second French 75) when our server came by, saw my board, and spoke those four lovely words toward me. 

Not only is the word choice interesting–to root? I’m growing roots for you? It’s far more casual than “I believe in you” and far less affectionate. When I looked up the origin of the phrase (idiom?), I found it is from the British word “rout” meaning to bellow, usually related to cattle. So, how we got from cattle yelling to encouragement, I don’t know.

But if we really think about it, the idea of rooting for someone is so beautiful. To be their support, their physical roots something grounding them while they grow or go out on a limb. Rooting for someone means supporting them with no gain of their own, simply basking in someone else’s joy or achievements. 

I didn’t need someone to root for me at that moment (it was a very low-stakes game), but it was nice to know that someone was on my side. In that moment he was actively thinking about me and wanting me to win. There are people in our lives who root for us daily with no gain besides our happiness. Yet, this wonderful stranger who happened to enjoy my friend and my game of buzzed Bananagrams was rooting for me. 

My name is Lilly Flowers and a few days ago I got to pick out a random literary magazine from a pile of them in my professor’s office. Our class focuses on copy editing and the publishing industry, and much of the conversation centers around the kind of jobs one can get with editing experience. I chose the “‘Arts & Letters” spring 2023 edition of the Journal of Contemporary Culture published by Georgia College. To be honest, I mostly picked it out because of the pretty cover (see the bottom of the post), but inside I found some wonderful works of poetry and prose. Some of them are not as bright and cheery as the cover, however.

Iowa City, Iowa by Jesse Lee Kercheval

Smoke, horizon, cornfield, windbreak, road, an implicit plot all disconnected as of by jigsaw blade, amputated pine boughs, gouged sky, fissures of horizon. Only when I write, staring for hours, do the bits begin to fit. I sense a compression in my spine. I match some pieces but others, red as marrow, won’t fit unless I force them. I tire. As always. I lift my eyes to window. Sky and bare limbs like saw cuts. A cloud like a torn blouse. I can’t assemble this.

(transition music)

I could feel the frustration so viscerally the first time I read this poem. The choppy lists of images painting the vast unchanging physical land around them show the monotony of having to always be creating, thinking of something, imagining. Jesse Lee connects the physical land with her mind; the landscape is in pieces and so is she. She’s trying to make something, but all her ideas aren’t fully formed, “amputated pine boughs…fissures of horizon…bare limbs like saw cuts.” These words are sharp like our own thoughts when we can’t write. So much of our worth is bound up in what we can create when you cannot measure your worth by that.

Although the poem is named “Iowa City, Iowa,” Iowa could be anywhere for the reader. The place they’re stuck: a hometown, a city they’ve outgrown, or a state of mind. Iowa is someplace where, after being there, nothing seems to fit. “Disconnected as of by jigsaw blade” it’s as if we’re confused and unsettled about our physical, or mental, surroundings. We no longer fit into that space therefore it cannot support us.

The spine is an interesting body part to focus on in this piece. It connects the entire body and when the spine is damaged it’s devastating. The “compression” Jesse Lee feels is the brink of what is coming. She’s on the edge of devastation and complete burnout if she doesn’t take care of herself. Forcing yourself to make something and “staring for hours” are not ways to motivate yourself.

By the end of the poem, it feels like Jesse Lee has given up. She cannot assemble this. It’s a definitive statement. But I don’t think that we should see this as a failure. Jesse Lee hints at the idea of a break, as in taking a break. For such a short piece, she is communicating a lot through her imagery connected to the physical body. The internal and external are working together to scream at you “Take a break! You cannot create under these conditions!” Your body needs a break, your mind needs a rest, and maybe you need a change of scenery.

The Mundane Chocolate Chip Bagel and the Holiness of Everything Else

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Part 1:

The Chocolate Chip Bagel

In my four years of college, I have eaten a chocolate chip bagel at least five days every week. Most people would be disappointed. I order it plain, untoasted, no shmear or cream cheese or toppings of any sort. Most people might even go so far as to call me a freak. At times, I feel like I’m dishonoring my heritage – no lox, no capers?! (although to be honest, I’m not in New York and I’ll never really understand why someone would want to start their morning with fish breath) – but I’ve come to terms with it. 

In fact, it’s more than that. I think this is more important. The ladies who run the Einstein’s ship at the College of Charleston are the glue that holds my world together. At this point, I haven’t had to ask for two years. I walk in, I say good morning, and my bagel is ready. On Valentine’s Day last year, they had a bag of candy with my name on it. I had the biggest smile on my face for the rest of the day. 

It’s nice to be a regular, but what’s so special about these ladies is that they’ve seen me through all of my achievements. Checking in after a job interview or a big test, even on Yom Kippur, where I had to fast for 24 hours. They gave me a care package the day before with a dozen bagels to help me get super full before the fast began.

Although the interaction at Einstein’s normally only lasts about thirty seconds, it’s the small act of empathy and memory that is so fantastic.

Part 2:

Footnote to Howl by Allen Ginsberg 

My name is Michael Stein, and today I saw a statistic that over 1,000 Palestianians have been killed in the past week. One week since the ICJ’s ruling. And I was confused – what had changed in me? When this all began in October, I was pretty much a full Zionist. I always knew that I believed that Palestinian people had a right to live just like Jewish and Israeli people, but since I was a kid I have been taught over and over that Israel is home. But I haven’t been able to explicitly say that for myself. And then I saw that flyer.

[music: “Praise the Rain” by Gautam Srikishan]

Footnote to Howl:

I first read this poem after the entirety of Howl, tired and not understanding anything. But I soon became enamored with Ginsberg – because he was a poet who was Jewish, not a Jewish poet. I had never seen that before. 

I tried to understand what was going on. Holy is said 86 times in this poem. I was trying to figure out who was speaking and how and for what – but what I could tell… and more realistically, was hit over the head with, was that everything is holy. Ginsberg is begging the question: if everything is made by G-d, then what’s the difference in ‘holiness-levels’ between a bum and the middle class and even, forgive me, the “cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas”?

So what did this mean to Ginsberg, a noted revolutionary, faced with the issues of his time: Vietnam, Gay Rights, Imperialism. And what does it mean for us today? And what does it mean for American Jews? We can begin to understand by looking at line two; “The tongue and cock and / hand and asshole holy” – it’s a complete rejection of the accepted standard. He starts with the most immediate and at times intimate part of a human: their body. In rejecting the status quo and loving his body, including his genitalia that he writes about having gay sex with, Ginsberg acknowledges that there will be more to come, and that this is just the beginning. This once-revolutionary line has now become part of a self-love agenda that waters down the importance of re-framing the body, which, when it is anything other than white and straight, it is inherently political. In this Israel-Palestine war, we have begun to align Israeli people and Jews with white people – an interesting decision. Normally, Jews are treated as semi-white, but lower class. In this situation, the bodies of Palestinians have been decided by the media as Other.

Ginsberg continues, writing how everyone is equally holy, from the “madman” to the “seraphim,” which, in religious literature, are some of the highest-ranking angels. He aligns writing and poetry with angels, and shouts out how all of his peers and contemporaries are holy as well.  And then there’s the fantastic line:

“Holy the fifth / International holy the Angel in Moloch!” – here, he’s referencing the meetings of the Communist, Socialist, and Labor Parties. This battle in Israel-Palestine is one of ideology – with Israel acting as the shining beacon of oil-democracy-capitalism in the middle East, and Palestine as the Other. But that’s not how it works – Palestine and Hamas are different beings. Hamas, the ruling body that reigns over the country, seems to fully be a terrorist group. Invading Israel, torturing and raping civilians, and more. But the Palestinian people are a separate entity – the “Angel in Moloch!”

Moloch is a idol that G-d strictly warns against in Judaism, but Ginsberg, in the full poem Howl, uses Moloch to represent America as villain. I believe that in reading Footnote to Howl today, Moloch can be read as Hamas, and the Angel within is the people.

The poem moves to finish with an overall appeal to good things: “forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith!” and more. This poem, a powerful read and an experience to listen to, is such a reminder to ask ourselves what we know is right and holy, and that sometimes we must step back to re-evaluate our beliefs. I’ve re-centered my own beliefs and will personally make the statement here that I believe Israel is committing genocide, the utmost hypocrisy. There is much more to be said on this issue, but that is for another post.