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.
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.
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?).
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?
"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
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.
Part I: The Horror/Purity of Accidentally Calling Your Teacher ‘Mom’
[ PhotoofJames 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think there are several reasons why someone becomes infatuated with literature enough to choose an English Major. Through my last four years at the college, I have met a plethora of people whose reasonings for the major differed. While I could claim I chose this major due to a great love for literature throughout my life, that would be a lie. I can name at most ten books I have ever truly enjoyed reading. I think it is important, however, to note that I do read it is just the ‘enjoying’ part that does not synchronize with my brain. I have always enjoyed music more as an art form. Many of my favorite memories from childhood are placed within the confines of my dad’s ‘music room’; which in reality was nothing more than a section in our basement between old collections of whatever lay in those unopened boxes. It was here that my dad kept his collections of CDs which reverberated against the concrete walls into a cacophony of echo and whatever album happened to be playing at the time. The sound quality and its blaring sound led my dad to have permanent tinnitus and me to have the hearing of a 35-year-old man at only 21, however, it was there in my basement where my ‘love’ for music grew.
When coming to the College of Charleston, I originally planned on becoming a Communications Major. Due to the lack of a Journalism Major at the college, and my hopes to write about music, I thought communications best filled the void. It was after my first ‘public speaking’ class that I knew that path was not for me. During the summer of my freshman year, my mom and I discussed what major I should switch to and English was quickly understood to be my best route. I was mostly tentative about the English major as a focus as my fear of grammar and lack thereof in writing I felt would hinder my performance. It was not until my first few classes that I became genuinely interested in the way we would discuss and dissect various texts.
I found Kathleen Ossip’s article, “Why All Poems Are Political” to actually agree with many of the reasons I find literature to be a valuable tool in life. Describing poetry and largely the written word she questions WHY we should care, “Could it be that not-understanding or wondering is more honest and even less violent than knowing?”. It seems that in our current cultural zeitgeist there is an incessant need to be right and know all. Spanning from politicians to stand-up comics there is a consistent theme found in their speaking. Certainty. Everyone must back their positions with one hundred percent certainty. I am at fault in this too. Constantly thinking I am right. The ages of 16-19 were ripe with a lack of conversing; any alternative point was a contention for argument and not understanding. I feel that my knowledge gained from the variety of English courses I have taken over the years has allowed me to slowly kill this part of me. I have been able to internalize that understanding is not always a net negative within assuring your own character. It is an interesting part of our culture that most points seem to ascertain the character of their speaker rather than create an argument for the sake of truly caring about a topic. In this way I think literature further embarks upon the topic of empathy. Rather than making an argument to back your own morality, the arguments more closely come from a place of true care.
For as long as I can remember, I have deeply cared about the little things. I was always overly sensitive to those around me, overly in tune with people’s emotions, and spent my time constantly observing everything and everyone closely.
Still, to this day, I find myself in the same position. It means a lot to me to pay attention, to notice, to watch, and to feel. And although this was characteristic of me during my early childhood, throughout my teenage years, I so desperately wanted to get away from that part of me.
Through those years, it felt like I paid too much attention, noticed too much, and felt too deeply every second of it. I always felt like no one else saw all the little things I did, nor did they care about them like me. And in the mix of my awkward teenage angst and constant emotional turmoil, I found poetry.
This newfound world of reading and writing was a world where I felt, for the first time, completely understood. All of a sudden, I was surrounded by other people who noticed, watched, and felt the same way I did. At the same depth that I did. And as I was introduced to this new world, I found myself writing poetry every single day.
For me, it felt like the only place I could truly be honest about everything happening in my life. I wrote poems about my familial issues, my relationships with friends at school, overwhelming thoughts of my existence and my place in the world, the great burden of my feelings and how much I cared, and about all the little things around me that everyone else seemed to take for granted but I didn’t.
This fundamental aspect of poetry is what Patrick Rosal mentions in the New York Times article we read for class, “Poetry is Hospitable to Strangeness and Surprise.” He describes poetry as encompassing “observation and attention, reflection and memory, description, imagination, re-seeing and discovery.” All of these are what drew me into poetry.
In middle school was the first time that poetry was taught in my English class. My teacher, Mr. Eleftheriadis, introduced me to Homer and Shakespeare, and it was that class that changed everything.
Not only did I fall in love with literature, poetry, and epics, but I fell in love with the details in every story. A part of his class I enjoyed the most was picking apart works line by line. As a middle schooler, my little brain was not nearly prepared for the sheer wisdom and magic that are laced between every line of the Odyssey and Macbeth, just to name a few.
In his class, I felt that I truly belonged. In every English class since then, I have always felt that way. The peers in them, the teachers and professors, and most of all, the literature have always been so inspiring and remain reminders that when it comes to noticing and feeling, I am not alone.
Since then and throughout my college career, I have been learning each and every day to return back to that little girl version of myself. I have been realizing that I want to notice, I want to watch closely, and I want to feel every second of it. I take pride in noticing the small things, paying attention, and caring immensely about the details.
As I have gotten older, I have learned that these are actually great strengths of mine, and the places where I can cultivate and grow them are in my English classes and in my photography classes. In both art mediums, I have found that my particular gift of noticing and feeling can be used to create narratives and stories, cultivate emotion through images, and learn how to intersect the two.
In an article that discusses the value and significance of poetry as a free space for language and politics, “Why All Poems Are Political” by Kathleen Ossip, she says so many things about poetry that I found incredibly intriguing, inspiring, and thought-provoking. One of the questions she asks in this article is:
“Is it possible that poetry wants to awaken your awareness of the essential and infinitely subtle suffering and joy of being alive?”
I found this question incredibly reflective of what poetry does to us. And I think it is true that poetry is about awakening, awakening to the world around us, taking note of all the things people fail to notice, and feeling all the emotions swirling about in the world. Poetry is about awakening to a world full of people who see and feel at the same depth that you do. Poetry is about a community of people who care; it is about no longer feeling alone.
Like many other individuals, my journey toward committing to the study of literature was contested by most of my family. My father and his family have always held the belief that unless you’re majoring in STEM during undergraduate studies, you’re wasting your time. This is not uncommon among South Asian households, and while I was never very close to my father or that side of my family, this belief was heavily ingrained in me during childhood.
My mother and her family were mostly indifferent. However, many of them, including my mother, dedicated their lives to the medical field. I subsequently believed that a nursing career would best suit me both financially and emotionally, but after briefly treading down this path I realized I was putting forth the effort solely seeking validation and support from my family. When I graduated high school I was unsure of what I wanted to study in college, so instead I decided to join the United States Air Force, during which I was a C-130J Loadmaster. This aircrew job provided me an environment rich with freedom as a young adult to explore what was most important to me.
an early USAF photo of myself, 2017
During childhood, I grew up in a chaotic household where having the quiet and comfortability to read literature was generally impossible. But in my down time while I was serving, I began to collect novels and immerse myself in them. It became clear that literature had a special place in my heart, and that I just didn’t quite have the necessary conditions in childhood to explore this passion fully. After honorably separating, I had many conversations with my partner about what discipline I would pursue in college. I once again grappled with the notion that nursing would be best, but after trial and error I finally settled on taking classes focused on literature, creative writing, history, and cultural and film studies.
During my first academic year of taking these classes, I experienced an identity crisis. I knew these disciplines made me feel alive and excited me in ways I hadn’t been before, but I couldn’t help feeling that perhaps my father was right: I’m wasting my time. A quote from Jasmine Guillory’s article titled ‘Reading Anti-Racist Nonfiction Is a Start. But Don’t Underestimate the Power of Black Fiction’ really resonates with me when I think back on this period in my life, which was only a year ago:
“I’ve read so many books about people who are nothing like me—often by necessity, since I can think of only one book I was assigned to read in my entire K-12 education that was about a Black girl or woman—and I’ve learned something from many of them. As characters confront events and situations we’ve never experienced, fiction helps us imagine how we would deal with them.”
Aside from being half South Asian, and knowing all too well how it feels for individuals like me to be underrepresented in literature studies in the classroom, this quote makes me think about why literature is a passion of mine and why my pursuit of it as a discipline is integral to my emotional and mental well-being.
Part of my experience in childhood of growing up in a mostly chaotic household was being stripped of social development with my peers. My mother, a single parent, uprooted our lives by moving nearly every single year. I eventually, at some point, grew exhausted at making friends in a new city because I knew our stay there would be short lived. I became distant from my peers, keeping to myself as a coping mechanism, and this largely impacted my ability to relate to those around me and form close connections.
Literature, however, has helped me glean information that I largely missed out on in childhood. Reading about The Great Perhaps in John Green’s ‘Looking for Alaska,’ for example, gave me insight on the nuances of being a teenager and interacting with one’s peers. Literature gives me a chance to put myself into experiences I missed out on, or like in Gabrielle Zevin’s ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,’ ones I will not experience at any point in my life.
My study of literature has drastically developed my ability to feel empathy for others and has shaped how I approach many relationships as a young adult, especially with those journeying through life at differing ages and in differing paths than myself. Guillory’s words remind me of why I chose to study literature when coming to college, and how with each class I take, the breadth of my knowledge in people and experiences expands, further cementing my choice.
But that doubt I’ve had within myself throughout my young adult years has not solely been because of my family’s influences. I’ve also found literature to be quite intimidating at times. While my childhood largely impacted my ability to immerse myself in literature, it was not as if I could never attempt enjoying a novel or a poem.
I can recall many times throughout grade school when I was assigned a certain text in one of my language arts classes and became overwhelmingly discouraged by the complex diction used or ideas being expressed. Or perhaps it was a piece I picked up in a thrift store which I had convinced my mother to buy for me. Many times, I felt discouraged away from literature because I could not fully understand it. This was not a lack of intelligence on my part, but more so a lack of patience.
As a young adult, I’ve slowly yet surely been cultivating this sense of patience that’s integral to studying literature. Which is why Traci Smith’s article titled ‘Wipe that Smirk Off Your Poem’ resonates with me. When I first read, “Poems infatuated with their own smarts and detached from any emotional grounding can leave the reader feeling lonely, empty and ashamed for having expected more,” I felt a brief sense of relief like finallysomeone recognizes my own frustration. Poetry, for me, was mostly off putting during my childhood because of its, what I thought at the time, mostly flowery and overcomplicated diction and syntax. Even as a young adult, I still do feel this way at times. It’s not beside me to admit that the novel is much more alluring to me than the poem.
However, with the study of literature comes that necessary discomfort at times to venture into the unknown and peculiar, to further my understanding of the world as I do and do not know it. The benefits continually prove to be immense and my love for the discipline steadily increases with time.
Growing up as a middle sister, I learned many lessons through the experiences of my older and younger sisters. I was constantly seeking to protect them, understand them, and support them, even when their struggles, triumphs, achievements, disappointments or goals were different than my own. However, this closeness changed and shifted as I grew up and we all attended different boarding schools. As I began studying French literature, I found myself deeply connected to Marcel Proust and Levi-Strauss. Their perspectives on how to handle themselves, their own darkness, their thoughts and perspectives on the world and how they conceptualized their reality all served as models to me when I was doubtful or struggling to understand my own reality. Feeling a connection to another person through their writing gave me great peace when I needed it most. Just as Steve Martin felt after reading W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, a story about a quest for knowledge,I felt that through learning, and reading in particular, I “could have secrets possessed only by a few” (Hitz 28). That’s what people need most in their youth, some words of guidance, which I think literature can provide, which in turn can make people, if not better human beings, at least feel better for a period of time in their lives.
Throughout my life, literature has provided me with guidance, reassurance and a sense of comfort. I’m inclined to believe that my personal experience serves as enough evidence for me to believe that literature makes people “better,” kinder, and softer. In “Does Great Literature Make Us Better?,” Gregory Currie argues that there lacks “causal evidence: we need to show that exposure to literature itself makes some sort of positive difference to the people we end up being.” I would include myself in the group of individuals who “will probably soldier on with a positive view of the improving effects of literature, supported by nothing more than an airy bed of sentiment.” But that airy bed of sentiment is all the evidence I need! After all, if literature has the capacity to show us how to relate to others, find connection and find solace in it, then I think that literature has improving effects on people, whether those effects are short-term or long-term probably depends on the person.
I was particularly fond of Currie’s reference to Martha Bussbaum’s book “Love’s knowledge,” in which she argues that narrative form gives literary fiction “a peculiar power to generate moral insight.” I love this! Narratives have a beginning, middle and end. It’s nice to read a story that presents a character, a challenge, a (hopefully) journey towards overcoming obstacles and eventual triumph. I agree that narratives would generate moral insight by allowing us to see the beginning, middle and end of a tale, imparting a lesson or wisdom to the reader.
I agree that reading can help us to empathize with other human beings, in addition to helping us connect with ourselves. In the article “Does reading fiction make us better people?,” Hammond discusses how books can teach us about the world, especially through our identification with characters in books. The article states, “without necessarily even noticing, we imagine what it’s like to be [the characters] and compare their reactions to situations with how we responded in the past, or imagine we might in the future.” Reading stories gives us the opportunity to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, to empathize with another person’s experience, to dive into another culture, assume a different perspective. Specifically when reading fiction, the reader is more likely to “suspend disbelief without questioning the veracity of what people are saying,” and view a characters life over a span of time, even many years. For me, reading fiction and other literature, has given me the ability not only to better understand human beings, but also to better understand myself. I have found comfort in knowing that my struggles, challenges or feelings at a certain point in my life are shared by another person (an author, character, sociologist, philosopher).
