Joy can be slippery. Slippery things should be approached with caution, so I’ve always tiptoed carefully in joy’s presence lest I lose my footing and wind up splatting flat on my back. When a moment of joy is upon me, I hesitate, standing safe and still instead of grabbing on with both hands and gobbling it up and making it part of my blood and bones because I am afraid. I am afraid to leap toward joy because if I fail and fall, I will have lost the sweetness of anticipation, and if I do somehow land in joy, I worry that it’s already ending; when I try to hold it tight, it streams away through my clenched fingers like sand. Of poetry, I asked the following question: How can I be brave enough to leave the safety of anticipation and fully live in life’s beginning, middle and end? Emily Dickinson, Li-Young Lee, Grace Paley, Barbara Ras, Lucille Clifton, and many others answered, teaching me that I don’t need to be afraid to gamble on joy, or afraid of its ending, or of what other people think about my joy; these poets have given me permission to set aside fear and begin to claim my joy, live in its moments, and then let them go.

In “‘Tis so much joy! ‘Tis so much joy!,” Emily Dickinson hesitates, bound by the fear of feeling failure’s sadness, before taking an existential risk. I can relate. But instead of teetering on hesitation’s edge until she’s missed her chance, like I do, Dickinson’s willingness to “know the worst” strips the power from the fear that is holding her back and allows her to boldly bet on herself. She rejects scarcity in favor of abundance; she happily gambles the paltry prize of safety for a chance at joy, and the exultation she feels in moving beyond fear’s paralysis is joy in its own right. I don’t agree with that curmudgeon Robinson Jeffers, who says,”Though joy is better than sorrow, joy is not great; Peace is great, strength is great.” No way! That sounds like the cop-out of someone rationalizing his choice to stay safely on the sidelines. I want Dickinson’s exuberant guns-at-sea, church-bells-ringing, so-big-it-might-kill-you kind of joy, but that can only exist beyond self-protective fear.

For me, perfection is imperfect because its transience is palpable; I struggle with ruining joy’s present by fearing its future ending. Much as Robert Frost laments that “Nothing gold can stay” when he waxes wistful about the fleeting beauty of spring’s first fresh leaf, my joy at beholding the full moon is marred by the knowledge that it will be a hair’s breadth less perfect and symmetrical tomorrow night. I’m like Adrianne Lenker in “Gone,” listening intently for the sound of thunder that portends the end of a love affair before there is a cloud in the metaphorical sky. I hate to buy into any part of Robert Herrick’s exhortation “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” with its misogynistic and cretinous implications that women are only valuable as long as their youthful beauty lasts. Still, the concept that my opportunities for joy might have an expiration date hits home for me in the same way it does for Mitski in “Liquid Smooth:” she says, “I’m in my prime/I’m liquid smooth, come touch me, too/I’m at my highest peak, I’m ripe/About to fall, capture me/Or at least take my picture.” Mitski and I both worry that we need to freeze this moment in time– take a picture– and cling to it because it might all be downhill from here. 

Luckily, Li-Young Lee and Grace Paley come to the rescue, providing alternative perspectives on transient joy and beauty. In “From Blossoms,” the peach that Lee delights in eating at a roadside stand is the culmination of tiny beautiful miracles that began and ended– the beauty of the blossoms it once was, the warmth of the sunshine and the cool of the shade and the dusty summer days it absorbed— to bring the fruit to the point of perfect ripeness. To try to capture or flash-freeze any part of the process– at the instant of Robert Frost’s “first green,” for example– is to halt the mechanism of joy production before it comes to fruition. In “Here,” Grace Paley provides confirmation that one joyful moment just gives way to the next, building into greater joy. Sitting in her “garden laughing/an old woman with sagging breasts/and a nicely mapped face,” Paley is long past Mitski’s “Liquid Smooth” prime, and yet she experiences an intensification of happiness so exquisite that the need to kiss her husband exhausts her. We can allow moments of joy to end without sorrow or fear because they become part of something bigger; Lee’s peach is even more miraculous than each of the individual stages of its development, just as Paley’s love for her husband is deeper for its accumulation of bygone joy-moments.

I have learned from Barbara Ras that joy is an endlessly renewable resource and from Lucille Clifton that my joy can be a source of power and defiance. Though Ras’s poem is called “You Can’t Have It All,” her list of ordinary joys seem like they are, in fact, all a person needs. Her joys are simple and rooted in gratitude: the purr of the cat and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise. They tumble together, one feeding into the next. She reminds me that joy is so abundant that I can fully live in the moments and then let them go; I don’t need to ruin them by clinging to them out of fear that they will end because the supply is endless. Finally, Lucille Clifton teaches me that my joy can empower me. In “homage to my hips,” Clifton celebrates the very body part most critiqued in Black women under Eurocentric beauty standards. She refuses to concede her joy in her identity to racist ideals. I can feel the unspoken challenge in Clifton’s tone of deep and settled authority: she’d like to see someone try to mess with her hips or her joy. Clifton’s work makes me realize that oppressors– from the patriarchy to architects of systemic racism to mean girls in high school– try to control their target groups by tearing down their joy. While Ras shows me how to find endless and abundant joy, Clifton emboldens me to claim it, no matter who is making fun of it or, pardon the expression, shitting on it. 

Joy can indeed be slippery. But as it turns out, that’s ok because I don’t need to try to hold onto it. My fear had tricked me into believing that joy is scarce, when it is actually endlessly abundant. I know now that the real risk lies in holding myself back because I am afraid to leap into my joy: If I can live in my joy-moments and then let them go, they become a part of my joy story, which will eventually become my joy epic (I’m looking at you, Grace Paley).