Joy is a Weird Thing

Getting Back into Poetry

Over the past month or so, I got the opportunity to workshop with the poet, Topaz Winters. She’s authored So, Stranger, Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing, Poems for the Sound of the Sky Before Thunder, and helms Half Mystic Press.

The funny thing about workshopping poems, or workshopping with poets, is it’s not at all like workshopping fiction. At least, not like my workshops, where we look for dropped object, or something that didn’t pay off. If you’re story is “broken” we try to fix it. But in Topaz’s workshop, poems aren’t broken. They are portals inviting you into their world. The words and the the voices that speak them need no correction. Instead, more like a gentle guiding hand that points the poem more toward itself.

Believe it or not, I used to want to be a poet. A hardcore poet with a capital P. Something that surprises me about the writing muscle is it really does fade over time. It’s not like a bicycle. You can’t just pick up where you left off. But one day after workshopping with a poet friend of mine, I literally did not have words to describe what was occurring on the page. It read to me as a list of fancy words that didn’t mean anything, the way we use those big words to hide how we really feel.

I felt stupid.

So another friend from Button Poetry put me on Topaz Winters. He mentioned that she was teaching a workshop. When I found That Summer I Wrote the Same Poem Over & Over it was one of those moments you ache a little different.

Here’s the rub: the workshop was centered on the power of joy in poetry. I’m not a joyous person, and for the most part, sunshine personalities make me uncomfortable. They’re creepy like clowns, or dolls. Perpetual smilers have fishhooks in the corners of their mouths. Plus I have a long history of getting booted from workshops for my content. My big fear was that I’d have to write a boring poem about lying in a field of flowers and nothing happens.

Luckily, Topaz is crazy smart and puts you on Ross Gay. She turns you onto poems like “Unit of Measure” by Sandra Beasly and “To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall” by Kim Addonizio. I’m not going to spill her entire syllabus, but she taught how joy can be used as a tool to deny drama in poems, or as a sort of magic up-note that could:
A. Prop up your reader before you kneecap them with heartbreak.
B. Deny the drama of a situation.
C. Demonstrate recovery from heartbreak—the exact opposite of A.

Basically, Topaz demonstrated how poems can be dynamic and shifting and funny. Like that Tom Spanbauer trick how you make someone laugh before you break their heart. Plus, she gave us a big list of prompts, and even though me and five other students were writing to the same prompt, we arrived to it from completely different places.

Here’s a poem that came out of that workshop:

The cherries and berries have passed

This time at least we are home 

Free for now. We’re talking about the fraud police 

Baby. No, the cherries and berries don’t taste good, they taste like rotten

Pork. No baby, those sirens aren’t for us. They’re for someone else. Darling 

No, we earned these jobs. Of course we get to make money. They’ve been practicing 

Us since preschool, our small hands on the scratchy carpet, learning to count is for counting

The money we’ll give back. The smell of that one kid with bladder

Problems, that’s all just pregaming for food service. Those crayon

Houses we drew are just forecasting for the things we’d chase forever

Forever stop we’re right now

In this bed with money the magic 8 ball was wrong yet

Stop shaking it. Nevermind the sirens, they’re across the street for someone

Else. Yes, it’s okay for us to be here, yes we can kiss we’re good

Kissers, we’ve kissed a lot of bad kissers with thin white people

Lips and who the hell said it was okay to kiss like Ralph Dimaggio 

Anyway, tongue in throat.

Our hands flew to hairbrushes and keyboards and journals

And that spot right above the ear—

Forget about the sirens— 

Trace a crescent, a moon, tucking hair

Out of the way. So what if we’re  nepo babies? 

Everyone is. We were born here, they’ve been practicing

Us. It’s all office romcom darling. No, that knock on the door isn’t for

Us. It’s not our door, and if it is it’s the wrong

Address. No, they’re calling two different people with our names

In the same house. What kind of magic 8 ball says to take the money and run? 

Stop shaking the ball. They’ll stop knocking soon. 

We’re going to get away with it.

The Experiment:

I’ve been so entrenched in the rules of Dangerous Writing over the past year or so, I was curious if it applies to other mediums. As part of my experiment, I applied Dangerous Writing to poetry. Other than the usual morphing and limiting of objects, use of burnt tongue, and the balancing act between using big voice and little voice, something else happened. I wrote things I didn’t know I knew. The way you trick yourself into writing about one thing when you’re really writing about a deeper thing. The way we enter the conversation with the intent to tell lies, but accidentally tell the truth. This is the essence of writing. 

I’m not going to tip my hand more than that. But meditating on joy had shown me some weird things.

One prompt was to write a poem where the conditions of joy are not a hope, but a reality. As in you are writing from a position where the things you think would make you happy have already happened. My discovery there was anxiety.

The incubator I’m a part of at Wieden + Kennedy is temporary. In November, we’ll be done. Some people might find full time employment after, but not most. The rest of us will have to drag ourselves back to our old lives, asking our old bosses if they’ll take us back. Back to tripping over nails, or testing colonoscopy equipment.

Lots of us are stupid enough to try dating during this. We have crushes in and out of the office, but I won’t hang my underwear here.

The point is I wrote a poem where I have a big bag of money, and I don’t have a crush. I took it a step further and wrote from the point of a relationship. Someone soothing and denying the drama that all this is too good to be true. Meanwhile the fraud police are on their way.

This angle of joy felt like a new superpower. Because readers are smart, you can use joy to deny drama in such a way that it increases tension instead of resolving it. It’s that kind of trick where Lenny in Of Mice and Men carries dead mice in his pockets and he thinks they are just sleeping.

Same in the poem, “The Cherries and Berries Are Coming”, by having the speaker deny the sirens and flashing lights while in bed with a loved one, the reader can feel all the drama and impending danger.

Something else happened too. Over the process of writing this poem, and I mean after three or four more drafts, I uncovered and exercised a memory.

Here is a thing I completely forgot:

a couple years ago I came home one night and someone had parked in my parking spot. This was third or fourth time in a month, and I was paying $40 a month on parking. I yelled at the building, asking for whoever parked their car to move it out of my spot. When nobody came down I kicked and spat on the car. My partner hushed me and called me inside. 

“Are you drunk?” my partner asked.

“No,” I said.

Our windows filled with flashing blue and red lights. One of my neighbors, who smoked by the dumpsters, called them the flashing cherries and berries.

I killed the lights and took my partner to the bedroom. She said to get on the bed and pray with her. With my hands wrapped up in hers, on our knees so the blankets and mattress press up beneath us uneven, she prayed. She asked for Jesus to keep me safe. To keep me employed. To keep us in our apartment and not let the police drag me away in cuffs. 

I’d never heard her pray in my whole life. She said she didn’t believe in God. When the police are knocking at your door, and you are me, your partner will pick a God and pray her ass off you don’t get arrested.

When the police knocked on our door, she got up to answer.

I grabbed her hand, held her still. “Don’t move, don’t make a sound,” I said. “We aren’t here.” 

She froze up, held her breath. We held our breaths and waited for the police to leave, their heavy boots clunking down the stairs. Their boots were quieter than the heartbeat in our ears, we held our breaths for so long. 

In both love and fear, we choose a god and beg, and the god you choose is the one closest at hand. In this poem, to make God physical, I needed a rosary, or a totem of some kind. To further deny the drama and fear of the situation, I chose a toy. I chose the magic 8 ball. They are cute and fun, and they give me the chance to write in an impossible detail, a message a magic 8 ball would never say. I could have chosen tarot cards, but even those have a little too much woo-woo. I can’t deny I’ve had a few readings that played out in spooky ways.¹

It also soothed my own anxieties, writing out this little psycho drama through a poem. It showed me that even if I had everything I wanted, I’d still be stressed.

As an exercise, write a story or a poem where your character has everything you want. Is there something they would want beyond you? What about their fears?

Also, because joy is a practice, one that I’m still learning to maintain, write in the comments about something that’s brought you joy recently.

Until next time,

Colton Merris

Another great big thanks to Topaz for teaching me to poem and for putting fishhooks in my mouth. Many of my friends and family are deeply unnerved by my changing smile to scowl ratio.

1.  I don’t know if this person was a master cold-reader, but once I had a fortune teller start telling me uncanny things about myself and what I was going through. Because I wasn’t prepared for an honest therapy session, I started lying to the fortune teller so she’d steer the conversation and the cards somewhere else.