Educator Note:

Alan Semerdjian

Herricks High School, New Hyde Park, NY

Reclamation

“O friend, my heart has tired

Of such darkness.

Now it vies for joy.”

—Tracy K Smith

I imagine the notion of joy was, for many of us, not unlike a bird outside our window during the early days of the pandemic. We knew it was there and heard, at times, its song that gave us, as the Dickinson poem goes, a kind of hope “in the Gale.” But it was always on the other side of the glass and hesitation, responsibility, and fear left the notes muted and the tune estranged. So, for me, when Young Radish’s call for work around the theme of joy came across my desk, I received it as an invitation to get at the thing that was just out of reach. 

My first thought was to explore the right focus for the work. What would I ask of my students? Would it be ghazals or ballads or any other form associated with desideratum? What about sonnets as love songs for joy or the obsessive close examinations of specific words that can only come with the sestina? Did it have to be traditional poetry at all? What about the strange rooms of the prose poems or other types of hybrid/creative nonfiction that intersect with poetry? What would be taught and what pedagogy would get us there? Then there was the question of partnering students to see what collaboration might offer. Would partnering happen at all in this new and isolated context?

I landed on a question to start the process and, ultimately, it was the question that shot past all other options to guide the work. How do we reclaim joy after periods of intense trauma, anxiety, and grief? While some of us were lucky and/or privileged enough not to experience challenges posed by the pandemic as intensely as others, we all knew of someone who struggled if we ourselves didn’t. I posed the question to our high school’s summer writing program students first and saw them grapple with it through quick genre studies and a short day of examining ekphrasis. I kept close to heart Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” and its appearance in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the latter of which I remember my grandfather (an artist and an Armenian Genocide survivor) playing often while painting in his studio during certain golden years of my childhood in Woodside, Queens. And then I kept rereading former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith’s rendering of Schiller’s poem for Carnegie Hall’s “All Together: A Global Ode to Joy” at the end of 2020, the year so much seemed to change for so many of us. I always intuited that the making of art is, at its core, about entering existing and creating new conversations. Imagining that joy is, possibly, the predominant preoccupation of these conversations, however, was something I hadn’t considered before...at least not at this level and with this concentration. For me, growing up as an only child, my friends were integral to the formation of my person and the conduit to that island of joy. Not seeing them in person for so long was bringing up so much nostalgia and a feeling of intense gratitude. I went back to an old draft and came up with this:

THE JOYS

I used to wake the inside of dark,late hours kept up because of

always someplace other to go,my friends near and our proud 

songs of reach and renunciation that skipped across sleepy bay

towns along the north shore.Alive was a long bridge to cross

and as far as the eyes could seein pitched moonlight, imagination

a night bird, the vehicle. I learnedhow to love here. I really did. 

I want them all to know thatI am thankful for these lessons. 

Some of the work that was chosen for this project comes from these early days of making meaning with the question alongside my students. The rest comes from our school’s English Scholars Program, a space where students highly motivated in the world of English Language Arts write for authentic audiences with the help of their teachers and learn various aspects of the writing process along the way. The program is a marriage of Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and low residency MFA work scaled down and adjusted for high school-aged learners. There is no gatekeeping for the program—the only prerequisite is a desire to make and enter our making into the world of letters.

The work the students created, I think, speaks for itself. Fifteen pieces seemed to best fit the requirements of the call. The pool from which to choose was large, but these pieces felt most ready to enter the discussion. They attempt to “untangle the heavy knot of sorrow,” as one student aptly puts it, and many focus on the healing balm of nature. Joy can “fill a body,” one young poet writes, and another adds that it can do so in the “click of a switch.” I appreciate the wisdom in these young minds as they attempt to make the best out of time spent diving inwards, so to speak, and all that is found there. We all, young and old, can learn from these makers who brave invention’s waters to recenter what might very well be our essential lifeforce.

When we think about language acquisition and specifically the skills related to creative writing, we don’t often equate those skills with real world application. But I’ve come to understand that creative writing is as instinctual and necessary as any other kind of writing, especially in times of intense personal or collective trauma and grief. How many writers noted the smoke circumnavigating Manhattan as a “ghost” or some other spectre of unrest or ephemeral scream during the horrific days of 9/11? Why did the term “lost generation” stick in the early 20th century? And how loud was Emma Gonzalez’s sound of silence at March for Our Lives in 2018? Metaphors and symbols and figurative language have very real applications outside the classroom and are sometimes the only authentic option we have for the unfathomable.

Years ago, I met the great Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko when I was caretaker for The Walt Whitman Birthplace and State Historic Site on Long Island, NY. He noted that poets and creative writers were a kind of vital journalism for our time. They know, he said, a deeper truth. It is their impulse to give voice to experience that allows others to access our common humanity. And in our youngest creative voices, we see the same impulse to get at the essence of the question. How do we reclaim joy? By examinations of our natural world, by serious contemplation, by finding shared experiences, and, it appears, by any means possible. These are not refined pieces polished for a grade in a classroom. These are exultations of the imagination coming together around an idea—a very important one for our community here at Herricks. And perhaps it is for you too, dear reader, wherever you are in the world while reading this. I hope what you find here stirs you closer to your own answer, whatever that may be.

*

Alan Semerdjian is an award-winning writer, musician, and public school teacher for 25 years. He lives in New Hyde Park, NY with his partner and son and teaches English at Herricks High School.