JOY FOR THE ASKING

President Moulton, Members of the Board of Trustees, my fellow colleagues whom I am honored to name friends, and most importantly today’s graduates, their families and honored guests, it is a pleasure to speak with you today. It is a special honor because the University of South Alabama is my academic home; it is a place I speak from with pride and with love, and you will find that through the years you will increasingly revere the time you spent at USA. Memories, reverently, will bring you back, will bring you home again and again.

What I want to tell you today is that your life is a poem in progress, a long, narrative construct that you write every day of your life. A poem you may ask? Yes, for I believe that poetry resides in the deep stillness of our selves waiting for expression, for the clear, marvelous, miraculous words that touch the earth under our feet. You will take this rich red clay and shape it into who you are and what you will become in the days and months and years that lie before you.

This past weekend I heard Sonia Sanchez, another Alabama poet, say that poetics with crystal clarity brings us to the right thing, personally as well as politically. She said that she recently spoke to 2000 students in Washington D.C., telling them about the possibility of making peace in their lives. “For just one week, don’t say anything negative,” she said. “In your dorm rooms, in offices, in homes, work places, don’t say anything negative about anyone.” Let me add that if anyone says anything negative to you. Hand them a poem. Carry it in your pocket, carry it on the tip of your tongue, commit it to memory. Give it as a gift.

Sanchez said that she gave out her telephone number. “Call me if you feel you’ll falter,” she said. One girl did just that, phoned and said that the mission of not speaking ill was impossible. But then she called back to say that she had done it. She had not twisted her tongue against anyone. And she said that the room changed as well as the air around her. What if this could be the way to speak, to say, in our country, in our world?

Literary folk have long interrogated the meaning of joy. John Locke said that “joy is a delight of the mind.” John Dryden said that “the roofs with joy resound, and John Keats said “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

There is also the Joy is called hyperhedonia – a condition in which heightened pleasure is derived from participation in activities that are sometimes tedious and sometimes uninteresting --- like studying seemingly endless hours for final exams.

Joy is not always gladness, pleasure, delight, happiness, exultation, transport, felicity, fun, ecstasy, rapture, bliss, gayety, mirth, merriment, festivity, and hilarity. It is also captured in the ability to overcome hardships and in the capacity to endure and expressed in the story of Saint Francis, patron saint of the environment. Saint Francis and Brother Leo were out walking one cold winter morning when Francis told Brother Leo that if every friar in every country were to possess integrity and great knowledge, perfect joy did not reside in this. As they continued their walk, St. Francis instructed Leo further. “Brother Leo,” he said, if a friar could make the blind see, the deaf hear, if he could cure all ills and make the lame walk, perfect joy is not in this.”

Traveling further, Francis called to Leo again. “Brother Leo,” he said, “if a friar could speak with the tongue of an angel, if he could chart the course of stars, know about plants and animals, the mysteries of the earth, its minerals, rocks and treasures, true joy does not lie in this.”

Poor Leo had had enough. “Where, then, is joy, he asked?”

Francis replied that joy sometimes meant standing long hours in the cold and rain. It meant suffering hardships, being called a scoundrel when seeking refuge and being turned away hungry, tired, and weak without food or drink. “If you can still manage to keep love in your heart in spite of this, brother, you will have found joy.”

Let me say that a poem is Joy. It is a living thing, the spirit within you. I want to use that word as an aspect of commencement, as a gift – to give joy, to congratulate. Let me use it today as text and title, as a poem I have written for you. But first a tiny bit about poetics. The poem is free verse. It does not rhyme, and toward the end of it, embedded within the poem is an alphabet poem, call an abecedarius. The initial letters of each line, when read down, give the letters of the alphabet. I will raise my hand, and tell you when to listen for this. I chose this form, because our education began simply with A,B,C. Your accomplishments extend from that beginning.

Where Joy Resides
(For Today’s Graduates)

Think Joy, each day’s joy-filled celebration,
the joy of song, the bell of joy ringing,
the lithe fingers and palm of joy,
the round world of joy on its axis turning.
Think of language as joy, the way
you bring words into being, the way
they gather on your tongue and are breath.
JOY JOY JOY JOY JOY oi oi oi oi oi,
reverberations sounding its sometimes inscrutable presence
in your life, sounding the iambic beat of your heart.

Joy is a lesson in living, an achievement, a college degree.
It is Frederich Schiller’s ethics and philosophy,
his real and tangible “Ode to Joy,”
when he wrote:

Joy all creatures drink
At nature’s bosom.
All good and all evil ones
Follow her rose-petaled path,

the path of Joy, that followed by Beethoven
when he set Schiller’s words to music,
his fingers pressing ivory piano keys,
releasing sounds his deaf ears
would never hear, but affirming
the possibility of being, as Schiller said,
a friend’s friend,
“across the firmament’s splendid design.”

Joy is a poetic commencing;
it is an alphabet,
a synthesis of all the letters that become words
that are shaped into meaning.

***

Ask me if what you say is your life
Bodied forth in science and art,
Caritas, let it be laughter,
Dance and dream, each day of dawning,
Education, eumoirousness, the happy result of being good,
Friendship, forgiveness,
Grace erasing greed, espousing
Hope, the heart’s eternal lesson
Inviolable, invincible,
Just, jubilant, the word
Kindness, a lozenge sweet on your tongue.
Language is your obligation to use words well.
Make them into day miracles addressing
Need. Never forget that words wound, so
Open your mind and open your heart.
Praise when you can.
Question always if what you say may
Right wrongs. I am word-working my way from A to Z
Sharing the language, the letters, the symphony,
Tútta la fórza, the whole power as loud as possible celebrating
USA, our country, the University of South Alabama, our
Voices speaking memory, loving this place even as you leave it.
Will you go forth, return, giving the gift of yourself,
Xenium, (Xenium,) a gift ancient Greeks gave to strangers:
Your accomplishments, your graduation from USA,
Zest and zeal, exquisite Joy.

That’s it: Joy from A to Z
Write your Ode to Joy,
the poem that is your life.

I am honored to have spoken to you today. Thank you for letting me share this moment, this joy, this special day in your life.