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Jonny Teklit: And I follow that impulse because it aligns so well with how I speak and how I view the world, right? The goal for me and my poems is, I’m gonna make the jump. They’re not always big, associative leaps as far as figurative language goes.
DeeSoul Carson: TL;DR, Earnestness: In, Irony: Out.
JT: Exactly. That’s kind of my TLDR for everything, but yeah.
DC: Yes. if you had to give it to like a six-word short story, like that’s — I guess that’s four words, but…
JT: Yeah, you know.
DC: Helllllllo poets of the internet. I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is O, Word? , the podcast interested in craft, poets, their obsessions, and the things that keep them writing. Today’s episode is O, Joy! I am here today with my friend, Jonny Teklit.
Jonny Teklit is an award-winning poet who has had work appear in The Academy of American Poets, The New Yorker, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. His poems have been anthologized in Poemhood: Our Black Revival and The Gift of Animals: Poems on Love, Loss, and Connection. He is currently working on his debut collection.
Jonny, hello!
JT: Hello, how are you?
DC: Good! How are you doing on this beautiful … It’s Friday the 13th.
JT: I’m good. 2026 is like a carbon copy of the year 1998, which is the year I was born. And so —
DC: — are you having deja vu?
JT: I don’t know. But it made for a perfect February, a perfect square four weeks.
DC: Which I love.
JT: February is the best month to be born in.
Joy in Poetry
DC: Well, I’m super excited to have you on today. Thank you for joining me. I always start with the definition from my guests, and I’m not gonna have you define joy, which is maybe its own kind of challenge, but I would love to have you define for us: what is joy for you as it relates to poetry?
JT: Yeah, I am really into thinking about joy, not something that is meek and/or cherubic or cutesy, though those things can bring one joy, certainly. In a thing I was writing recently, I was talking about how I personally appreciate a joy with fangs, a joy that doesn’t stay down in the ring. Something that feels more like a means of survival, and also like a tool that one can use for their survival. And perhaps it’s utilitarian and cold to think of joy in that way, and that’s not necessarily my attitude, but I think that joy certainly has way more to it than fluff, or a sort of fluffiness, and in the way that I employ it in poetry or the ways in which I most appreciate it in poetry.
I think you can strike a balance between joy in poetry and the articulation of such that isn’t so removed from the world that we all live in to the point of feeling like it’s written in a vacuum or willfully ignorant or ignoring the conditions materially and politically, et cetera, that we live in. And at the same time, still being able to write about the mundane, right?
Over AWP weekend, I went to the aquarium; if I wanted to write a poem about looking at all the sharks and fish and all stuff like that, I totally could. And that would be wonderful. But there’s ways in which joy can be defanged to say nothing, just to have some sort of happy platitudes, and I’m much more interested in joy that gets you feeling, “wow, I love this world,” while also being like, in the same poem, “the world is sometimes difficult to love and/or difficult to be in. Period”
DC: There’s definitely a sense that I get from you, like, there’s not a use of writing about joy if we’re going to remove it from its material conditions, the things that Joy has to push through or work against or work with, or work in tandem, all the prepositions that go along with joy.
Feelings RE: “Joy is Resistance”
DC: I love what you’re saying here about joy with fangs, and joy is a thing that acts actively, working with us. I think there’s often an impulse to simplify joy, and I’m not unguilty of it. People love to say things like “joy is resistance,” or I have a friend who absolutely hates when people are like, “rest is resistance,” all the kinds of et cetera things that are like “x is resistance,” as opposed to, “resistance is resistance.” So I’m wondering, how do you feel about the general “Joy is Resistance” set of sentiments — does it resonate with you? Does it irk you?
JT: I am not a hater by nature. It is not my general mode of moving through the world. I do think it’s like, there’s humor in being a hater and it’s like fun to talk smack with friends and whatnot from time to time. But that’s like not generally my attitude.
In my non-haterdom, I understand where people are coming from when they say the phrase, right? And the idea that, for Black folks, for example, who live in a nation that over-polices, murders, right? Surveils, disenfranchises, incarcerates, dah, dah, dah, dah. To have all of that be the foundation for life for Black people in this country should be miserable. Yes, to experience joy is in resistance to that reality. However, at the same time, the person who is most often saying “joy is resistance” is someone that I’m like, yehhhh. Is that the sort of like slogan or a or term, for lack that you have seen used and attached to as a means of abdicating responsibility for yourself?
Yes, I am Black in the United States. Yes, there’s a bunch of things that Black people face, and also, I personally am not often experiencing the level of literal discomfort or prejudice that other people, like my neighbors and other people across the country, are, or other people across the world are. And therefore I could —again, speaking only for myself — I could use a bit more discomfort. I could use getting out there, doing the thing that is perhaps inconvenient.
I know there was some post, some copypasta-post going like a month or two ago about, like, friendship is about inconvenience and it’s like, yeah, I want to pick you up from the airport or…
DC: Maya Salameh has a really great poem on that in ONLY POEMS.
JT: And that sort of sentiment I understand, and it can be extrapolated. My own joy, my own pleasure is not so precious that I have to prioritize it above committed action or a variety of things. Donating money, work, volunteering at a variety of places, right? All of these things are work, but also feed one’s own joy. The idea of a” job well done, time well spent,” work that is valuable, but the idea that like, “oh, I feel like I’m contributing to my community, I feel like my community contributes to me, even in its very continued existence,” and the knowledge that the web is there, the safety net is there, that people look out for each other, brings me joy, and therefore for that joy to continue, I must contribute to it. So when I resist “joy as resistance,” I’m resisting what I think can sometimes feel like a resistance to truly get involved, right? A resistance to do anything that actually inconveniences you, which is to say a kind of laziness.
DC: We sometimes have an issue thinking about what it is that we owe to each other. It gets lost in translation often. I think especially living in this country, at this time, with the different kinds of forces that move against us and influence us, we often are asking the question, it’s like, “well, I don’t owe anything to anyone. I’m my own individual person.” And so in many ways, it could feel like my happiness is the thing that matters most, and as long as I’m happy in this terrible country, that I am winning. And it then also comes to the point where, well, that doesn’t really do much for anyone else.
And so thinking about, yeah, joy is resisting this kind of thing that’s working against us, but also, you maybe weren’t the most materially affected by said thing.
I know you host your own Substack, you do your own interviews called Writers & Their Cherished Hobbies (WATCH!), which is really great, ‘cause I know for each one of those, based on what kind of funds you’re able to procure, you donate those funds to different causes. I think that’s a really great idea of what joy can do. Like, okay, we’re creating an outlet for joy, for people to talk about their joys, and also we are materially, financially supporting another group of folks who actually could use that sort of resistance.
JT: There was a Palestinian man in Gaza who used to make these videos where he’d be smoking a cigar and he’d say, “Hello, my enemies, may you have a very bad day every day.” And he is always kind of grinning and whatever, and he loves cigars. Or when you hear about kids break dancing, or Ethiopian girls forming like a skating group. In that way, yes, of course joy is resistance because of what every other daily moment is.
But here, in the United States, yes, for example, I live in Washington, D.C., National Guard is present, da da da da. But also, I’m going through my days generally unbothered, right? So it’s like, okay, well, how am I gonna make sure I’m taking care of myself, my own mental health, my own physical health, right? My family and friends, et cetera. And then also be like, okay, the joy that I get from playing video games in my living room at night, or going out to eat with my friends or what have you, that has refilled my tank, so to speak. How am I then gonna turn that outward? The turning outward is also a source of joy for me, and I think for many people.
How Joy Shows Up
DC: I am wondering, with everything that you’re saying, how does joy show up for you within your creative work? How do you then channel it into your poetry or anything else that you write?
JT: I am a rambler, generally speaking. Someone asks a 10-word question and they get like a five minute answer. The amount of times in my life that I’ve told someone, “so like, the short version is,” and then I proceed to tell what, for them, might be the longest story they’ve ever heard. That impulse is also present, to a degree, in my poetry, which is just that I’m a big fan of long, kind of meandering…
DC: Like an effusiveness.
JT: Yeah. I have always been kind of earnest. Maybe briefly was gripped by irony in my early teen years, but thankfully was inoculated from all that. I don’t particularly find earnestness to be something embarrassing or to be bashful of. Especially nowadays, in the last handful of years, I think for most, an evidence of earnestness is actually kind of really inviting. Especially now when we get into not just people being fake, but like literal digital media sometimes being fake.
I have always enjoyed, very much in the school of Ross Gay’s poetics or Hanif Abdurraquib’s poetics, it’s almost like, they’re like, “We’re gonna go on a walk,” right? “And I’m gonna tell you something.” The poetic intent and craft choices come from, okay, how am I gonna guide the reader’s eye and sensory experience to the things that I want? And also perhaps that I, the writer or the speaker, was experiencing as they were navigating a particular thing. “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” which is probably the poster child of joy poems in the last fifteen years, or ever, I don’t know, is a prime example of that.
I tend to be a relatively narrative poet, but my goal, hopefully, is to be like, I’m gonna make sure that the reader follows me there. I don’t think poems are particularly difficult to understand, but I want them to be beautiful to experience. I feel like I try that in a bunch of ways. I try some metaphors and similes that I think are surprising, but also I just try to build an image that I think has, or details that have a lot of weight.
I think a lot of Rick Barot’s “The Wooden Overcoat” —
DC: I teach that poem every time I teach a class. Yeah.
JT: Exactly. Everyone teaches it because it’s such a brilliant crash course in how to build from details to images. Paul Tran talks about how you have details, and once you add dramatic context to a detail…
DC: …it becomes an image. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
JT: And so a tattoo can be a detail. Your grandmother’s faded tattoo can become an image. Or a flower versus a flower pushing up from the concrete, you can think about those sorts of things. I love that kind of stacking, that kind of compilation almost, those bouquets that seem almost too big … Sometimes I kind of want that effect, where I almost don’t even even know what to do with this, but the longer I look at it, the more I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t notice that this particular flower looks like this,” or, “This one hasn’t even budded yet, or bloomed.”
DC: When I talk about image with my students, another way that I go about it is — because my father does photography, and so there’s like some theories, and now, my father does not use these words, but there’s like theories in photography. There’s like the punctum and there’s like the studium, right?
So the studium is the context around the photo. It’s the intellectual realm of the photo, why it was taken, what it’s “about.” And then the punctum is the thing that pierces you. And so when I talk about image and details with my students, you can decide for yourself what image you’re going for, but sometimes you can’t actually decide what the image is. Because the image, when I explain it, it’s the thing that stays with you after you leave the poem. And for exactly the reasons that you’re talking about earlier, and that Paul Tran is talking about. The tattoo: detail. The grandmother’s faded tattoo: image, because it’s staying with me after I leave the poem.
When you’re talking about “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” every time I read that poem — which is not always super often because it is a 14 page poem, but it’s a lovely poem. I do have it on the vinyl. If anyone doesn’t have that vinyl, I recommend it, it’s so good. I can listen to him forever, which is why he’s the only one I’m trusting with, with four pages of text to listen to, to read — Anytime I listen to it, I think of “Note to Self” from the end of J. Cole’s 2014 Forest Hill Drive. There’s this kind of the same kind of effusiveness. It’s exactly what you’re saying, it is a catalog.
Something that I appreciate about him and Hanif, who you mentioned, and yourself is a deep appreciation, a deep attention to the scene of the poem, what’s happening within the world of the text. I think that’s its own kind of skill. There’s obviously plenty of poets who are really good at honing in on whatever the particular subject or item or whatever it is that they’re worried about, but what I appreciate about all three of your work is just how much you create a world for us. I think it comes from different valences, right? Hanif does music journalism, and so much of music is about setting scenes. So he does a really great job of crafting that environment. But similarly, to you and Ross, is just seeing the way that you guys go about making sure that everything within this world gets its proper attention.
JT: I love listening to scores of particular movies and video games and things like that, and there’s times when I’m like, I wanna build that moment. And that can only work if you’ve scaffolded the, like, okay, you’re hearing this thread and this thread and this thread and oh my God, it culminates in this moment.
In the “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” recording with Bon Iver, the first time I heard it, I was like, wow, I’m having a great time. But then when we get — it’s like it’s pretty late in it. Maybe like the last two or three minutes — when he sings. Thank you. When Ross is like, Thank you. Thank you. It has — again, nothing about that particular recording is instrumental, it’s the reading of the poem — but it’s the only moment where it has singing, and I’m like, “oh, wow.” I’m like, so dazzled.
Or in… have you played The Outer Wilds? Have we? I know I talk about it all the time.
DC: I have played a portion of it. It did not end up being the game for me, but…
JT: No, that’s totally fine.
DC: Recommendation! My friend Amelia Crowther has played the Outer Wilds and has a terrific set of… they’re like poems, like found text poems pulled from them. Terrific poems.
JT: There’s a moment — I’m gonna be as vague as possible, ‘cause I think it’s the emotional punch of the whole —
DC: I mean, you could tell me; I probably will not end up going back in and playing it.
JT: Okay. Well, all of the side characters you meet play an instrument, and they’re all playing like a particular melody or a particular beat. And at one point in the game, you can assemble all of them and direct them all to play. You can choose who plays first, who plays second, who plays third, and they’ll eventually all play at the same time. And it makes a song. They’ve actually all been playing distinct parts of a song, and it has such a like… it comes at a moment when the plot is sort of like at its height and that kind of thing, and there’s some visual fun that’s, you know, the equivalent of like fireworks, to be more precise. But it’s just like, oh, this thing has all of these components brought into it. And I think when, I don’t know, I think I just like love when you feel like the snowball is getting larger.
DC: Something about the way that repetition will reveal, or, like, surprise and repetition. I was just talking about repetition with Summer Farah, but it’s something about patterns, right? Our brains love patterns, and so when we find patterns that then like to merge into each other, or we recognize that the pattern’s been doing something underneath that we didn’t notice all along, it’s like that element, that moment of “aha” or “wow” that really gets to us.
JT: And poetry is just patterned language. Like it’s literal definition.
Poetic Influences
DC: I would love to hear more about poets and writers you feel are really big influences for you.
JT: I love Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, true Not just the poem, the whole book. Highly recommend. I love Aracelis Girmay. I am also half Eritrean, and so that’s my Eritrean goat right there. She has a poem that many people know called “You Are Who I Love,” and it’s also tremendous. The Hanif Abdurraquib poem that I love — I know, perhaps he jokes about this, but I know some people associate him with, like, sad guy, and he’s always posting, he’s like, “I’m really funny, I’m really goofy” or whatever. In A Fortune for Your Disaster, his second poetry collection, he has a poem called “If Life Is as Short as Our Ancestors Insist It Is, Why Isn’t Everything I Want Already at My Feet?”
And I think it’s beautiful. It’s one page, and the images stick with me a lot. It’s a poem, to be a little reductive, about like, the speaker is told, “oh, you have to like, cut some foods outta your diet cause of cholesterol,” and it’s a poem about like, well, unfortunately the things I love are… they got a lot of that. There’s like a scene of eating fried chicken in the car, and it just really resonates with me. The orange light, the grease stain which gets described as a country, and I think it’s…I don’t know. I think everyone knows that Hanif writes with a very tender, loving eye, but that poem is joyful through and through.
June Jordan’s “Intifada Incantation: Poem #8,” — more commonly understood as [I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP] — is another poem that’s about joy, even though it’s mostly a list of demands, so to speak, wishes, hopes.
Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me,” Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s “Hammond B3 Organ Cistern”, which opens with the line:
The days I don’t want to kill myself
are extraordinary.
and it just goes from there. Yeah. Those works, they just really get me going. The poets really get me…. There’s so many more I could list, but like those are poems that, you know, some of them are short, some of them are long, but they have that quality. Even “I Must Become a Menace to my Enemies” by June Jordan is a joyful poem. I would make that argument, ‘cause it’s kind of gleeful in how the speaker makes their enemies uncomfortable.
DC: The joy of hate. The joy of hateration.
JT: Exactly. Anyway, those are the ones that I like to think about a lot.
How Joy Lives Alongside Heavier Emotions
DC: Maybe the last question I’ll ask you before we get to reading your poem, because I know we’ve talked about Ross Gay and you were talking about Inciting Joy, and in the introduction of Inciting Joy, he prompts us away from thinking of joy as an emotion that’s discreet and locked away from feelings like sorrow or grief.
And I know we were talking about this earlier, about the urge to reduce joy, or even thinking away from joy as a reward we receive when we reach some type of milestone or accomplishment. And so I’m wondering, as a closing thought: How does joy live alongside your other, maybe heavier, emotions? What does joy make possible or necessary in your actions?
JT: I love Inciting Joy a lot. I love Ross a lot, what can I say? I’m a fan boy, whatever. But I think… it’s funny ‘cause the cliche is also like, “oh, you can’t have pleasure without pain.” And that phrasing also kind of annoys me. Not because I disagree, but it’s just, you know, it goes the way that cliches do, which you’re like, “enough. I’ve heard enough.”
I think I appreciate the way, and again, it’s like, it succeeds in the way it stacks, in the way it builds this idea that you can’t live without the two things. Joy is not something that is devoid of heartbreak. Even the joy itself is not devoid of heartbreak, not like heartbreak makes joy possible because you’re experiencing the opposite of it. But even sometimes in the joy, there is something heartbreaking. In “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” there is gratitude to finding in a drawer the dreadlocks of a murdered friend.
That’s like the line, or close to the line, and that’s like a simultaneity, both happening at once. How everything must be kind of touched by grief if you’re going through the belongings of a deceased loved one of any kind. And then to find something as proximal as like the literal hair on their head, you know? And yet there’s like gratitude to that. And then it unspools to “I saw our murdered friend in a dream and he guided me towards this place.” And that kind of simultaneity, I think, happens all the time. I really distrust people that can shut off the kinds of things that are happening around.
It’s not to say that it needs to come up at every single moment. It’s not to say that there’s some sort of virtue signal-y attitude towards, like, “I’m gonna bring this up in every chance I get, this horror, this atrocity.” But I really distrust people who, like, it doesn’t even cross their mind.
Not just because we’re always seeing reports of bombings and things like that, but it’s just like, it’s all… it all happens. We’re experiencing it all at once, and therefore I want a joy that… or if I’m gonna write about joy, I enjoy writing about joy, but I’m not necessarily like sitting down to be like, “it’s time to write a new, joyful poem,” you know? It’s just sort of like one of my preoccupations.
DC: Thinking about how joy lives through, through these things.
JT: Yeah. I’m sober, right? I’m aware of people in my life with various, or have had a history with, addiction in the past and you can have joy and elation chemically administered at the cost of one’s own body, perhaps short term, perhaps long term. And if you’re gonna resist that, the thing that makes you happy, in this particular case, can also be the thing that deteriorates you. Okay, well then, in that case, how do you go about joy that grapples with all of these facts, that you have to resist the easy path to it?
The path that is as simple as a substance, right? I can’t speak for other people’s experiences, but if you’re gonna resist the easier “path to joy,” — which is again, of course, not to say that addiction is easy, you get what I’m saying? — What work are you gonna do to actually cultivate it? How are you gonna both protect it from the forces that be, surround us, while also understanding that you can’t protect it outright. You know, the passage in Inciting Joy’s introduction is like “joy doesn’t exist in this locked room with warm lighting while on the outside trying to get in is like all of the horrors,” right, it’s more so, “Okay, atrocities abound.”
I think of the first poem of Franny Choi’s “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On” —
DC: Yep. That title poem. Mm-hmm.
JT: “Before there was an apocalypse of this, there was an apocalypse of that,” right? Perhaps everyone has thought this is the worst it’s ever been.
DC: Right.
JT: And I’m like, okay, well, if that’s true, even if sometimes selfishly, I’m like, “well, no, I think this is the worst it’s ever been,” but then you really think about it and you’re like. I mean, not really. Not for me specifically. Then, if that’s the case, how do I make sure that I am balancing that, right? Not being afraid to write about the horror. Even if it’s messy, that doesn’t mean it has to be published. It can just be a way of moving through your own mind, right? Not just the world. And then the joy, you’ll find a way, I think, to include joy in a way that feels more genuine, in a way that doesn’t feel so forced or even, like, duplicitous.
DC: You wanna be honest with your joy and being honest with the joy means being honest about what’s happening around the joy.
JT: Totally.
DC: Perfect. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Jonny. This has been a terrific conversation, and I would love it if you could close us out here with a work of your own that showcases how you think about joy.
JT: Yeah, totally.
Winter Solstice
“Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming”
- Cameron Awkward-Rich
I wake up today—again—in a nation giddy as a nectared hummingbird at the smell of blood and immediately everything claws at me: the shower hisses against my neck like a doberman’s leash, the kitchen sink nurses a tower of filth I can’t bear to look at, winter has turned the brightest tree on my block into a snuffed chandelier. Today, the rain comes down in icy fangs. Tomorrow, the same. Nothing here escapes the physics of American violence, not even the weather. What good is a clock in a place where suffering never sets? Language makes for a lousy tourniquet, I know, but I get dressed, walk to the park, and throw my voice amongst the other protesters all the same. What else to do with the dozen kicked beehives in my chest? Beside me, a little girl no taller than my hip holds a sign and chants and it is enough to turn the institution of dreaming I was raised in into a ruin. This happens daily, this ruining, this encroaching darkness, but here, amongst these people so full-throated with their convictions toward a more abundant world, I’m rebuilt, mosaicked by their singing & tenderness & rage. The coalescing voices a hot tonic against the pessimism our nation pledges to. I walk home, on the precipice of sobs, and there’s the tree again, dark and towering, its leaves all yellow in the mud. One of its branches kisses the top of my head. A common finch assembles a nest in its canopy. It prepares for the life it knows is coming.
Copyright © 2025 by Jonny Teklit. Originally published in Split This Rock. Used with permission of the author.
DC: Thank you all for listening to this episode of the O, Word? Podcast produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. If you are interested in joy as poetic practice, I have added some folks recommended by our guest in the Substack Post. The music for O, Word? is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify. Our guest, Jonny, offers the following prompt:
Read the poems that are suggested at the end of this episode. From there, write out a list of things that bring you joy. Write an ode to one of them, or many of them.
All the example poems can be found in the episode transcript. Until next time, thanks for listening.
If you are interested in the poetics of joy, Jonny recommends:
“Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” | Ross Gay
“You Are Who I Love” | Aracelis Girmay
“If Life Is as Short as Our Ancestors Insist It Is, Why Isn’t Everything I Want Already at My Feet?” | Hanif Abdurraqib
“Intifada Incantation: Poem #8” | June Jordan
“Hammond B3 Organ Cistern” | Gabrielle Calvocoressi
“won’t you celebrate with me” | Lucille Clifton
