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New Poetry Workshop. That Feeling When…

I’m happy to be conducting another online poetry workshop hosted by One Art, the web publication edited by Mark Danowski. It happens Tuesday Feb 17, from 6pm to 8pm and I’m calling it That Feeling When.

This is a generative workshop aimed at demonstrating some techniques to create poems about, for lack of better terms, vague or abstract feelings. Many poems, particularly lyric-focus poetry, function largely as vehicles to express things that can only be expressed through poetry—this is the best function of any art. In this workshop I’ll help attendees identify those abstracts and find ways to turn them into words.

Wendell Berry’s poem The Peace of Wild Things is a good example of identifying that feeling and showing its result. In this case, the action he chooses to take. When “despair for the world” overcomes him, he turns to wild things, and the poem describes his decision and actions. This is a fairly obvious version of the approach—the feeling is directly stated, rather than left for the reader to experience–we experience the results of the feeling. For a writer, just choose anything that elicits a feeling, and write the actions you take. It could be something very situational and specific (when I watch the first snowfall of the year from my window…) or more general, like Berry’s poem.

Another approach, and one we’ll also discuss in the class, doesn’t come out and state what the feeling is. The poem may describe the circumstances of a feeling, without naming it, usually because it doesn’t have a name at all. Consider this poem by Linda Gregg. What is the feeling it conveys? I don’t know there’s a word, or just one word for it. That’s why it’s a poem. The prompt could be something like “write that feeling when you’re looking out over town and thinking of the people in the houses below, what they’ve been through and what they may want…” In this case, she describes a scene (imaginary or not? I don’t know), and a subject (is “she” Gregg or someone Gregg invents—we don’t know), but the description and setting powerfully invoke a number of feelings by their arrangement and telling.

Anyway, we’ll look at several examples, talk about how they work, and then I’ll both offer prompts and show how you can create your own prompts for future poems.

Oh, and by the way, at only $25 this is a very affordable workshop. Details on how to register here.

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Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

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Grant Reads Tom Hennen and Talks About Birds on In Three Poems Podcast

I was happy to appear this week on David Bauman’s poetry podcast In Three Poems. I love the format which focuses on (as the name implies) three poems. One of mine chosen and read by Dave, one of mine read by me, and one I select by another poet–Tom Hennen’s “From a Country Overlooked.” We talk about birding (Dave’s an expert, I’m a hack), hiking, the silence of pine forests, and what all that has to do with poetry and my new book Temporary Shelters. You can listen to it at this link or find it on Spotify or Apple.

Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

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The Weight of Poetry

Hatfield is foggy this morning, and most of the snow has melted off. My adult kids have returned to their towns, and the holiday leftovers eaten or tossed. I’ve got some books to mail, some poems to send to the black hole of Submittable, and a few new drafts to sit with. 

I woke this morning with the remnant of a dream in which I was talking with a famous poet (I won’t say who) about how heavy poems were. Lately I’ve been working on a poem about trains.  I have my father’s old Lionel train set, which he gave me a couple years ago (I can’t say inherited, because he’s still living, but inherited feels more accurate). While I didn’t really care for toy trains when I was a kid (I had a Tyco racecar track instead), they seem important to me now because it was important to him that I or my brother take the set rather than let it go to a stranger. It’s a post-war classic train set about 75-years old, and amazingly still mostly works. I even added two new cars myself, and the old engine manages to pull them. This year it chugged a circle under my Christmas tree. 

Anyway, I’ve heard people talk about how finishing a poem feels like relieving themselves of a weight, wringing something out of their body. For me, it’s the opposite. When you create something new, you have a responsibility for it, and you carry it with you. It’s like Jacob Marley and his burden of chains. I made those poems, and now I drag them around with me wherever I go. Some I’m quite proud of and wear like a nice sweater, yet there are plenty I’ve spent months working on but would never drag out in public. I think even the ones I’ve deleted and abandoned are still clawing onto me in some way–maybe like adding cars to that old train. 

With each new poem, a poet becomes something more. I’m not sure what it is, or if it’s better or worse, but writing a poem isn’t shedding a skin, it’s adding layers to an existing one. An old poet is a giant snowball after rolling down a hill, twigs and pinecones sticking out at odd angles. 

And I’m starting to like that train poem. 

—Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

Almost Christmas Poetry
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Almost Christmas Poetry

W’ere a week away from Christmas. The weekend snow is melting, though still hanging around. My kids will be coming home soon and I hope to share some winter hikes with them.

Anyway, the lovely poetry website One Art published two Xmas-themed poems of mine. One takes place in a dismal shopping mall where a pall of the season’s (year’s) malaise looms over everything except the lone mall caroler.

The other is mostly a metaphor for the hard passage of time, the burdens we carry, especially this time of year–typical holiday stuff.

You can read them both here at One Art.

And if you want to hear me read some poems live, please log onto my reading Saturday at 7pm hosted by Wordhive.

Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

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Video for Gunpowder Homestead

I’m happy to share the third poetry video from my book Temporary Shelters. The poem, Gunpowder Homestead, explores my fascination with the old house ruins and foundations I sometimes run into on woods hikes in my home state of Pennsylvania.

Whenever I encounter a place like this, I think about the people who lived here once 150 or more years ago–how their lives were different from mine, how the land and the world may have been different, and what happened that the place fell into ruin.

The poem was first published by Whale Road Review and now appears in my book Temporary Shelters.

Hang around until the end to hear the short interview.

This video was shot and produced by Bare Bones Filmmakers.

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Reading The Water: Form and Content in Fishing and Poetry

Not long ago I hiked down a gameland trail into a gorge thick with hemlock and rhododendron to look for a small creek named Devil’s Hole. The name comes from the way the creek emerges through rocks via an underground aquifer and disappears under the earth a few more times throughout its course to join another creek curiously named Paradise.

After a good rain, Devil’s Hole is still only 10 feet at its widest. It tumbles over and around boulders of Devonian sandstone left there when the Pocono formation was rearranging itself like a dog getting comfortable on a sofa. The topography creates plunge pools, short shallow runs, cascade falls a few feet high, and cutbanks shadowed by the bent elbows of mountain laurel. It is a remote, mysterious, and beautiful place.

I went there looking for brook trout–small, wild jewels far away from the stocked waters where most anglers go. As a catch-and-release fly fisher who likes to avoid people, this kind of angling is more about the experience than about catching fish. I go to observe the motions –water on stone, current on insect, stillness and rise– form and content defining each other.

Water in motion, like poems, is made of multiple currents, obstacles, fast sections and slower spots. The center channel may be deep or shallow. A gravel bottom holds different insects than a silt bottom. Boulders hide small pockets of stillwater. The steep bank is hard to enter, and then again hard to climb out of. Understanding those variations and learning to use them is what anglers call “reading the water.”

Because I know the region pretty well I already knew what kinds of fish and aquatic insects it would hold for the time of year. That’s the kind of knowledge that comes from having read a library’s worth of rivers.

But, as with a good poem, you can’t know everything ahead of time. At some point you’ve read enough Mary Oliver poems to know what you’re getting into when you enter one, but nothing prepares you for “The face of the moose is as sad / as the face of Jesus.” in her poem Some Questions you Might Ask.

So you read each water anew.

“One question leads to another.” says Oliver. Like a good poem, moving water asks you questions over and over again. What will the current do if I mend my line upstream? Will that boulder hide a trout or a hellbender? Can this log support my weight, or am I going to get wet?

I want poems to prompt questions the way a river or creek does. A stanza break, a caesura–these are moments in motion. Moments when you read the currents around them, observe the words doing things to each other, doing things to you, forcing a response. An enjambment is a bend around a boulder; a stanza break may be the stone you cross to continue on the other side. Form is what gets you there, what shapes your approach to the water.

But as any angler knows, some creeks don’t give up their answers easily, though hopefully their questions invite you back to give it another try. Sometimes you land the fish. Sometimes you don’t. Draft, fail, revise.

I encourage my poetry students to be observers and questioners. Why is this element here? What does it do? How does it affect what comes next? It takes time and practice to understand the machinations of water in motion. It’s the mixture of patience and humility that smooths a rough impatient stone.

Lately, I’ve been moving away from leading workshops with the goal of re-engineering a poem, and more toward learning to read it. And also asking the writer to think about why they wrote it the way they did. As an angler, the better you get at reading rivers, the more you’ll appreciate each new water you step foot in, and the better you’ll be at teasing a fish out of it. As a writer, as you learn how water works, you get better at making it work for you.

That trip down to Devil’s Hole included half a dozen creek crossings. I found bear scat along the bank, a few trout in places I expected them to be, and some where I didn’t. It’s that combination of recognition and surprise that makes a good experience on the water. I lost one fish, probably the biggest one of the day, and the strike still sends jolts into me when I think about it.

And I think about it a lot.

My latest book, Temporary Shelters, is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

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New Poetry Video and Book Update

I’m very happy to share this new video from my upcoming book, Temporary Shelters. It was produced by Barebones Filmmakers (who happen to be my daughter and her boyfriend–both extremely talented). We did the filming earlier this year in various locations in Pennsylvania’s Poconos.

We’ll have two more videos to release probably in September when the book is officially available.

On that note, I’m also happy to share that Temporary Shelters can now be pre-ordered from Cornerstone Press (at a 20% discount). Use the scan code on the image below (or this link if that’s easier).

If you’re a reviewer or work at a journal and are interested in reviewing the book, please let me know.

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2024 Update and stuff

Well, it’s been a while. I hope your year has been free of major trouble. Here’s a sneak peek of the likely cover of my next book, coming out in 2025 from Cornerstone Press.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for something good to read, I highly recommend a new anthology, The Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia (edited by Todd and Noah Davis and and Carolyn Mahan). it pairs descriptions, habitat and lifestyle notes on key species in the region with poems about those species. Yes, I’m included (my entry is the the mayapple). Among the other poets included are David Baker, Kasey Jueds, Chase Twichell, Lee Upton, Marjorie Maddox, K.A. Hays, Michael Garrigan, Jerry Wemple, Chard deNiord, and many more.

In addition to my Rosemont poetry classes, I was happy to teach a couple of guest workshops for the online poetry journal OneArt (edited by Mark Danowsky). Those were fun, so I’ll probably do another next year.

I have a few more poems included in the Poems section of this site. I’ll continue to include more as they become available online.

Finally, like many others, I’ve left twitter for Bluesky. Find me there @grantclauser.bsky.social

that’s it.

gc