On the Poetry of Grant Clauser
"the invisible physics of weight and balance"

"Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after."
-Henry David Thoreau

A trip into the woods with Grant Clauser is not simply fishing and campfires; he is one of those, you can tell, who goes to nature in order to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” (That’s Thoreau again; I taught early American Lit for far too long.) Those of us who choose to tag along are well rewarded; there is the beauty of the wilderness, the music of the wild, and the delightful songs of the poet.

“Once the match is struck/ there’s no taking it back.” So Clauser builds his fire, claiming a safe place, illuminating the beautiful world.

We stack our oak and maple
inside the stone ring and stare
until the smoking paper
turns to red and blue flame.

And the greeny leaves overhead “quiver / from the wind heat creates / like some wise animal / watching its mate being devoured.” That simile is unexpected, even, perhaps, shocking, as we begin to understand the give and take that comes of communing with the great outdoors. From there, though, the poet takes us into the true heat of the fire, “hot memory,” he calls it, where “every step / and kiss and hunger / is borrowed heat. / All fires are forever.” Still, there is the comfort of knowing, “Those who loved us / once are warm somewhere….” No, this is not a simple fishing trip, a quiet night under the starry sky.

Clauser is a pensive man, whether off on his own in the wild, or at home with family and friends. Ordinary things that pass for life, fussing the late season garden, for example, can evoke curious thoughts and bring on stirring meditations: “Spilling its sugary fish eyes / glossy over the dry garden— / summer’s last tomato, split / down the side like a piñata.” Perhaps it is his daughter’s being there, seeing the oozing fruit in his hand, “leaking / tart and sweet” over his fingers. Whatever the reason, the moment brings an understanding:

Sometimes we arrive
at just the right moment,
an orange ocean sunset
or sea turtles boiling
pre dawn from their nest,
while other times,
the phones go unanswered
children grow strong
and cut their hair alone
or people you love
die without you….

Robert Bly, who chose Clauser as the 2010 Poet Laureate for Montgomery County, has noted his poems’“lovely way of flowing from one line to the next, and one stanza to the next” – the dance, which speaks to the music, the pleasing rhythm that carries the reader. The usually short, often enjambed lines pass effortlessly, at least in part because of the sounds the words make. One is reminded that John Logan spoke of “a ballet for the ear.” That is, close attention to assonance, consonance, alliteration, and other chimes, rhymes and echoes. Eschewing fixed forms, rigid measures and meters, and the obvious, heavy-handed rhymes, Clauser braids a swell of sounds throughout his lines, threads that weave from line to line and hold the whole together.

I have shown you singing rivers
seeing stones and the witch in the water.
We have whispered to tree sprites
and worried over night voices in the woods.

The alliterative s’s, as well as those buried in the middle and at ends of words, almost bring those musical rivers alive, and the hushed w’s add just the right eeriness to the evocation of the witch and spirits. Clauser has a keen ear, slipping in the rhyme, “sprites” / “night,” and it is a skilled craftsman who composed the line, with its haunting assonant o’s, “and worried over night voices in the woods.”

While the tetrameter of the above lines, from “Telling Things to My Daughters,” is incidental, Clauser clearly knows how to work with a varied meter to effect a sure-footed and still surprising cadence. With a voice that is casual, conversational, comforting, he carries us, with the ease of a serene river, to lament:

I love the myths of your lives
because I barely remember mine.

Clauser can turn a moment into a memory, an idea into a monument, and all with words. Simple words, at that – he admits to a “fascination with simple words.” “Trying to do less with less,” he tells us. Agreater concern for him, though, are “Things We Don’t Have Words For.”

The color of the creek,
the difference between green, olive
and August moss.

The nuance of shading that light brings to creek water.

Remember twenty years ago
soaking our long hair
in the cold water
after sitting all afternoon in the sun?
What do you call that?
Or the glint I remember
waiting in your left eye,
a refection of the Colman lantern
and the moth landing
on the table like a spare
and misplaced noun.

There is clearly much in our world, from our days, to speak about, and a poet’s greatest frustration is not so much not knowing what to say, but more, how to say it. “Firsts and lasts,” for example, speaks of

things worth scratching
on a wall.
Everything else is just
a footprint on the trail,
lipstick on the glass.
It tells you someone
was here,
but not who she loved.

Clauser is good with closure; as Yeats said, “a poem comes right with a click like a closing box.”

And there is another tool in his trusty bag of poetin’ tricks that he is obviously fond of using. He is a master of metaphor, and drops similes into his poems nonchalantly, with a soft touch, only to have them explode:

There’s always an injury
when we compare one thing
to something else, the tepid moon
to its jealous sister, the viscous fog
to seven years of silence.
And any word can be a knife….
A loaf of bread cooling on the counter
is a wild act of love.

“The physics of weight and balance,” indeed. Whether it is daughters growing up, learning to cast flies into the hula hoop pools set up in the yard, or stumping their father with questions of Theology: “You will, some day, no longer believe in fairies, / and this grieves me more than I could ever measure.” Or the stuff of textbooks, the stars, the stones, or, coming real, the infections, amputations, and cancers – “even the corrupt strands of DNA/ gone haywire, radically dissolving / their nature –” stalking our friends. Grandeur and beauty cannot erase the hard truths, the pain of knowledge.

As the poet says, “like everything else, it’s almost too easy / to remain speechless.”

In “Sitting by a Campfire with my Father,” as the sun “drowns into the pine trees” and the day goes to dust, the campfire brings to light the face of his father:

I finally notice the lines
flowing over your face,
the creeks and rivers and weirs
carved by paper wind and the
high pitched whine of old dogs.

There is a story here, unfolding, a campfire tale, and a son of any age sees the world in his father’s face change, and his father’s face changed in the world.

So watching you hold your face
with one hand, the ghosts of other
faces there too, pressing skin
against bone, against the slow
drive of years, the rises and sets,
the loves, your father too and his…

A trip into the woods with Grant Clauser is not simply fishing and campfires; no, it is an adventure, Thoreauvian, both outward and inward. One that we will be glad we took; one that we will not soon forget.