Grant Clauser

More poems than not of mine find themselves grounded, at least in part, in the non-human world, whether from walks in the woods or messing around in my backyard garden. I find in those places two of the most important components: metaphor and story. My overactive imagination likes to turn nearly any image or experience into something else, to find comparison, commonality or contrast. I think that’s fundamental to how we learn about the world, by lining up what we already know next to what we don’t and seeing where they connect. Story, too, is part of that. Even when there’s not much of a story, something happened here, always or will, and sharing that makes something else happen. 

‘Bluebells” had two origins. The first was with the student protests at college campuses widely reported this year and last. The second was my frequent walks in the woods looking for ephemeral wildflowers, and I mashed the two things together. “Walnut” began with me thinking about the allelopathic quality of those trees (they produce a toxic chemical which reduces competition) and how that seemed so much like a human tendency that I couldn’t resist the comparison.