On Wednesday, Feb. 6, G.C. Waldrep, Professor and Director of Creative Writing, a brilliant voice in the Southern literary tradition and emulation of what it means to be a lyrical poet, and Alfredo Aguilar, the Spring 2025 Roth Resident at the Stadler Center, lover of landscape poems and avid visitor of the Bucknell Campus Theatre, shared their poetry at the Stadler Center’s first literary reading of the semester. During our interview, Aguilar noted that “having an audience’s attention [at an open mic] is a great gift, and I can only hope to honor that attention.” Both he and Waldrep did that and some, offering advice on how a novice or stuck poet can get started or revamped on their writing journey.
Waldrep opened his fourth reading during his 18 years at Bucknell by reading five poems. Some were from his new book, “The Opening Ritual,” others were pieces that will be included in his next book and all works were sprinkled with the essence of Waldrep musicality and flare. He began by asking the audience of literary lovers and poetry students to hold their applause until the end of his collection, as he “enjoys the silence.”
All five of Waldrep’s poems were profound and made me, a novice poet, want to run back to my room immediately to grab my journal and gel pens to begin a new poem of my own. “To a Shelf Fungus at Acadia National Park” left me most inspired to create. Lines from the poem such as, “It would be/ unlike you to pretend/ to decoration, being,/ as you are, a spirit/ encased in a block/ of/ jagged fir./ The ruins of a forest/ were the first/ cinema, surely,” bottle up the otherworldly feeling of being at Acadia National Park, which is where Waldrep was an artist-in-residence in 2019.
The same can be said for Aguilar, who also read five poems Thursday evening, many of which from his debut book, “On This Side of the Desert,” where he was deeply inspired by the landscape of his Southern Californian home, family and fellow artistic friends. Within stanzas like, “& left him covered in a new skin/ of dust. used rope to force/ the colt to kneel before him & it never/ again tried to jump. my father,” I was in a scene of despair bottled by Aguilar, transporting readers back to his father’s time working with horses on their California ranch.
That is the essence of poetry: to find an image or feeling and to catch it in a glass mason jar like a little lightning bug. Let its glow be your inspiration and its existence your poem. However, seeing the glow in an idea, catching it and making it into art is not always so easy. Luckily, G.C. Waldrep and Alfredo Aguilar have shared with me some advice for any novice poet, writer or creative who has so many ideas but no idea how to get started.
Alfredo Aguilar: “Perhaps more important than writing, I’d suggest reading deeply. Read for the contemporary moment definitely, but also read poets from the past and from the world over to get a sense of this art, its various traditions and what traditions you yourself might be coming out of. I believe in being a student of the thing that you wish to make. I had a teacher who urged us to take in as much different poetry as we could, even if it didn’t line up with what we thought of as our aesthetic. I took that to heart. On a more writing focused note, I’d also say try to find poets who you can share your work with, who will push you and your art. I know for myself that I wouldn’t have gotten far in writing were it not for other poets offering encouragement and critique. It’s a tremendous help to see and listen to what your peers are doing and to have the opportunity to contribute and be in dialogue with them.”
G.C. Waldrep: “I come from a non-literary, rural background and I had zero idea how to ‘become a writer’—and somehow, the actual answer (you write) didn’t penetrate the fog of my early ambition. Also, like many Bucknell students I teach, I was raised to be a perfectionist—and perfectionism is actually a kind of bondage, a tyranny, that prevents people from accomplishing anything at all. It’s certainly an enemy to any kind of creative endeavor. A famous writer-teacher once said that if you are having problems writing, you should lower your standards. That’s not quite true, but certain things become possible if you (temporarily) adopt it. (Later, in revision, you can let your perfectionism run riot.) So: the freedom to experiment. I went through years when I told myself, ‘You aren’t a writer, you can’t be, so what you are doing isn’t writing’—and even ‘This isn’t creative writing, it’s creative typing.’ Let something happen on the page that could only happen by and through you. Don’t be too concerned with whether it’s ‘any good’ or who would want to read it. One of Wordsworth’s justly famous quotes goes ‘To begin, begin.’ It’s that simple, but it’s also that hard. Once you’ve actually written something, then you can let the world back in.”
If you catch the lightning bug, write the poem and write ferociously. Then, let the world back in, it’ll be waiting for you when you come back.