Poets encourage, critique each other

One Tuesday a month, a group of writers comes together to share poetry.

Nancy Gavrilis, who has 30 years of experience teaching college-level English, literature and writing, started the group about two years ago.

Each month, participants share a poem and critique each other's work at Lacey Timberland Regional Library.

"The goal is to help the person do the best possible work," said Gavrilis, who started writing as a teenager and wrote a book of poems for her dissertation in 1980. "The idea is to help the beginners become more sensitive and help those who are accomplished recognize their strength and develop in that area."

She said the critiquing can be intimidating to the beginner, but it's necessary to advance as a writer.

Improvement

Members say the workshop has helped them improve.

Kathy Kruzner of Lacey said she used to write mainly rhyming poems, but Gavrilis encouraged her to expand to free-verse writing. Now she rarely writes rhyming poems.

"You can articulate a lot more when you can do words that don't rhyme," Kruzner said.

Kruzner said she's always liked poetry and took some creative writing classes in college. Mainly she likes to look at pictures for inspiration, she said.

"Otherwise, I draw a blank," she said.

Gavrilis tries to give an assignment each meeting to help focus the group. She might ask them to base their poem on a picture from a calendar or an article in a newspaper.

Critiquing

Bob Mowrey, a former wildlife scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, enjoys writing about nature. The poem he presented at the February meeting was about the relationship between flying squirrels and truffles.

"The idea is it's all symbiotic," he said.

The other poets gave him gentle recommendations for converting his long, detailed paragraphs into a poem.

"I love Bob's imagination. If we could just get him to condense a little bit," said Terry Storey of Lacey, a retired Boeing employee.

Mowrey admitted that he's more of a lyrical writer and has trouble keeping his writing concise.

"He thinks in terms of paragraphs; he doesn't think in terms of lines," Gavrilis said. "It would be interesting if each of us took a marker and took out things and made a poem, so we come up with Bob's words, but not Bob's poem."

And that became the March assignment.

Gavrilis said she hopes to maintain an interest in poetry through the workshop.

To her, poetry is like a piece of art.

"I think if you write, you understand yourself better," she said. "I see expressions of the way the world is, or the way people are in poetry as similar to a sculpture."

Diane Huber covers the city of Lacey and its urban growth area for Lacey Today. She can be reached at 360-357-0204 or dhuber@theolympian.com.