Meet River River Books' Spring Intern!

I’m Al Gastmeier, a student in my third year at Grand Valley University, located on the banks of Michigan’s Grand River, where I am majoring in writing and minoring in digital studies. I’ll be working as an intern for River River Books and Moist Poetry Journal this winter. I’m very excited (and grateful) for this chance. I’ve been writing creatively since I was a child, and in particular, I am enamored with poetry as a way of seeing the world, from the ordinary to the strange, in a different light.  

I’m not entirely sure why I started writing. It’s been so long since then. But I doubt my younger self even cared about a reason. I had paper and pencil, so I wrote. Free of any expectations, free of all the standards imposed on children from grade school and onwards. No timed essay prompts. No standardized questions. I still remember the first poem I ever wrote, a sort of portrait of dawn breaking in a forest, simple in form and lineation. Nothing life changing. And certainly not something that I think I would write now. Even so, I can’t deny the efforts of the child I was then, the child who was amazed by the written word. I believe I wrote because it was fun.  

I think I’m still trying to reach that place again, as far away as it seems. For the longest time, I wrote largely out of necessity. English classes were a place to get a decent grade and nothing more. I’m hardly the only one who has long since lost the ability to write like a child. It’s something that, more often than not, is drowned out over and over by the world we live in. Even though I did return to writing later in high school, I wouldn’t say that I write purely for the joy of it anymore.  

It’s impossible to return to that kind of past. Some things simply come with the territory of growing up. It’s near impossible to get water to flow backwards. 

Even so, poetry is by far the closest I’ve gotten. And more importantly than going back, it’s shown me a way forward. In that regard, the past few years have been full of change. I didn’t expect to take a poetry class my second year of college, and I had no idea that poetry would end up as something so important to me. I’ve found myself captivated more and more by the sounds, the form, the way the words move on the page, how poets find new ways to form the mundane into something that readers have never considered.  

There are so many different ways to look at the same thing, and there are countless writers who showcase those angles through their craft. I continue to think back to Matthew Olzmann’s poem “Photograph of a Boy and a Dead Dog.” Olzmann writes,  

Never before had I thought of grief in this way, but every time I return to this poem, it always “clicks,” resonating in a way that reaches to some strange, deeply buried part of me. Something surfaces from the murky depths. Even for just a moment, I understand something about how another person sees the world, and in turn, I can understand myself. I’m endlessly grateful that I live in a world where people write and will keep writing. 

Communication is difficult. It’s easy to misinterpret, to lose something as thoughts go from one person to another. Fluid, ever changing. I feel that poetry is one of the best answers to that experience. It becomes an art to try and use language in a way that conveys things that may reach beyond it, and there are infinite ways of doing so. Here, I can play with ambiguity and connotations as artistic tools. Here, the commonplace can become the extraordinary. There’s something freeing about existing between the lines. Poetry has given me a place to thrive.