The Shore Interview #44: Carson Colenbaugh

Questions by Ella Flores, Art Editor

EF: “Love Song Scrawled at Shaking Rock” offers several potent comparisons, like having “a little love,” to a massive, once-balancing, once-moveable, boulder. Indeed, the fact that the titular Shaking Rock fell “ill to gravity’s dull / ubiquitous tug” seems to be pivotal to the speaker’s final clarity. Are there any details, subtle connections, or other aspects about the poem that surprise or seem more important to you now than when you first finished it?

CC: Thank you so much for this wonderful opportunity and for this great first question. When I was living the experience that prompted this poem and when I drafted the poem, I was focused on the immediate scenario: I saw something immense that ended, saw something special surviving and found myself and the ‘we’ caught between the two. Only after thinking about this question do I realize that most rock-centric works I’ve read don’t cast the rock as a figure or character with an ending. Last March, I had the pleasure to work at Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House and was reminded of Jeffers’ poem, “Oh, Lovely Rock,” by the foundation’s president, Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts. In that poem and most of Jeffers’ other works, all influenced by his more-or-less pantheistic views, rocks are nearly deities and eternal, outlasting his own fragile humanity. Yet in front of me, in those woods, was a rock that in someone’s lifetime ceased doing what folks thought it would always do. Jeffers was a huge influence on me at the time and it’s interesting to have written something unlike what I’ve read and to have worked against the influence of an influence without realizing it. This poem was born before I ever read James Still’s River of Earth and fell in love with the preacher’s sermon about mountains rising and falling like tides, one of my favorite passages in American literature. And now I will be on the lookout for more dying rock poems in my daily reading.

EF: Could you explain the process of arriving at the poem’s current form, including line or stanza length and shape, or, conversely, could you speak to how you see the form functioning now in hindsight?

CC: I find free-verse almost impossible. The weight of choosing line-breaks outside of some quantitative parameter is debilitating. This poem was originally drafted with others that I wrote when I first decided to seriously pursue poetry, and since I knew that contemporary poetry is almost entirely free-verse, I needed to come up with some way to fake it. All of the lines in this poem are 11–13 syllables according to my pronunciation, as I didn’t want to accidentally write a 10-syllable pentameter line and felt that a 3-syllable range would be enough variation to seem ‘free.’ Writing this now, I realize the absurdity of this method, but at the time it taught me almost everything I’d need to know about concision and tension. As for the stanzas, I write best when viewing lines as single units of information, with like information grouped together in little rooms. I originally wrote this poem in a single body, and I’m pretty sure the cinquain was the only stanza type that didn’t break-up the list of plants in the middle of the poem. In hindsight, the form functions as the poem’s only possible vessel, but my algorithm had to fail at every other possible combination of line and stanza before landing here.

EF: Whether it’s Shaking Rock or other attractions, what about physically visiting a place do you think has struck you differently, poetically speaking, than only reading about or seeing a video of a particular location?

CC: As someone educated as a forest ecologist before studying as a poet, the plant species I get to include in my poems are one of my top concerns; they’re like my poetic plus-ones. I know my way around plant communities and the environmental conditions of certain site types in the southeastern US, but I’ve been to enough spots to know there’s always something growing there that the textbooks don’t prepare you for. Besides being a neat nonfictional inclusion, those species usually prompt the poems themselves. How did it get there? Where am I really? When I visited Shaking Rock with my partner, I had no clue we’d slip down into an alluvial floodplain. Silky dogwood and rusty blackhaw are always delightful to see and I’d been taught in college that it’s rather hard to run into a river birch not growing in someone’s lawn. I’ve visited a lot of cool rocks in my life, but finding those plants forced me to think about all the reasons why that particular moment was notable. If I had only read about Shaking Rock, or seen it in photos, my plant palette would’ve been like every backyard in Georgia. White oak and poison-ivy and a pignut hickory, if I was feeling particularly imaginative.

EF: Are there any journals or magazines you're currently enjoying?

CC: I follow Orion, The Bitter Southerner and The Oxford American closely. The folks at Cutleaf, South Carolina Review and Salvation South are doing really lovely work. And the plant-scientist in me adores Arnoldia.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

CC: Two poems from this issue that I found intertwined were Kate Welsh’s “In June, Pigeons” and Ana Prundaru’s “Old Haunt.” Welsh’s poem speaks from an outsider’s view about an unfamiliar habitation; pigeons typically craft “pitiful nests: / a few sticks thrown together…” and although the speaker finds a particular nest worthy of admiration, in the end, the pigeons are left unsheltered. In Prundaru’s “Old Haunt,” we get thrust into the perspective of a human being contemplating a loss of home and the sensations that follow attempts at finding a new one. It was not difficult for me to imagine the pigeons from Welsh’s poem within the speaker of Prundaru’s, which perhaps speaks to a sense of universal domesticity—everything living exactly as they can—that I think about more and more frequently these days.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Carson Colenbaugh (he/him) is a poet and forest ecologist from Kennesaw, Georgia. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Terrain.org, Birmingham Poetry Review and elsewhere. Ecological work of his has been featured in Human Ecology. He is a 2024 Tor House Foundation Fellow and can be found on Instagram @carsoncolenbaugh