UCLA graduate student, award-winning poet Eric Gudas uses curiosity of his environment to gain inspiration

Sitting in the middle of buzzing Kerckhoff Coffeehouse, Eric Gudas, a UCLA graduate student in 20th-century American literature and an award-winning poet, scanned his environment for images that could inspire one of his poems. Looking up at the ceiling, he noticed something that I had often overlooked in my many visits to Kerckhoff.

“I have a lot of questions, usually very ordinary questions,” Gudas said. “Right now I am wondering whether those hanging plants are real or fake.”

During his reading this past Saturday at the poetry center in Venice, Beyond Baroque, alongside poets Alissa Valles and Ilya Kaminsky, he read a series of poems about death, which included dialogues he had with his young daughter. His use of language and subject is approachable and crisp, sometimes formal or freewheeling.

Gudas drew questions from his surrounding environment as a source for his highly tactile and image-centered poems.

“Maybe I feel like inspiration is a high word for me. I try to cultivate curiosity and then hope for inspiration,” Gudas said.

In Gudas’ poems Orange Juice and Meditation at the County Landfill, senses emerge in tantalizing and even repulsive ways.

“Gudas’ musical images have the demotic speech of common man, but the way he resonates the words goes way beyond speech,” said Richard Modiano, executive director of Beyond Baroque.

About 20 years of Gudas’ poetry have been compiled in his two publications, “Beautiful Monster” and Best Western and Other Poems Western and Other Poems, the latter of which received the 2008 Gerald Cable Book Award.

One of Gudas’ main concerns in describing an image in writing is accuracy.

“I think accuracy helps make language as vital as possible,” Gudas said. “For instance, colors. You can say gray, but if you are trying to say what shade it really is, it bleeds off in all sorts of neat directions. When I am trying to describe accurately, something that is interesting as a piece of language will emerge.”

For his doctoral dissertation, Gudas is working on a book about the life and poetry of Eleanor Ross Taylor, a Southern poet who was recently awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2010.

As we were sitting in Kerckhoff Coffeehouse, Gudas said that this was the sort of place he often wrote about, a semi-public space where people are not interacting with one another, such as waiting rooms, elevators and office buildings. He said he was interested in the isolation of each student as they gaze into their screens or become absorbed by technology.

“It’s almost like they have a precious object and they are touching it, gazing into it, petting it. I would probably write about it because you can be in a group of people and no one is interacting. This is just more pronounced in a college campus. It’s kind of an atomized world.” Gudas said.

The UCLA students’ distracted college life might serve the use of a little poetry, and Gudas’ curiosity and insight into the public mundane draws out the pleasure in what can often be overlooked.