Five minutes. One word. One chance. This is the challenge Adam Grabowski often poses to himself writing on a typewriter.
You may have seen the Holyoke resident at Cultural Chaos in Easthampton, a poetry reading in the Valley, or simply around the writing community. Though when set up with his typewriter, Grabowski invites people to pitch him one word to create a poem. With that one word, he attempts to finish it in roughly five minutes, returning the poem made to the passerby. However, he draws on inspiration far beyond the chosen word.
“It is connected with people. A lot of it is persona based. I think there’s only one poem that really is directly related to my life,” Grabowski said. “A lot of it draws on things that happen to me but when I’m doing a typewriter poem with somebody, it’s like a judgment call of where they are when I see in them, what spark I feel and I just write.”
Grabowski’s typewriter poetry walks the line between being trapped in language and breaking free from its clutches. Though the poetry is able to escape with the connection and presence of a stranger, and that’s Grabowski’s favorite part.
“I rarely do write it in my own voice with this stuff, but that’s kind of what makes it fun,” Grabowski said. “It makes it liberating … It’s more from the heart in a lot of ways.”
While he was working a wedding this October, a line began to form where Grabowski sat. As excited as he was, there was one problem — his typewriter was not working. The list of names and words kept growing. And Grabowski needed people to stay, having to see who they are to write. Fortunately, someone retrieved Grabowski’s backup typewriter.
“People love them. I love to do them. I love the pressure behind it. It’s just fun,” Grabowski said.
The five minutes typically generate a poem similar in length to an Emily Dickinson poem, though they vary, using different numbers of stanzas and different forms and structures.
Reactions from the recipients of the poems are often validating, Grabowski said.
“People cry. People actually cry. Somebody gave me $100 for a poem,” he said.
While Grabowski has a deep appreciation for typewriter poetry now, the idea was originally pitched to him from a friend.
“I never expected to do this,” he said. “This is a gift that Alex Woolner and Jason Montgomery gave me.”
Grabowski originally began writing poems in 2018 on a borrowed typewriter from Woolner, who is the cofounder of Attack Bear Press in Easthampton along with Montgomery. Woolner pitched the series, calling it, “Poetry on Demand.” While he’d share the poems with the recipients, he’d also keep a copy for himself.
Over time, Grabowski accumulated dozens of poems. That process, however, was briefly put on hold when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“It didn’t hit me nearly as hard as some of my other colleagues and people who I admire,” he said of the pandemic. “But everything poets do for money, whether it’s workshops, performances, readings, you’re in front of people. And all of a sudden, all that’s gone. So any workshops I had lined up to do anything features just gone. I had a lot of time on my hands.”
With that time, Grabowski got to work putting together the chapbook that was published in 2020, “Go on Bewilderment,” consisting of 16 typewriter poems from Grabowski.
Locked inside in the first months of the pandemic, Grabowski laid out the dozens of typewriter poems on the floor, that he wrote from the “Poetry on Demand” series.
In “Go on Bewilderment,” the poems are not changed from the original, besides spelling corrections, inspired from words, such as, “gently, celestial and ramen.” Grabowski often tries to include the word pitched to him in the poem, take for example, the beginning of the 13-line poem using the word “gently.”
"Stand there gently
watch me gently
there is no hard stare back
into this conversation," Grabowski wrote.
Choosing the poems for the chapbook was always a matter of quality for Grabowski. He did not pick favorites, rather the ones he felt were the best.
“I picked the best ones … The ones that connected with me aren’t the same as like the ones I think are good,” he said. “I had to look at them as objectively as possible. I looked at if they if I found them moving, if they moved me, if they weren’t too repetitious. I was interested in what happened in relation to the word.”
With a Master’s of Fine Arts from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, graduating in 2020, Grabowski is currently sending out a poetry manuscript to publishers. He is an associate editor for the The Maine Review and his poems have been featured in publications such as New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, Blackbird and more.
The manuscript currently titled, “Life Model,” is a reflection of his work in graduate school, compiling years of dedication his poetic craft, he said.
“It comes from just a lot of patience and a lot of work over the years with a poem. Poems take, I’ll work on it for two or three years at times, these are short poems,” he said. “I just worked really hard to get exactly the kind of music I’m looking for. And since it’s very much rooted in my life, all those poems, the center of it’s a divorce, at the center of it’s interpersonal drama and fatherhood and being in the second act of one’s life.”
Grabowski said “Life Model” seeks to find the beauty in that second act. After a writing spree in 2022, Grabowski saw a lot of poems coming together and a major step for the manuscript was taken in August 2022 when he went on a postgraduate writer’s conference.
“I realized I kind of had something, so I threw it together,” he said. “With the manuscript … I’ve tried really hard to not let myself be the hero of it or at least the clean hero.”
He explained when reading poetry, you cannot assume the speaker is always the poet or the same person. His manuscript builds on numerous voices at different times.
“The assumption is never that the poem is the person,” he said. “My speakers are in various places in their life. Sometimes they’re a bit more of an exaggerated version of me … Sometimes there’s a few things where I’m just really making fun of myself, calling myself out.”
Grabowski said that as a straight, white man, there are a lot of poets that cover similar topics. Trying to find a new angle and staying true to who he is is crucial, something he tried to harness for “Life Model.”
“There’s a lot of poets like me, so I just try to write whatever my particular truth is and I kind of hold it up against what’s already been said, what’s already been shown,” he said. “If there’s a way I could find a new angle, for me, that meant writing towards the vulnerability of it, writing towards the less than graceful, towards the brutality at times, to not pull any punches on myself.”
He said a theme of the manuscript centers on “being grounded in the body,” at times exploring the metaphor of the difference between being naked and nude, a reflection on being who you are.
While Grabowski’s poetic career began long before he purchased his first typewriter, typewriting has transformed his work. Connection to self and others is a theme in his work.
Just as the typewriter poems create human connection, the typewriter makes Grabowski feel more connected to the writing.
He referenced the poet James Galvin, who said that when you write using a typewriter, you can feel the connection. You can see and hear a letter being imprinted on the page, as opposed to a computer where you press a key and a letter just appears.
“You can actually hear it. The kineticism of it is incredible. I love it. I can’t get enough of it,” Grabowski said. “It’s changed the way I write. Not what I write about or like my style about my writing, but in terms of drafting, I try to draft as much as I can on the typewriter.”
Grabowski and his typewriter will be at the Northampton Antiquarian Book, Ephemera and Book Arts Fair at Northampton Center for the Arts on Friday, Nov. 21 and Saturday, Nov. 22, and welcomes all to visit with any word on their mind.
