Poets among us: The Poetry of Ordinary Moments

Suzanne Cleary

By LEISHA DOUGLAS 

Suzanne Cleary says, “I wasn’t a kid who kept journals or thought about being a writer. Senior year of high school, I just happened to take a class called ‘Poetry Workshop’ because it fit into my schedule. We read contemporary poems, and I discovered poets who used language that was kind of like my language and wrote about subjects drawn from ordinary life.” She adds, “Poetry suddenly seemed to be about living in a state of wakefulness, and that appealed to me. It still does.” 

Throughout her college years at Oneonta State, while majoring in history and anthropology, she maintained her passion for poetry by repeatedly enrolling in a poetry workshop, and reading. Her goal had been to immediately get a job in the museum field, but her teacher, the poet Donald Petersen, recommended that she apply to Washington University’s inaugural MFA program. He said that MFA work would be a valuable experience, and that she could work in museums afterward. And both turned out to be true.

After years as a museum professional, most notably working for the New York State Historic Preservation Office at Philipse Manor Hall, Cleary received a fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts. This enabled her to leave her job and begin teaching English as an adjunct professor at State University of New York, Rockland Community College. She earned a promotion to full professor, with a Ph.D. in literature and criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Suzanne continues to mine ordinary moments for poetic treasure. As she says, “When I begin a poem, I’m not shooting for anything grand. I’m shooting for being alive in the moment and inviting the reader along.” 

Over the course of five full-length and award-winning books, she has mastered the narrative form of poetry — poetry that tells a story. 

She frequently mixes humor and pathos, as in her 2025 collection, “The Odds,” which won the 2024 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award. Some of the poem titles in this book are amusing, for example, “Again, I Hear Myself Lecturing My Students On a Subject About Which I Know Very Little” or “Marilyn Monroe’s Body-Double Speaks to Marilyn’s Fans.” 

We laughed together over her portrayal of a bulldog in her poem, “Who Among Us,” which begins: 

What the bulldog lacks in grace

It makes up for with lack of grace

thick-set, low-slung, little pig feet shuffling

through wet leaves beside the river.

Suzanne teaches as core faculty in the MFA program at Converse University, SC., and frequently teaches elsewhere at poetry festivals and literary centers. She encourages her students to write about what most interests them, and to approach the poem with a spirit of discovery. “You can’t remain too much in control; the poem probably knows more than you do, so you need to trust it,” she advises. She recommends welcoming into the poem a wide range of experiences and emotions.

The first stanzas of her poem, “The Music,” exemplify her approach.

You’ve got to face the music, Sweetie, my father would say

this refrain from my childhood chiming surer than Sunday’s         church bells

than the neighbor’s pug barking at every car

He’d say it, and then say nothing else, as if he trusted

that I already understood this, my first metaphor. He knew

that time would soon teach me the music

of the broken arm, the weak eye, the eyepatch

the music of swimming lessons in the cold lake

my teeth chattering as dark fish pin-wheeled against my legs.

For more information, visit suzanneclearypoet.com. 

Leisha Douglas served as poet advisor to the Katonah Poetry Series for 23 years. Her stories and poems have been published in many literary journals.