DOYLESTOWN — Between sips of peach-flavored iced tea at a local eatery, Luray Gross pondered the power of poetry.
The image itself was poetic.
"You walk very lightly through the world when that is your baggage. Words don't weigh anything, yet in other ways they have great weight," she said.
Gross, 53, started writing poems in grade school, stringing together words in simple rhyming verses. She has since written two chapbooks and currently holds the honor of Bucks County poet laureate.
More than 120 people entered the poetry competition last fall, said Robert Bense, director of the poet-laureate program and literature professor at Bucks County Community College.
"Her poetry has a limpid clarity to it," Bense said. ". . . It is crystal clear and warm simultaneously. Something not found in all poetry."
Gross described her poetry as precise and generally impersonal, bringing in fictional elements, surreal elements, or elements of other people's lives.
When writing, she said, she struggles to "say something I didn't know I wanted to say."
"In poetry," she added, "you're discovering your message."
Gross helps students express their thoughts as a poet-in-residence for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She conducts four- and five-day workshops for students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
"Through the arts, students can take the initiative," she said. "There's not a right answer, not a wrong way. There's a lot of space to make discoveries."
Gross added that children, surrounded by sounds and overwhelmed by after-school commitments, needed time to sit and "experience a wandering of spirit and mind."
A Central Bucks High School graduate, Gross was born and raised in Plumstead Township and returned there in 1992. In the interim, she went to college, served as a VISTA volunteer in New York, taught at North Penn High School in Lansdale, moved to New Jersey, and was an adjunct teacher at Trenton State College (now the College of New Jersey).
She holds a bachelor's degree in English from Gettysburg College and a master's degree in English from Trenton State.
In 1991, she earned a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Three years ago, she won the Robert Fraser open poetry competition, sponsored by BCCC.
