Lynne Jensen Lampe : part one

Lynne Jensen Lampe’s debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022) concerns mother-daughter relationships, mental illness, and antisemitism. Her poems appear in many journals, including THRUSH, Figure 1, and Yemassee. A finalist for the 2020 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize and Best of the Net nominee, she lives with her husband and two dogs in mid-Missouri, where she edits academic research. Visit her at https://lynnejensenlampe.com; on Twitter @LJensenLampe; or IG @lynnejensenlampe. 

How do you know when a poem is finished?

It depends on the poem. In general, a poem is done when I read it aloud and feel the energy in my voice stay strong until the last word. Sometimes I can feel that in my body, other times I need to listen to a recording. Conversely, I know a poem needs work when I hear or sense a vocal weakness, a softness that doesn’t derive from the content. Places I stumble over words. The revision and just sitting with the poem can take months. A few times, though, I needed to write a quick draft in time for my critique group, think I have nothing like an actual poem, and they tell me to send it out. Or I submit a poem over and over, all of a sudden decide to change the last word, and the next journal accepts it.

Jamie Evan Kitts : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Luke Hathaway’s The Affirmations, John Elizabeth Stintzi’s Junebat, Di Brandt’s The Sweetest Dance on Earth, Sue Sinclair’s Almost Beauty, Jordan Trethewey and Marcel Herms’s Unexpected Mergers, Amber McMillan’s This is a Stickup, Daniel Scott Tysdal’s The End is in the Middle, Alyda Faber’s Poisonous If Eaten Raw, Robert Colman’s Democratically Applied Machine, Katie Fewster-Yan’s Surrender & Resistance, Triny Finlay’s Myself, a Paperclip, Maleea Acker’s Hesitating Once to Feel Glory, David Huebert’s Humanimus, and Harry Thurston and Thaddeus Holownia’s Icarus, Falling of Birds.

Lee Ann Roripaugh : part five

How does a poem begin?

For me, a poem tends to begin in one of three ways: (1) An image. Something I see or encounter, or from my memories, that I find arresting, or compelling. Something that isn’t literally shiny (especially since the image doesn’t have to be visual although, for me, it oftentimes is), but feels “shiny” inside my brain and continues to linger or shimmer or hold space within my mind until it becomes a kind of a question to which a poem might respond, but not necessarily answer. (2) A line, or a snippet of a line. Something that has a sense of music or propulsion, and is also language that I don’t really quite understand. Once again, this creates a question to which a poem might respond, but not necessarily answer. (3) A strange and compelling fact, usually scientific, frequently zoological, that brings me delight. From one of these starting points, I look for patterns, or connections, and I usually start to collect other images, pieces of language, or sometimes additional facts—oftentimes the more disparate on the surface the better—and I start to clink them together and see if I can make them sing.

Jamie Evan Kitts : part four

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Language is plain enough for hate but not complicated enough for love. I feel like a poem’s steady accumulation of images in context grants that complication the focus. Poetry doesn’t have to be an answer, but it can be where we understand a problem together through reading. For me that problem is how to say “I love you” with every true reason we have.

Lee Ann Roripaugh : part four

Why is poetry important? 

I think that poetry is perhaps one of the most anti-capitalist of the art forms in that a poem is rarely generated for large sums of capital and poems rarely function as traditional commodities. And yet the circulation and exchange of poems/poetry continues, which to me affirms the necessity and value not only just of poetry per se, but of systems or currencies that exist outside of, or aren’t centered in, capital: language, incantation, song, breath, experiment, narrative or anti-narrative, image, line, communion, compassion, inspiration, creative play. I believe that poetry circles around a shared sense of ineffabilities, things felt or understood but unsayable and unsaid, that pulls us into a space of meaning, or meaning making, that reminds us not only of our ephemerality but also allows us to transcend the state of being mere meatsacks in the service of capital.

Jamie Evan Kitts : part three

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I work closely with a group called the Egg Poets Society. We started workshopping each other’s poems during a COVID lockdown period in early 2022 with the aim of getting our work in publication-ready quality. We’ve been slowly accumulating new members, all folks we’ve made connections with during our degrees and careers. These are all people I can rely on to give honest and helpful feedback, but also glowing support. We’re all just so stoked about what we’re making, and every new publication is a big win. Pieces I’ve workshopped with this group have ended up in The Malahat Review, Augur Magazine, and the League of Canadian Poets’ Poetry Pause, and currently our group chat is called “Taco Poets Society” because they wanted to support me as I wait for word on what I’ve submitted to Taco Bell Quarterly.

Lee Ann Roripaugh : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I feel like poetry is perhaps the most fluid of forms, the one most capable of shapeshifting, of transformation, and by extension I think that poems are also the form that is most capable of being aesthetically, emotionally, psychologically, culturally transformative. I think that any site of flux has the potentially to be a liminal space—a space of mystery, dismantling, and transgression. And so I think that poems frequently serve as small sites of mystery, dismantling, and transgression. Along similar lines, poetry tends to be the form in which language can function most explicitly as art, in which the aesthetic properties of language can be deliberately highlighted or deliberately played down, and in which the materiality of language is most often revealed, and as such the idea of language as transparent, or as communicative tool, or as a site of political or systemic neutrality is challenged. But I also think that poetry asks of the reader/audience to participate as an intellectual, artistic, emotional and psychological collaborator, and so the relationship between poet and reader/audience is never passive, or one-dimensional, and so powerful and unique relationships can be created between the poet, the poem, and the reader/audience.