Lauren Camp : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

I came to poetry in part through years of music-mixing for my local public radio station. My ears had become highly attuned to sounds and the way they organized, and then to the segues I chose to make as I shifted from one song or genre to the next. All those years in the lap of jazz, with its improvisations and eccentric angles, as well as its melodies, crossovers and minor chords. All that aural attention slid right into me and came out on the page. It taught me to wriggle through a poem, creating different “listens” for the reader. 

Lauren Camp : part four

How does a poem begin?

It begins because I need to hold something dear or turn over something troubling. It begins with an image, an opening, a dislocation of knowledge. With motion through landscape as much as because my emotional landscape needs to do some unfurling or shifting.  It doesn’t begin until and unless I come crashing into one of these. I don’t write at a set time of day or even every day. I’m not interested in simply filling a blank page. I want what T.S. Eliot wrote, “the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” I don’t write to begin. I write to continue. I know this will be a journey because I want the poem to be sensuous even if I am writing about what is not easy or what is, by nature, messy, miserable, or uncontrolled. Every poem is a challenge and every challenge could be a poem. I love that—the sanctuary of such possibility. The uncertainty is a fine motivator.

Lauren Camp : part three

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

A poem is an intimacy, a new form of touch, the body of language made fresh and surprising.  Without straight reason, it offers either new vision or comforting familiarity. Because it enlarges beyond a single and exact reading, it pushes the reader to devote time and spirit to hear its perspective and voices. Poems move into every knot or emptiness, exist against complacency. I am perfectly happy when a poem gets to be exuberant in its tragedy, when it mends my heart with its word play and turns. I love that one isolated poem can be a whole world, that it can undo someone—to joy or to sadness. Is there anything better than that?

Lauren Camp : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

I came to poetry from outside the genre, knowing (truly) nothing about it. I wrote into the walls of my heart, into the noise I was holding. I wrote to pause with how I feel, and to describe and maybe let it go. My early poems were narrative. Now that poetry is less new to me, but no less magical, I strive for that and the integration of greater details, musicality, questions and confusion. My goal is to chase outer attention, risk, losses, our place in the ecosphere. I need to be in it, shattered by it, even. 

Lauren Camp : part one

Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press, 2020), which Publishers Weekly calls a “stirring, original collection.” Her writing has appeared in Ecotone, Poem-a-Day, Witness, Poet Lore, and other journals. Honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com

Photo credit: Bob Godwin

What are you working on?

I have been musing over and documenting elements of my father’s last four years with Alzheimer’s Disease. Writing poems, rather than a full narrative, means I can focus anywhere I want: an edge, a worry, a pleasing connection. Within the same time frame, I’ve also been writing poems inspired by the quiet, spacious canvases of artist Agnes Martin. I began this latter project shortly after the 2016 election results. I didn’t have a particular determination with the work, just an interior need for ease. I’ve been happy to be in the sandbox with these two projects for a good while.