Lauren Camp is the author of two books of poems, The Dailiness (Edwin E. Smith, 2013), selected by World Literature Today for an “Editor’s Pick,” and This Business of Wisdom (West End Press, 2010). Her poems have been published in numerous journals, including Brilliant Corners, Beloit Poetry Journal, Linebreak and Feminist Studies. She is a radio producer and host on Santa Fe Public Radio, and also an acclaimed visual artist. You can visit her website here. ---------
Lauren Camp interview, with Julie Brooks Barbour
I love your use of alliteration, slant rhyme, and assonance in these poems. Could you talk about the construction of your poems as you develop them? How do you arrive at this musical structure?
I often dip into dark topics in my writing. This is somewhat at odds with my optimistic nature, so perhaps the musicality is my way to bring balance. Alliteration, slant rhyme, and assonance (all of which generally happen subconsciously) offer me the chance to play.
I love how words in different contexts can sound heavy and hard, or joyful and teasing. As a long-time radio host, I’m used to blending musical genres into what feels, to my ear, like the perfect beats and segues. I am particularly drawn to jazz and its thirst for improvisation, and am sure, or at least hope, that the aural qualities of my poems have been dramatically influenced by what I choose to listen to.
But, to answer your question directly, as I work and revise, I read my poems out loud. Repeatedly. And when I think the poem is done, I make someone else read it to me, so I can hear what other readers see on the page, hear where the rhythm breaks, where the poem falls flat. I’m not musically trained, and I don’t know how to phrase what I’m after in musical terminology, but I have to like what I hear.
I'd love to hear more about your work as a radio host and which musical genres, including jazz, you are most drawn to. What are some of the ways in which this has influenced your poetry?
Jazz grounds each episode of my radio show, “Audio Saucepan,” but the music selections reach out to the edges of all continents — didgeridoo, jaw harp, throat singing, oud and sitar, congas, other sounds. Attuning my ear to music so thoroughly has certainly influenced my writing rhythms. The improvisation inherent in jazz has taught me to know what I want to say and then tilt my perspective toward an unexpected way to say it.
Also, reading other people’s poems (three for each show) has been quite a lesson. Every Sunday evening, there I am, sitting in a small overheated room, trying to do justice to the author’s words, to bring his or her poem to life, and also practicing performance skills and vocal variety. I figure I have voiced at least 700 poems over the airwaves. This means that every week I’m actively perusing a lot of books to cull my selections. I’m lucky to be exposed to a good deal of the new poetry that’s being published.
I’ve been a volunteer with Santa Fe Public Radio for more than 10 years. It’s been a rich time, offering me at least as much as I try to give out to listeners. (By the way, you can listen live at ksfr.org on Sundays at 6PM MST.)
Your poem "Dot Etiquette" is lyrically as well as imagistically pleasing. It builds as it develops, layering dot upon dot, each type charged and changed with its own meaning. I learned from your website that you are not only a radio host, but a visual artist as well, and that your artwork is composed of layered, dyed, and painted fabrics, which reminds me of the ways in which poetry can be layered in sound, imagery, and meaning. This poem seems, to me, to merge your visual and poetic eyes. In what ways do you notice that your visual artistic skills enter your writing? Is there a connection, for you, between the ways in which you layer and color in both mediums of expression?
“Dot Etiquette” started from a class assignment where I asked my students to select a photo from a stack I put in front of them, jumping off from one small detail in the image and developing a story. I wanted to make sure the prompt had substance, so I did the exercise, too. I wrote from a glorious image I found in The New Yorker of two people prepping for Yayoi Kusama’s giant pumpkin installation in New York City a few years ago.
Most of my artwork deals with depth — either in the content of narrative pieces, the illusion of dimensionality, or (in 3-D sculptural works) the actual progression away from the wall. My poems, in the same way, strive for depth of meaning. I’m interested in what is revealed and how, or what stays hidden. I am fascinated by how poems look on the page, how they fill the page or find white space. I can’t help but color my words, move them around, crop them, rearrange. Add this to the musical angle I’m simultaneously assessing, and the poem becomes quite a layering of effects and efforts.
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Dot Etiquette
Those diesel dots
and coffee dots. Opportune dots
and criminal dots
out at the long time of day.
Tight dots, loose dots, an urban population
of squatting dots. Drunk dots,
delinquent dots disbursed in musty corners.
Those dots on our architecture,
dots on our money, a tremor of circles, a mouth
leading nowhere. Dots winnowed
from space. The warm room is speckled
in hallways of yellow. I whisk in and out,
painting black ruptures
in a government building, painting a bank
filled with dots, an endowment
of dots. I am coated in paint, in the dark
of myself, in the freckled
uncertainty. I paint over the windows,
the black in my ears.
The dots keep falling forward, empty
of thought, so I paint up
the hole, inhaling the dots, the delusion
of dots, the bare space around them. Small dots
climb the walls — a vista
of stubborn black dots, a steep slope
of dots, each perfect, each round
with aggressive exuberance.
I’ll paint more light. No fuzz
at the edges. I’ll paint the sinews
of night on the hollering wall,
color the niche of control. My insides
are glowing, no points and no future.
Holding on to the frame,
I spin in the room
of vagabond dots, drinking the gloss. High
on a rooftop. Drinking the viewpoint,
dotting the dark, outlining the edge
and the statement of nothing,
the circle, its middle
plastered flat to the walls.
Down Below, Empty
A black car drove to a field of abandoned bodies. She watched herself sob at the frequency of words about the confected craving of missing. Wind integrated the plain. Men prayed in a wide spread: all language and choke, all prompts and angst. She counted aisles of eyes. Each solemn slap of stark dirt boxed in her grandfather’s grave, drawing a door over death. Surprised that the oblong shape of fate was only one color, after a while, she picked the taut lock of sense to sit within the closed lid, knocking her head against sun-toughened sky as ground stacked heavy, swallowing over her.
Answers to Why
As we idled the car, a multiplied moon slipped from the envelope of sky. I looked through coils of juniper. Choosing. I couldn’t say no—no wasn’t an option he offered. Already almost unhallowed, my voice was low, folded. I swallowed, overshadowed by the thrashing in this body, the pearl and sequence of each sentence. Later, when he ordered a long line of wines, sweet with murmur and grasping, I tried to remain neutral with irrefutable shrugs, but it was futile: the ongoing volatility stitched to the insides of my thighs. I didn’t know to limit the damage, damn the slippage. I sipped again. Against this, the sun covered itself. The table wished to be between us. We held it, instead of grieving. Plenty of gazes had grazed my body before. To myself, I kept only the most precious trembling.