EC0601-From Goatheads to Grand Canyons: A Love Letter to the Landscape with New Mexico State Poet Laureate, Lauren Camp
[Opening strum of Spanish guitar music]
[00:00:00] Lauren Camp: Well, I actually think that a poem that is completely cerebral would do better with some sensory stuff to ground it before it goes off into the heady space. Right?
Emily Withnall: Yeah.
[00:00:11] Lauren: And kids are wonderful at that. You know, if you just sort of tickle them a little into doing it, they’re like, jumping beans, like they can’t get enough. They’re like pop rocks, right?
Emily: (laughs) Yeah.
Lauren: (laughs) They can’t get enough chance to like say, I have something. I have something.
Emily: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:00:28] Lauren: I mean, it’s just permission. I’m not going out there telling people how to write a poem ’cause I don’t believe there’s a way. I’m going out there saying, you get to do it.
[Lively Spanish guitar music]
[00:00:37] Emily: ¡Bienvenidos! This is Encounter Culture from the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.
I’m your host, and editor of El Palacio Magazine, Emily Withnall.
[Spanish music fades]
[00:00:53] Poetry is what got me through the Hermit’s Peak and Calf Canyon fires two years ago.
[Piano music rises and plays in background]
[00:01:00] I was working at New Mexico Highlands University at the time, putting out daily communications about the fire, evacuations, and resources. In the midst of that, the president at Highlands, who also loves poetry, asked me to send out a daily poem to the campus community.
[00:01:18] Selecting poems for people to read as they faced evacuations, the loss of homes, or animals, or beloved trees, became a kind of balm for me. I didn’t want to select anything that ignored the suffering, but I didn’t want to dwell in it, either.
[00:01:34] I needed to strike the right balance between grief and hope. Fortunately, the world is filled with poetry and I had a rich array to choose from.
[00:01:46] Poems like “An Old Story” by Tracy K. Smith and “The Creation Story” by Joy Harjo, and “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limón.
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[00:01:57] Poems that acknowledge the intertwining of pain and beauty.
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[00:02:04] Poetry is, for me, a way to slow down.
[00:02:10] It’s a way to see differently or to find the truth in an insight or feeling that had previously felt inexpressible.
[00:02:18] In many ways, poetry feels like not only the balm in the middle of a crisis like the fires, but a balm for our lives in general, as we face the onslaught of social media and news.
[00:02:31] Poetry offers space—a pause, or welcoming. But of course, I know not everyone feels this way.
[Piano music fades]
[Sounds of voices in a school hallway + subtle expansive electronic music]
[00:02:43] Emily: I used to teach poetry in the schools, and I often faced the students who seemed particularly uninterested in poetry.
[00:02:51] Many students came to poetry with apprehension and a belief in their inability to understand poetry.
[Gentle piano music rises]
[00:02:59] This anxiety was fueled by the idea that poems were obscure and filled with symbols that could only be unlocked by a certain kind of intellectual. And so, I would stand before the students and recite Marianne Moore’s poem titled “Poetry.”
[00:03:15] It reads…
[Poetry formatting has been modified for transcription purposes ]
I too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.
[00:03:32] The poem often created an opening for discovery and expression. It was delightful to witness. Although I no longer teach poetry, I am thrilled that there are still poets and teachers who are bringing poetry to the people who have, perhaps, not yet discovered its magic.
[00:03:54] One of these people is New Mexico Poet Laureate Lauren Camp. As the state’s poet laureate, and as a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, Lauren has been traveling across New Mexico to bring poetry to everyone who does not yet know they need it.
[00:04:13] Lauren’s eighth poetry collection, In Old Sky [Poems Inspired by the Grand Canyon], written about her time as Astronomer in Residence at the Grand Canyon, was just published and features the kind of collective community poems that she is engaged with writing around New Mexico. It would take me the entire episode to read through Lauren’s publications and accolades. So, I’ll leave it there.
[00:04:39] And if you like what you hear in this episode, I encourage you to read more of her beautiful work. We’ll provide links in the show notes for this episode and on the website at podcast.nmculture.org.
[00:04:54] Please join us for a rich, delightful conversation as Lauren shares her perspective on engaging community through epic poem writing, composing odes to the things that cause us pain, and using words to capture meaning and feeling.
[00:05:13] Whether you love poetry, dislike it, or have no opinion at all. This episode is for you. Welcome.
[Music fades]
[00:05:27] Emily: Welcome to Encounter Culture, Lauren, I’m so excited to have you here.
[00:05:31] Lauren: It’s wonderful to be here.
[00:05:33] Emily: (laughs) So, what does it mean to be a state poet laureate? What do you do?
[00:05:39] Lauren: In New Mexico,
Emily: Yeah.
Lauren: It means something different probably than it means in other states. Basically, what it means to be a poet laureate of a state or a city or a county or municipality or whatever, is to somehow represent the genre and bring it to the people, and poets laureate do it differently wherever they are.
[00:06:00] My goal in this role has been to actually go out and meet with as many people as I can. Bring poetry to them and bring them to poetry. And part of that has to do with the fact that I like being in person with other people. And also, that we’ve just come out of a pandemic. And, it felt important to me to be on the ground in whatever ground and whatever location everybody is in.
[00:06:27] And, you know, New Mexico is large geographically and mostly rural state, and my goal has been to get to the rural and underserved communities especially.
[00:06:37] Emily: So, where have you been? What are some of the places that you’ve been in? What are you doing in these communities?
[00:06:43] Lauren: I’ve been to Gallup and Farmington, Bayard, Fort Sumner, Artesia, um, I mean, I can go on and on and on. (Emily laughing in background)
[00:06:52] I’ve been a lot of places, some places I’d never before been. My way of thinking about places is to look at a county map. When I agreed to the role, I understood that I was in some way to try to reach all the counties of New Mexico—thirty-three of them. So, I’m looking at county maps and saying, haven’t been to this part of the state. I haven’t been to this county. So, I think I’ve probably been to twelve or fourteen of them now, at least.
[00:07:21] Emily: Okay. Okay. Okay.
[00:07:23] Lauren: But also, as I go to these counties and go to one particular place in each county, I think, I wanna do more. I wanna go to as many places as I can because the response has been, just so incredible where people are saying either they’ve never known what a poem is, they’ve never met a poet, they’ve never written a poem or a line of poetry, and so it makes me wanna just keep going out there and introducing people to poetry.
[00:07:51] Emily: Yeah. So how are you doing that?
[00:07:52] Lauren: The events that I’m holding are in conjunction with New Mexico Arts. And I’m usually reading a couple of poems, having a bit of a conversation around poetry, answering any questions anyone has. And then sometimes doing an open mic for communities that have never done that before, and ultimately ending with a community epic poem workshop, which sounds more epic and large in time than it has to be, but it’s just a chance for the community to come together through some guidance and begin to write about their particular place.
[00:08:32] My choice in what I was going to do, ’cause I had a lot of say in what I wanted to do in shaping the role was to especially reach the people who maybe didn’t know what a poem was or that a poem could be for them, or that they could even maybe write something. So, that’s my primary audience. Those are the people I’m trying to reach.
[00:08:55] Emily: Yeah.
[00:08:56] Lauren: And it has not been hard.
[00:08:58] Emily: Well, I’m very excited about what you’re doing in these communities. My first love is poetry. I started writing poetry as a very young child, and I taught in schools in Montana when I lived there for eight years. You know, I feel like sometimes when I mention that I read poetry or that I like poetry, sometimes people say, oh, I don’t like that.
[00:09:18] Why does poetry feel inaccessible to some people?
[00:09:22] Lauren: I think, for some people poetry is inaccessible from some early on, educational trauma. (Emily chuckles) I mean, how else do you say it? I mean, I have students who are in their eighties and nineties who come to me and say, I don’t like poetry. I am not good at it. I don’t understand it.
[00:09:44] And I think that goes all the way back to a teacher in elementary school who said, what does this poem mean, class? And the very enthusiastic students said, “I know, I know.” And the teacher said, “Nope, that’s not right.” And so, part of what I’m doing is going around and saying, this poem can mean what it means to you. And that can be different from what it means to the person sitting next to you or the person across the room.
[Light instrumental background music begins]
[00:10:11] It can not even mean something. It can feel like something as opposed to I know exactly what this story is. I mean, maybe the poem has mystery in it. Maybe it has an emotion you resonate with. Maybe it has an emotion or an experience that you’ve never known, and you needed a way in to better allow for that perspective. So, I think if I can get people to the table or to the room, then it’s wide open because I firmly believe there’s space in poetry for everybody.
[Inquisitive music with piano & strings]
[00:10:58] Emily: When you get the people into the room, are there different strategies you have for different ages or different personalities? What types of poems you choose or what does that look like?
[00:11:08] Lauren: There are different strategies. I mean, if I’m in a room with people who are already somewhat familiar, they are usually very happy to read their own work. They’re very happy to be in a Q&A sort of situation with good, literary questions maybe.
[00:11:24] And then there are other people who have no idea what to ask other than “What do you do in this role?” Or, you know, “Does a poem have to rhyme?” Then I can begin to dismantle those strict rules and say, you know, it could be this. It could be that. It could be long, it could be short, it could be any number of things, and my goal is always just to move people a little bit in their knowledge and in their familiarity and their comfort.
[00:11:52] Emily: Do you have any go-to poems or poets that you like to introduce reluctant poetry people to?
[00:12:00] Lauren: I have a lot.
[00:12:01] Emily: Okay. (Laughs)
[00:12:03] Lauren: Yeah. I have a, I have a, like a big arsenal
[00:12:06] Emily: Okay.
[00:12:07] Lauren: of possible poems that I can bring to people. But I find that in these conversations around the state, I’m not often doing that.
Emily: Okay.
[00:12:16] Lauren: I’m not even bringing them other work. Very often I read one or maybe two poems of my own. And then we’re kind of off and running.
Emily: Nice.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: So, you just get them to dive in without any… (chuckling)
Lauren: I guess.
Emily: Yeah. (chuckling)
[00:12:29] Lauren: I mean, I think for some people it’s like little baby steps toward the water.
[00:12:33] Emily: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. I like that. Would you be willing to read one of your own poems?
[00:12:39] Lauren: Sure.
[00:12:43] Lauren: I think I’ll read you a poem from my most recent book, which is called, “Worn Smooth between Devourings,” and the whole book is very much a sort of love letter to New Mexico. There’s a poem in it about a weed, that I hate. And maybe you’ll know this, you’ve lived here a while, right?
Emily: I’m from New Mexico.
Lauren: Yeah, I know you are, but I know you went away.
[00:13:07] Um, I think you’ll know what this is about. The poem is called “Property.”
[Poetry formatting has been modified for transcription purposes. Read the poem in its original format here. ]
After each lyric drop of rain falls, bodiless, shuddering[Text Wrapping Break]and rippling to the shoulder of this parched Earth.
After this,
the deep-throated sage, artemisia and juniper slowly lift,
arranging their scent.
A desert takes what staggers to it.
The storm landed in unplanted pathways the spiritless
withered places, transfixed nearly
to stone, and now the ground
is socked in a blanket of flat-patch goathead.
Winds hiss through, unfinished, to say something we don’t understand. What we’ve planted fails under the branchless sky, and the periphery of the property is wrapped in fast-formed stickers, a crowded geometry:[Text Wrapping Break]precise, spiteful, yellow, without margins.
Each morning we scoop with trowels.
I had never loved a land enough to want to bend[Text Wrapping Break]and whittle out the dangers, to lift them up by centers,
needling the soft pads of my fingers where they gaze upward. Enough
that I would sign my name to each spot I clear[Text Wrapping Break]with a drop of blood.
My bucket fills with five-sided thorns sprawling like stars.
And in the end, nothing left
but the dead-dry ground—
again shredded at the effort of pressing water to it.
[00:15:20] Emily: That was beautiful and genius. (Lauren chuckles) Like I never would’ve thought of writing like an ode to goatheads. (Emily laughs)
[00:15:26] Lauren: It’s, they’re so evil, aren’t they?
[00:15:31] Emily: (laughing) Yes. That’s amazing. Um, yeah. They are the bane of my existence and my poor dog’s existence.
[00:15:40] Lauren: I know, and I’ve read that to people in other states and other places, and they don’t know anything about goatheads, but they have their own horrific weed.
[00:15:50] Emily: Mm-Hmm. There was one line that really grabbed me, or not a line, but a phrase.
“The desert takes what staggers to it.” Oh, so good.
[00:16:01] Lauren: Thank you.
[Bluesy guitar and percussion]
[00:16:16] Emily: So, when you’re writing community poems, what does that look like?
[Bluesy guitar and percussion fades]
[00:16:20] Lauren: So, that comes at the end of a whole, whatever the event is, by then they’re pretty warmed up. They feel safe. I mean, I’m telling you this, this is what I hope for. I maybe believe that they feel pretty safe. The events themselves are very casual, and I learned along the way that that was what people responded to best.
So, I don’t go in with a hardcore, “I’m gonna read for a half an hour and then you’re gonna clap” kind of like, that doesn’t work. That’s not of interest to anybody, especially not me, but also not them. And so, at the very end, there’s just time for like, I’ve just left time for this little, little workshop.
[Subtly curious string and marimba music]
[00:17:04] Lauren: It’s so little that it’s not built as a workshop, it’s just a chance for people to bring their perspective on their community.
And I set it up and I ask for their responses to a few simple questions. And I give them some writing materials, like really, I mean, it’s very not precious, and I tell them as much and they write, and in all the events that I’ve done, people write, everybody writes, it’s been incredibly rewarding to see that.
[Curious string and marimba music increase in energy]
[00:17:43] So, I’m asking them to write about their home in very specific ways, and ultimately, (music fades) I will take responses from each community and build them into a collective poem for that particular community. So, Farmington will have its own community poem, and Fort Sumner its own, and Silver City its own, and that sort of thing.
[00:18:07] Then those poems will be printed with a letterpress printing by the historic Palace Press, and one of those broadsides will be gifted back to their community and one will be kept to travel around the state for a traveling exhibit of all of them.
[00:18:27] Emily: That’s amazing.
Lauren: Yeah. It’s a big project.
[Curious string and marimba music returns]
[00:18:28] Emily: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:18:29] Lauren: and it’s exhilarating to see people’s responses.
[00:18:36] Emily: So, how do you even begin? Where do you begin with collecting all these responses from one community and forming it into a cohesive community poem?
[00:18:48] Lauren: Well, I begin in those workshops.
Emily: Okay.
Lauren: With the people who are there. But then I don’t think that’s really what you’re asking.
Emily: (laughter) No.
[00:18:55] Lauren: And then how I will put it together into the poem is the trick of it. Right? I mean, my voice isn’t in the poems at all. Because I don’t know these communities well enough to know how to describe them. So, I needed everybody who’s willing to be able to teach me more, show me more about their communities. How I will put them together is gonna be the craft of it. And I can’t tell you exactly because it’s gonna be different poem by poem.
[00:19:26] In part because of the information I have, but also because, because I want them to be different. Because I want them to reflect these different communities. ‘Cause I don’t want the poems to all sound the same. And then I could go a little further and say that I did a kind of grand test of this, uh, a couple of summers ago.
[00:19:46] I was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park and one of the projects I did there was an epic poem about the Grand Canyon and the night skies, and I put these boxes for visitor responses in every visitor center and gathered responses from hundreds of people with the goal of building an epic poem.
[00:20:07] And I had no real, specific idea how I was gonna do that. I got hundreds of responses, (light piano music begins) some in languages I couldn’t even understand, and I built a poem that is not as long as you’d expect, but I guess as comprehensive of the responses I got and as poetic as I could make it, that flowed through different bits of people’s answers into someone else’s, in a way that felt larger than any one individual voice.
[Light, inspired piano and strings]
[00:20:43] Emily: Did you by chance bring the Grand Canyon poem? ‘Cause I’d love to hear it.
[00:20:47] Lauren: I did. I’m glad I brought this whole binder because I didn’t think about it. By the way, the Grand Canyon book is called In Old Sky and it’s coming out this spring.
[00:20:56] Emily: Oh, excellent. I look forward to that.
[00:20:58] Lauren: So, I’ll read a bit of this collective poem from the Grand Canyon. It’s in eight parts.
Emily: Okay.
Lauren: And I haven’t read it to anybody. It hasn’t been out there anywhere. The whole poem is called “Look Up, Look Out, Look Infinite.” It’s in eight parts in the phases of the moon. And I’ll read the first two.
[Poetry formatting has been modified for transcription purposes]
Lauren: —Waxing Crescent—
The sun chased away by the wolf pack of night.[Text Wrapping Break]Tonight I am safe in the blurring endless
sky, letting go the burdens of muscle.[Text Wrapping Break]I am going to pause thinking and start feeling.
The light plays tricks—flecks pink-[Text Wrapping Break]orange-lavender. In the ocean of night swim celestial
fishes. Little cricket songs.[Text Wrapping Break]Stars, the past beacons, dream the ground,
wink, beckoning, bring us outside and together.[Text Wrapping Break]Tonight I will listen to the whisperly creek,
the grand scheme, ugly and beautiful at the same time.[Text Wrapping Break]Night is the reality, dark a thick blanket.
We are not alone[Text Wrapping Break]but we are small, the stars numbered one by one, the eyes
of angels, I remember about silence. Tonight[Text Wrapping Break]I will see in the absence of light.
I am the light in the darkness.
Lauren: —First Quarter—
I am holding still my lips.[Text Wrapping Break]Fading of light, fading of thought.[Text Wrapping Break]At night the stars come out; in dark the lights are simply out.[Text Wrapping Break]I sleep whenever I feel tired.[Text Wrapping Break]Sun arises obscured by a cloud.
[00:22:53] Emily: Those are all other people’s words?
Lauren: Yes. (Both laughing) It’s beautiful, isn’t it?
[00:22:58] Emily: Yes, it’s gorgeous. Wow. I can’t wait to read the whole thing. So, what instructions do you leave at the visitor centers for people to be writing these things?
[00:23:08] Lauren: I had a few different things, and I don’t remember all of them. There were two, maybe three or four different sort of statements or beginnings of statements that they were to continue. I know one of them was, what is the difference between dark and night?
[00:23:25] Emily: Okay, interesting. Wow. So, when you were going through all these responses and figuring out how to craft this poem, did that process influence your own poems that came after in any way?
[00:23:42] Lauren: You know, when I was doing it. I had hundreds, as I said, and I just spent like two solid days holed up in my place I was staying at the Grand Canyon, inputting the information from the cards. They were on little cards and trying to figure out how I was gonna begin to put them together. So, I just typed everything in and started moving things around.
[00:24:04] Collage, which is basically what it ended up being—sort of curation and collage—is very familiar to me. It’s kind of how I made visual art when I used to do that. It’s how, in a way, how I make my own poems. You know, sometimes I have more to work with than I did in this case. Like sometimes for my own writing, I have a whole stanza or a whole draft and then I’m pulling something from elsewhere into it. But yeah, I think what this does is introduce a lot of surprise, and I like that so much that I do think that I started doing a lot more of it.
[00:24:44] Emily: Interesting. And now you’re gonna have thirty-three collage poems to write.
[00:24:49] Lauren: At least. Yeah.
[00:24:51] Emily: At least. (laughs) Nice.
[00:24:55] Lauren: Yep. They’re gonna be shorter. They’re not like, this was a big project, this Grand Canyon project, but they’ll be a little shorter. But yeah, they’ll, they’ll all be different. And I’ve been to all those communities, so I have a little sense of them and also a sense of the people I met there who anonymously or semi-anonymously gave their comments.
[00:25:15] So, I think that will also help in how I shape the poems, how I decide, you know, what line starts and how do I go in and out of the poem.
[00:25:25] Emily: So, are there all ages at these events?
[00:25:28] Lauren: Well, we’ve had high school, college, all the way up to elders. When I was in Lovington in December, we had a couple of couples and the gentlemen from those two couples, one of them said he had lived his entire seventy-three years in Lovington, and he was one of the best responders.
Emily: Wow.
Lauren: I mean, he knows that community. How lovely is that?
Emily: Yeah. Yeah. That’s amazing.
[Minimal Americana music with acoustic & slide guitar for New Mexico State Library and CulturePass Information]
[00:25:57] Emily: I’ve often thought of librarians as magicians. Beyond helping you find the book you’re seeking; it seems like they always know just where to look to find the answer to any question. The New Mexico State Library is so much more than a place filled with books—though it is that too. The library’s primary mission is to promote library services and access to information to all citizens of New Mexico.
[00:26:27] And when we say all, that’s a tall order, given the vast reaches of our geography. The state library provides reading materials and research services for the blind and print disabled, for rural community members through books by mail, and our ever-popular book mobiles. They also support librarians across the state with items to add to their enchanted toolkit, from the tribal libraries program to summer reading programs for our youngest patrons.
[00:27:00] And of course, let’s not forget one of my favorite realms of magic, the New Mexico State Library Poetry Center where you can learn about our state’s poet laureate, and discover even more New Mexico poetry.
[00:27:16] Explore the library’s research and digital resources. Get the bookmobile schedule. Or find your local library at nmstatelibrary.org.
[00:27:32] Did you know, the New Mexico CulturePass is now available to purchase online? CulturePass gives you access to each of the fifteen state museums and historic sites we feature on Encounter Culture. Reserve your CulturePass today at nmculture.org/visit/culturepass.
[Promo ends, music fades]
[00:28:04] Emily: So, have you converted some people? Are you hearing from people that they’re writing now?
[00:28:09] Lauren: Yes. I’ve converted a lot of people.
Emily: (laughs) Good.
[00:28:14] Lauren: I met a, I met a wonderful family in Bayard. And the mother, they had a little girl who was maybe five and we were going around giving notebooks out to the kids. We were traveling with the Wonders on Wheels van—the mobile museum van—and doing projects alongside the WoW van.
[00:28:33] So, I was giving out notebooks and especially in Bayard, the families that came, all the adults wanted notebooks. They all wanted to participate. And, I heard from that mother that she was writing. I would hear from her late at night after her kid went to sleep. And yeah, I mean, it’s just permission. I’m not going out there telling people how to write a poem, ’cause I don’t believe there’s a way.
I’m going out there saying, you get to do it. You get to read it. You get to write it if you want.
[00:29:01] Emily: So, when you bring people into poetry for the first time and they’re writing, how do you help them understand what is a poem and if they’ve written something, if it counts as a poem?
[00:29:14] Lauren: I think that the best way to do that is to teach them how to revise, actually, and not how to completely overhaul something, but how to look at maybe one little thing. A lot of my regular students have heard me talk about looking at the adverbs perhaps, and can we pull back on adverb usage and instead use one stronger verb? So, those kinds of little tricks that begin to give someone a way in to know that they can do something to what they’ve drafted.
[00:29:52] Because a lot of times what I’ve seen is that, new writers, or new to poetry, I mean, maybe we’ve all written something. I have lots of students, older adults who’ve come having written legal briefs and, you know, technical writing and medical journal articles, and all of that. But to come to creative writing, it’s not a one and done, but it’s a shaping of the work.
[00:30:16] And that is, I’m hesitating ’cause I was gonna say that is like a methodology, but it’s not a, you do this and then you do this, and then you do this, and then you do this, and then you sign off on it. It’s more like, especially with poetry, does this line break match where I wanna pause or match the content?
[00:30:34] Do I get hung up on any of the words? Is there a better word to say this with? Is there a more surprising way to say this? So, if I make a little change or be a little more specific or descriptive, you know, it’s little by little, make this be more than you thought it was when you first wrote it down.
[00:30:54] Emily: Yeah. That makes sense. I’m also thinking about your Grand Canyon poem experience, because something that you said about that process made me think about how there’s just… People speak in poetry, even if people are coming from backgrounds of like a medical journal for example. There might be little snippets of things even in there that might be like these little flashes of poetry that you can pull out.
[00:31:17] Lauren: Absolutely. No, that’s absolutely true. I mean, when I’m pulling something out of someone who’s written something, a lot of times I will ask questions. You know, can you tell me more about this or what color was the dress you were wearing? Can you describe it, or anything? Whatever it is. And in that description that I hear that is just spoken, I will say, maybe you could put that in there.
[00:31:39] Like let’s just pull this a little so that there’s more in there and there’s more context, there’s more grounding, there’s more, whatever it is, there’s more muscle, more energy, more space. I mean, it could be any number of things, and showing how they might do one of those things.
[00:31:59] Emily: Right? Yeah. Well, what I’m struck by in your poems and what makes me think about this is teaching kids poetry is just the embodiment and all the sensory, and I know that poems can be completely cerebral and not at all attached to the world, but there’s something that’s so affecting about those visceral kind of embodied details in poems.
[00:32:23] Lauren: Well, I actually think that a poem that is completely cerebral would do better with some sensory stuff to ground it before it goes off into the heady space, right?
Emily: Yeah.
[00:32:23] And kids are wonderful at that. You know, if you just sort of tickle them a little into doing it, they’re like jumping beans. Like they can’t get enough. They’re like Pop Rocks, right?
Emily: Yeah.
[Laughing together]
[00:33:45] Lauren: They can’t get enough chance to like say, “I have something. I have something.”
[Jazzy swing & vocal scat]
[00:32:57] Emily: It’s honestly hard to keep track of how much you have going on. I’ve been trying. And it’s just so much.
Lauren: For me too.
Emily: (laughing) Like awards and books and readings and events and all these things going on all the time. But I know a big one is the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. So, can you tell me about this fellowship and what it means and what you’re doing with it?
[00:33:20] Lauren: Yes. So, the Academy of American Poets, this is the third year, I think, that they have selected twenty-two or twenty-three fellows from around the country. Poets laureate, all of them, but at different levels: city, state, and maybe some other community levels, to fund for their work in community. And it’s a one-year fellowship.
[00:33:46] It allows me to expand that whole project that I was describing to you about getting out to communities, doing these workshops, giving them the materials they need, and just showing up for them. My project was very much getting out to rural and underserved communities, to people of all ages, and doing twelve to fifteen of these workshops.
[00:34:12] They know that I’m not gonna have the broadsides yet, but it’s on the ground work to begin to build those poems. For anyone who doesn’t know a broadside, it’s sort of a gorgeous poster of a poem. And in this case, Palace Press has a historic letterpress and they will beautifully print broadsides.
[00:34:34] In one of the communities, we went into a library and the head librarian, she pointed out a wall on one of their side rooms and said, we are gonna paint our community poem on this wall. I was like, “Whoa. Okay. That sounds fantastic.” I think it’s great for the communities too, because they have something that is theirs that came from them, that was birthed out of the voices of the community and they own it.
[00:35:03] Emily: Wow. So, you have a lot of time on the road ahead of you.
[00:35:05] Lauren: I do. And I have a lot of time on the road behind me too. And, this state is the fifth largest geographically, and most of the trips I’m doing are, are overnight trips and its communities all over, and communities of varying sizes. Most of them seem to be hovering around a thousand people at most. And that’s ideal for me, which means a small handful of people, a couple dozen people come out for an event. And that’s a, that’s a good showing.
[00:35:35] Emily: So, I know I asked you about the process of making the Grand Canyon poem and how that affected your poetry, but how is all of this traveling affecting your poetry?
[00:35:46] Lauren: Well, I guess the short answer is, all of the things I am doing are limiting the time that I have to write, which is sort of fine. I wrote a lot during the pandemic. I know some poets didn’t, but I was working at home. I was teaching from home. I had a lot of time. It’s sort of okay for a stretch of time to slow down on that.
[00:36:11] And I write best from experience, so I need something to happen for me to begin a poem. I need a kernel of something that I care to sort of circle around or to hold onto in some way. And so, the getting out there has been the gathering of those kernels. Of course, now I don’t have the time to really do much with them, but I’m gathering little bits.
[00:36:37] Emily: And what do you do with those kernels? Do they kind of just swirl around in your head, or do you write a note to yourself to look at later or?
Lauren: They’re little notes on my phone.
Emily: Yeah. Okay.
[00:36:49] Lauren: They’re on little scraps of paper. They’re, they’re in little notebooks. They’re not by any means a cohered anything.
Emily: Yeah. But sounds like me. (Chuckling)
Lauren: But it’s okay. That, again, goes back to that collage idea. When I come back to it, hopefully it holds enough of a memory that I can take that and remember the place I wrote it from or the people that I wrote it about or whatever.
[00:37:13] Emily: Yeah. Excellent. Well, I look forward to those poems. (laughing)
[00:37:17] Lauren: It’ll be a little while.
Emily: (laughing) Yeah. Yeah.
[00:37:19] Lauren: I actually believe that poetry writing is a slow art, which offers a huge amount of permission, you know? Like, I don’t pour out a perfect poem. It could take me weeks, months, years. Many, many drafts. My students hear me talk about this a lot, and that’s a kind of joy, that it does not have to be right for a long time. I’m just moving it along, so I don’t remember, but that line might not have been there at the beginning.
[00:37:52] Emily: I love that. I remember I kind of drifted away from poetry. I wrote it a lot when I was a kid and then I came back to it in college and one of the poets that really brought me fully back in was Elizabeth Bishop.
And I remember reading parts of the book, uh, what is it called? Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, where it shows all the drafts that she went through. And just feeling this sense of relief and seeing her early drafts and how unlike the genius polished versions were and feeling like, oh, okay, yeah, I can do this again.
[Magical string and piano fairytale music in background]
[00:38:28] Lauren: I totally believe in that process, in that, you know, for my students who say, I’ve already written it twice, and I’m like, “Good. Keep going.” You know, it’s not about finishing. I mean, I say that as someone who has finished a lot. It’s not about finishing. For me, it’s about being in it until it is, I don’t know, in some way magical for myself. In some way I’ve done something more on the page than I knew when I started.
Emily: Yeah. Yeah.
[Magical string and piano fairytale music rise]
[00:39:15] Emily: I also love that your ode to goatheads is a love letter to New Mexico because I’ve written many love letters to New Mexico, mostly in essay form, but the whole time I spent in Montana, I was writing these pining letters up to New Mexico. (chuckling)
[00:39:31] Lauren: I kind of think that happens. I was listening to a conversation the other day where someone said you have to go away from your place sometimes to be able to see what you have and to write about it. I love writing about New Mexico. It’s easy for me to want to do, here and elsewhere, because I find this place so extraordinary.
[00:39:53] I mean, I didn’t grow up here and it’s a very different landscape from what I knew, but some of my love letters are about real difficulties here too, about fire, about drought. About weeds.
[00:40:07] Emily: Yeah. Yeah. (chuckling) I think one of the things for me, and I haven’t really found a way to write about this, so I’m curious if you have a poem about this, but when I came back to New Mexico, the light, I was like, how did I take this for granted before I left?
[00:40:22] Lauren: Yeah. I was somewhere recently and just consumed by the fog because it was so unfamiliar to me. I was like, what is this? You can’t see through it. You can’t see anything. I think I have a lot of poems about light.
[00:40:37] Emily: Do you wanna find one? (laughing)
[00:40:39] Lauren: Lemme think about it. I write a lot into place, not about place. Like I’m using the place to capture something else, if that makes sense. So, it’s not, it’s not like a still life of something or a landscape painting in a poem. It’s like little bits of that come into anything I’m writing about. So, a lot of the places that I’ve traveled around, I’ve talked about how I write about sun a lot. A lot. I mean, it’s everywhere, right? We know it very well if we live here.
[00:41:13] I also write about wind a lot because that’s another one of those. I mean, sun is, is preferable to me. And wind. But when I write about either one of those things, I task myself with writing them in a new way so, I can mention the wind, and I have to describe it in some way that is not in all the nineteen other poems where I’ve written about wind.
[00:41:36] And that’s a really interesting challenge for myself. Same with light, so same with sun. All right, maybe I’ll read this one. This is the last poem in Worn Smooth between Devourings. It’s called “Exercise in Heart,” and later if you wanna know where it is, I’ll tell you exactly.
[Poetry formatting has been modified for transcription purposes]
Lauren: “Exercise in Heart”
We’ve had to stop trying and we’ve had to go on.[Text Wrapping Break]The path seemed only soft stems, then a landscape—[Text Wrapping Break]spacious, partly vandalized. Birds paddled in[Text Wrapping Break]with their voluptuous chanting, slashing[Text Wrapping Break]our impudent truths. We were moving along[Text Wrapping Break]a ridge. Tender, the sun began to embroider[Text Wrapping Break]the meager shrubs which were not flaming with petals.[Text Wrapping Break]They seemed to have fallen asleep, nodded off[Text Wrapping Break]in the fields, but hadn’t lain down. A chubby trail[Text Wrapping Break]propelled us through the final damp thought[Text Wrapping Break]of autumn. Into a quest without speaking[Text Wrapping Break]ugly world tensions. No need, after all;[Text Wrapping Break]the path sauntered with its geographies[Text Wrapping Break]and stony slopes. At one hurried curve,[Text Wrapping Break]horses swelled by, faces lined to the prow.[Text Wrapping Break]Clop and clop, their purpose; we slid[Text Wrapping Break]to the side. The sky in an hour would be[Text Wrapping Break]descending in a watermelon lace, quickly wrapping[Text Wrapping Break]to a matter of recess, each mountain devouring[Text Wrapping Break]the next. Then we’d squint through binoculars at planets.[Text Wrapping Break]A quick tilt would show us a halo, a future, a silvery pulse.[Text Wrapping Break]Imagine that: Whatever we see we can call evidence.
[00:43:32] Emily: Beautiful. And so, where is that? I do wanna know.
[00:43:37] Lauren: So, that’s Galisteo Basin.
Emily: Okay.
Lauren: We should go sometime.
[00:43:40] Emily: Yes! (laughing joyfully) I didn’t think it was the Sandias, but because of your watermelon reference, I was like, Hmm. But I also loved the sun embroidering the bushes or…
Lauren: The meager shrubs.
Emily: Yes. The meager shrubs. I messed it up.
Lauren: No, you did great.
Emily: Yeah. (laughing)
[00:43:58] Lauren: But, but also, you know, I’m just, yes, that’s Galisteo Basin for me, but that could be anywhere for anyone who wants to figure it out for themselves. For me, as the writer, it holds a particular little memory of a day and a companionship that I had on a very particular day and an experience, and I like doing that in poems. Like a poem for me does better than a snapshot at holding a memory.
[Quiet background music]
[00:44:25] Emily: Yeah. And there’s so much emotion, like I love the way that you open about not trying anymore. And I was like, oh, that just feels like relief to me. And then the next line was, and go on. I was like, no, (laughing) shoot, I don’t wanna… (laughing)
[00:44:44] Lauren: Life is hard.
Emily: Yeah. (continued laughing)
[A wave of ambient strings and woodwinds]
[00:44:53] Emily: I know you mentioned that you go through this deeper vision process with all of your poems. How do you know, like what feeling do you have when you know that you’re at the end?
[00:45:04] Lauren: When a poem is done?
Emily: Yeah. Mm-Hmm.
[ambient strings and woodwinds get quieter]
[00:45:06] Lauren: Uh, great question. I like to be in the process, as I said, but it’s super appealing to get something done. Right?
[00:45:15] My goal is to write something, get it as far as I can, set it aside. And I have a lot of drafts at any given time of different poems. So, it’s easy for me to go over to something else or to go do some other work or whatever. So, by the time I’ve come back to a poem, however many times, until it’s not, the term that I like to use is moving. It’s not moving.
[00:45:40] It’s not like, oh, I could take this middle stanza and move it all the way up to the top and I can slide this around until my page doesn’t have arrows all over and cross outs, at the point that I’ve done virtually nothing to it for a time or two. Read it aloud, ask someone else to read it aloud, heard it, and it sounds okay.
[00:46:01] At that point, I might say it’s done. I would say it’s done, but there’s something that has to click for me for it to really be done. And the way that I often describe it is, I have to feel a little giddy about it. So, I could be writing about grief and still I have to, there has to be something in there that is a little bit of a thrill or a little bit of a kind of friction or something that is unsettling in a lighthearted way or in a slightly nauseating way. Even just something that’s like, ooh, oh, that’s interesting. I mean, yes, I wrote it, but I love those three words together.
[00:46:45] Or, I’m writing until I get to that place where the poem holds something that is delightful to me. Even if I’m writing about visiting the cemetery where my parents are buried. You know something that is like, oh, that, that makes me feel good.
[Music fades out, then crescendos back to a loud string medley]
[00:47:12] Emily: If you enjoyed this conversation and these poems as much as I did, check out the events page on Lauren’s website at laurencamp.com. Her newest book, out this month is In Old Sky, and can be purchased on the Grand Canyon Conservancy website at grandcanyon.org/store. To join the New Mexico Epic Poem Project in collaboration with New Mexico Arts visit nmstatelibrary.org. Lauren is also featured in the Spring 2023 issue of El Palacio, in conversation with former editor and Encounter Culture host Charlotte Jusinski. All of the links can be found in the show notes in the episode description in your listening app.
[String medley fades out and theme music fades in for End Credits]
[00:48:24] Emily: Encounter Culture is a production of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.
Our producer is Andrea Klunder at The Creative Impostor Studios.
Season six is produced and edited by Andrea Klunder and Alex Riegler, with additional editing by Monica Braine.
Our recording engineer is Kabby at Kabby Sound Studios in Santa Fe.
Technical direction and post-production audio by Edwin R. Ruiz.
[00:48:53] Our executive producer is Daniel Zillmann.
Thank you to New Mexico artist, “El Brujo” D’Santi Nava, for our theme music.
For a full transcript and show notes, visit podcast.nmculture.org or click the link in the episode description in your listening app.
I’m your host. Emily Withnall.
[00:49:14] The New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs is your guide to the state’s entire family of museums, historic sites, and cultural institutions. From Native treasures to space exploration, world class folk art to ancient dinosaurs, our favorite way to fully explore is with the New Mexico CulturePass. To see everywhere CulturePass is accepted and reserve yours today, visit nmculture.org/visit/culturepass.
[00:49:47] The New Mexico State Library delivers an array of services designed to meet you where you are. Explore everything they have to offer or “Ask a Librarian” at nmstatelibrary.org.
And if you love New Mexico, you’ll love El Palacio magazine. Subscribe at elpalacio.org.
[00:50:11] Thank you for listening, and if you learned something new, send this episode to a friend or share it on social media. We love celebrating the cultures of New Mexico together.
[Theme music fades out]