Interview with Lauren Camp on Took House — April 29, 2020
Lauren Camp is the author of five books of poems. She received the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. She came to poetry while working as a visual artist, a career she has since left behind. Camp lives in New Mexico, where she teaches creative writing to people of all ages. www.laurencamp.com
Christopher Nelson: First let me say congratulations for a beautiful book. I am sorry about the timing though. It must be difficult to feel celebratory during a pandemic.
Lauren Camp: Thank you! I didn’t expect Took House to be coming out in a pandemic. But maybe it is during fraught and confusing times that the world most needs new energy. Everything is now read and seen through the lens of our current situation, but hopefully, Took House also offers a separate experience.
Nelson: You write early in Took House, "So little of what happens belongs to us." It's a line that exemplifies, for me, a mood of the book—a sense of loss, but not for what was, exactly, but loss of the possibilities those things contained. It's haunting.
Camp: In our close-fitting realities (as well as in the larger world), much goes on that we don’t understand. Some Sundays in my rural village, the nearby military base sends its helicopters overhead. I don’t know why. I hear the noise, but that’s all that belongs to me. Is there trouble? Is it rehearsal? And the birds don’t belong me, though I can watch them pecking seed or hawking through the olive trees. People do things that may be generous or ill-advised. These actions could affect you or me. The COVID-19 virus proved this. Each individual’s health has depended on every other person acting appropriately.
I think almost nothing belongs to us; even our own actions and thoughts sometimes happen without our willingness. To me, the book circles around an echoed loss of control.
Nelson: And I love how you weave that loss of control with intimacy. I see that in your images: the intimacy of the hawk’s ruthless regard for the lizard; how the lover will “sluice the shiny surface / of the porcelain” after sex. But isn’t there a paradox in this loss of control?: the more fully we experience the self, say by moving into desire, as many of these poems do, the less control over the self we feel.
Camp: Yes, in intimacy, we move out of the rational mind into the body. And the body does what it wants, doesn’t it?
Poetry taught me to fully sing the close intimacy. In all the art forms I’ve lived in, I’ve always been drawn to a narrow focus rather than a grand view. I love the way poems can contain and champion small details; those can become the ambition of the poem.
Nelson: I also love the motif of birds. Several of the poems are overtly about birds, usually birds of prey. Can you talk about how you regard them in relation to the other poems, which often center on intimacy or subjective emotional states?
Camp: When I was making art portraits of jazz musicians, which I did for more than 10 years, I would find the main image I wanted to use (the musical “center,” if you will). Once I had that, I would build what I called “a context” around it. Those other elements would further my understanding or impression of the musician and/or the music. (“The Shout,” my portrait of bass player Charles Mingus is a good example of this.) I was constructing—through fabric and a 2-dimensional medium—a reverent response to the music I love. I knew a static shot of the musician wouldn’t be enough. I needed a few elements to play together.
I have carried that approach over into assembling poetry collections. The raptor poems in Took House are part of the context. They might also provide a breather. I’ve grown to like the challenge of putting three elements together; I get to (and have to) make surprise connections. In this case, the birds were a logical choice that fit with the predator-prey relationship in some of the poems.
I’ve been entranced by birds of prey for years. Tasking myself to write these poems meant research, which is always a pleasure. And because I was writing from within the mental rooms of the Took House poems, the raptor poems rubbed up against the themes I was already circling around.
Nelson: Several of the poems allude to works of visual art: O'Keeffe, Mondrian, Judd, Rauschenberg. We both have visual arts backgrounds, so I'm particularly curious to hear about your ekphrastic poems. How do you orient yourself to the artwork in the poem? How do you use the ekphrastic mode?
Camp: Writing into an artwork is a way I can more fully experience the artist’s subconscious mind, the part of them that created something I’ve found extravagantly unusual or moving. I think I do it differently each time, but it’s almost like the poem has begun without me. I have something to react to. I’m trying to feel my way into the impetus, the end result, the painter’s mood and circumstance. I’m just trying to catch up.
Nelson: And Nest, the evocative artwork on the cover by Suzanne Sbarge—tell us why it was chosen and how you see it in relationship with these poems.
Camp: I wanted the art to have mystery and sense of timelessness, as I think exists in the poems. Suzanne lives here in New Mexico. I have been interested in her work for many years. The symbols in Nest—the wine glass, the birds, the woman’s face and legs, the door, the shifting ground, the ladder to the sky—all of it seems drawn straight from my poems. I’m lucky Suzanne agreed.
Nelson: I’ve been thinking about concordances lately—those documentations of words used by a writer across several works—and how with time we can see idiosyncrasies and personal symbols and signifiers. How, for example, the dozens of occurrences of lost in Milton accrue or expand into being more than just “no longer having.” I feel like wine has taken on such subjective symbolism in Took House. There is, of course, the drinking of wine for social pleasure and intoxication, but it calls up, for me, sacrament, harvest, and escape.
Camp: I think we each have our own emotional imagery that we write into, probing it (hopefully) for great resonances. I include the sun often in my poems, but then again, I live in a place where that glowing orb is ready for action almost all the time. So the issue becomes, how to offer the term differently. How can I make a commonplace thing, that repeated image, unconventional even to me? How can I make it signify more?
Wine is integral to Took House for every reason you mention. I’m grateful that you’ve seen those meanings. For me, in the writing, wine is also innocence and lack of it, compartmentalizing of life’s complications, joy and threat, luxury, patience, sensual pleasure. It’s what allows the altering of a regular balance and the resulting curiosity (and maybe even insistence) on that shifting state. There was much to explore in that symbol!
Nelson: I’m intrigued by the title of the book. I think it is perfect; though I can’t exactly place it semantically. There is, of course, the past-tense of take, but take has so many uses. Can you talk us through the valences of the title?
Camp: It pleases me that the title offers multiplicities and uncertainties. I’ve been asked if it’s a real place and my brief response is, “no, it’s a verb.” That’s a confusing answer, adding to the puzzle of it.
But I could go further. I think of the past tense of take as in “to grab.” And the past tense of take as in “to remove” … and also “to capture.” Let’s also put in there “to subtract.” In fact, every way I look at it, took opens to more possibilities.
I’m not after confusion so much as those slips and displacements. I think (or hope) the title settles to something manageable for a reader (as you seem to suggest it has), even if it never fully resolves.
Nelson: Took House is your fifth book. When you consider your previous work, what has changed; what has remained constant?
Camp: I like muddy subjects. I guess that’s a constant. I’ve gotten better at writing some poems of simple praise, but that’s not where my fascination lies.
I am intrigued by people and how we exist in the world, what decisions we make, where we falter or fail. Sometimes I’m looking at a political situation; other times, I want to capture how a friend handles a cancer diagnosis, or watching an aging parent with memory loss, what a neighbor did, anything that haunts my mind. The language and perspective I use to write a poem might shift, but the psychological curiosity about an individual (who is sometimes me, but often others) stays constant.
I’m always trying to push language further. I want to make the words and the order they’re in do something unexpected. Because of all the jazz I’ve immersed in, I’m used to hearing improvised and complicated rhythms. I like a little friction in my poems (and artwork). I’m not interested in the fully organized or melodic. Instead, I am especially drawn to the less likely construction, a complex thought, and repurposed words.
What has changed is a harder question! I think I’ve been writing more complex poems that collide disparate topics, images, or themes. But this might be better answered by a critic. I’m too close to the inside to tell.
