"Art taught me freedom": An Interview with Lauren Camp

Editor’s note: The following interview was conducted by our spring intern, Al Gastmeier, and poet Lauren Camp, via email.

You previously worked in both audio and visual art, and your bio says that both of these have strongly influenced how you write poetry. Would you be willing to elaborate on that? 

I worked as a fiber artist for nearly 15 years, making abstract work and figurative pieces. Self-taught, I was intuitively focused on texture, pattern, line, and negative space. I wanted colors to come together to create a sort of sense, but also found a bit of friction appealing.

For almost the same span of time, I volunteered as host and producer for a program of my design, called “Audio Saucepan,” on Santa Fe Public Radio. I shaped the show as primarily jazz-inflected, but mixed in world music and other genres. Each week, I also slipped in three contemporary poems—poems I had selected for their narrative or imagery, their sound, or their effect on me. Reading so many poems aloud into a microphone, week after week for 15 years, taught me a great deal about sonics and spacing. Jazz taught me the value of improvisation. Art taught me freedom. So many good lessons! When I was ready for poetry, it was easy to want to pull these creative elements into what I was writing.

How does your background as a visual artist affect your ekphrastic poems that feature in this book? 

Though I pivoted away from artmaking around 2008, I remained fascinated by art, and how and why it was made. Poetry gave me a way to stay engaged—to indulge my curiosity in certain artists and their work. I’ve written ekphrastic poems in conversation with the work of Donald Judd, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Georgia O’Keeffe and others. It’s not interesting to me to recreate the artwork in words. I want to investigate it—how it was made, why the artist needed to do this, how hard it was and in what ways, what was happening as the artist shaped the work. And maybe, most especially, how the artwork makes me feel. I come to artwork with an artist’s hands and a poet’s mind. I’m keenly observant, but only to some things. I’ve learned to trust that sort of awareness and to ask: why did I care about that? 

I began An Eye in Each Square by accident. The first poem in the book, “Must Learn Neither,” lays out what happened: the world was in chaos and my family life was burdened with worry. All I knew was that the answer seemed to be in Agnes Martin’s work, and I set about writing to figure out why. I wrote a great many poems, only a portion of which ended up in the book. As I went along, I began to write to and about the horizontal line Agnes employed in much of her work. The line was sort of a character. I was following where it led—with my poetic lines. Only a few poems address her history. Instead, the book is a triangulation of her work, her, and me. 

Throughout the book, I was reminded that the line between visual art and poetry is often difficult to define, if not outright nonexistent in places. How do you go about navigating this ambiguity in your writing? 

What a question! I don’t think about this at all. Perhaps then, the answer is that the ambiguity feels comfortable to me. 

The abstract painter Agnes Martin and her works feature in many of the poems in your book, including in the titles of several, as well as the title, which is quoted from here. Her presence can be felt across the book. What is it about her story and her artwork that left such a strong impression on you? 

I think what compelled me most, after the paintings themselves, was how enigmatic Agnes was, and this only increased as I continued to write into what I saw. I had known of her work for decades and appreciated the opportunities I’d had to stand in front of it. The Harwood Museum in Taos, New Mexico has a permanent gallery of her work—and some Donald Judd benches on which to sit and observe them. I have been in that room many times, looking closely and at a distance. Thinking and not thinking. Seeing and resting.

In 2017, when I started the poems that became An Eye in Each Square, what pulled me to her was a sense of calm. The spaciousness felt empty in a way I craved. It was quiet. It was helpful. I needed it, and writing about it seemed a way to keep it close.

You’ve lived in New Mexico (the same state that Agnes Martin eventually lived in as well) for quite some time, in addition to being the state’s poet laureate. How does location influence your poetry? 

I need poems to be grounded somewhere. I’m not interested in writing strictly about a place. Instead, I use my location and its particularities to help me write into anything else. I find that I sometimes need to shift where I am and what I see, so I can also shift what I want to write about. Much of An Eye in Each Square was written by the Washington coast, with the ocean readily available. That landscape was entirely different from my high desert home. It, too, enters the poems.

LAUREN CAMP is the author of five previous books of poetry, including Took House, which won the American Fiction Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award and the Southwest Book Design & Production Award. Her book One Hundred Hungers won a Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and Housatonic Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative, Massachusetts Review, and Poet Lore; her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. She is a senior fellow for Black Earth Institute and was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park in 2022. She is the Poet Laureate of New Mexico.