Interpreting a Poem - Part 1

A photograph by Michael Nichols of a Bengal tiger and cubs. 

See more at National Geographic's website.

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

by Adrienne Rich

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

Next post - how to make sense of a poem

Writing thoughts

Gentle waves at a wetland sanctuary in Florida.
Can you see the poems written where the water crests and falls?
You have to really study the darks and lights, and this takes time.
Then, you'll realize the words are your own.

I've been trying to write in the little spaces between the excitement of iris bulbs poking up and the occasional jazz concert, mounds of laundry and hours of work.

I find poetry easier to come and go from than my visual art. I am more apt to pick it up and put it down again, much as someone else might with knitting, but even so, lately there's a frustration with not having a long steady run of "considering."

Sometimes that's all you can do - look at a poem in its various states of undress and hope that a solution will come forth and cover it elegantly. That kind of thinking takes time - the time of exploring the closet of your mind, seeing what's available, trying things on, checking the fit.

I catch myself staring out the window or standing in the shower with the water off, still wet. At those moments, I am visualizing the poem, the way it could be, the words forming a shape, and the shape becoming something more than what I had created on the paper.

And it is only when I have figured out where the poem might go that I step away from the water or the window. It is as if I was given a space, momentarily cleared of everything else, and on it wrote a new poem.

Alternative Places for Poetry: How a Truck Got Interested in Haiku

Axle Contemporary is a retrofitted truck - and an art gallery. It moves daily between the Farmer's Market and various grocery stores and restaurants. It carts art around and shares it with the public. The two visionary men behind Axle's metaphorical and actual wheel keep looking for new ways to allow others to be expressive. They actively bring art where it needs to go.

Yes, the truck is in Santa Fe, capital of all things creative. I realize not every town in the country or world has as much artistic support from its regular denizens as we do. (I am NOT talking about financial support here, but rather emotional). Even so, every place has creative energy that needs to be shared.

Here are details from Axle's website about their Haiku Roadsign Project:

We found a charming old roadside sign in need of a new purpose.…We will present 2 new poems (one on each side of the sign) each week for four months during the summer of 2011. Automobile passengers, bike riders, and pedestrians will enjoy poetry in consistently unexpected places throughout Santa Fe.  2 poems x 16 weeks = 32 poems, liberated from the page and set free to infiltrate the consciousness of the people:  ¡Que Viva La Poesia!

Santa Fe’s Poet Laureate, Joan Logghe will jury the entries. We’ll take professional photos of each poem on the sign and at the end we’ll publish a beautiful book of the poems, photos, and an essay about the project. We’ll also put the photos and poems up on a special bloglike section of our website to share it all with the wide world. We encourage and expect interactivity both in our local community and in our world wide virtual community. From the website we hope to expand the sense of community created by the haiku emblazoned road sign. We will encourage artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers to respond on our website.

So, go on .... if you're a New Mexican, submit your littlest darlins' to them. 


And whether you are or aren't, write in with your best poetry story. What's the weirdest, most unexpected, most exhilarating site or situation where you've found poetry? Tell me about it.

"Word Play / Word Power" - The Series You Didn't Know You Need

I love this photo, which seems to me both internal and external.
This was from a class I taught with the O'Keeffe Museum.
We spent the day exploring Georgia O'Keeffe's glorious Abiquiu,
hiking and writing to various prompts I offered the group.
After lunch, students relaxed and wrote more in the lush garden of the restaurant.

In the last post, we were talking about "Word Play" classes. They are intimate groups, authentic talk, and definitely unexpected exercises. I volunteer every last bit of information about process and expression that I think students want, and leave lots of space for writing, questions, thought-provoking discussions and laughter.


We laugh a lot.


One of the students said of the last series: “Thank you for a great time!  It’s good therapy for me and I feel somehow more than I was before.”


Would I be bragging if I said everyone feels good leaving class? I hope not. I think it's true.


I miss the classes when they aren't happening. They are the weirdest mash-up of poetry, memoir, story-telling, humor, imagination and surprise. There are no grades. Doesn't matter to me if you spell well, or put your periods and commas in the right place. That's not what this is about.


It's about finding beginnings. It's about finding your voice.


"Word Play / Word Power" Writing Series
Where: Southwest Literary Center, Santa Fe, NM
Monday evenings --  April 4th through May 2nd (5 weeks), 7-9 PM

People Need to Write

I'm getting ready to teach another series of creative writing classes. I call them "Word Play / Word Power." Even though the name never changes, the classes are different each time.

I try to meet students where they are -- and they are many places. Currently I have a student interested in mysteries, another one swimming through the waves of spirituality, a former MFA student who writes exquisitely but wants the steadiness of exercises... and on and on.

How critical it is for all of them, every single person, to have a chance for expression. These are not necessarily students that would define themselves as writers, so many don't even know they have something to say. Most don't realize that their stories are, in some way, universal.

For the first class, people are often shy... or maybe it is better defined as "careful." I ask for volunteers to read and everyone holds back. If I've learned names, I call on someone. I gently pull the words from them into the room.

But by class two... wow! completely different scenario. They are now, hands raised, ready....  desperate, even.

It's wonderful to watch the transformation - and to provide the place to make it possible.

Next post - more on "Word Play"

Lynne Knight and Audio Saucepan

I first came across Lynne Knight's poems in the pages of Rattle. I have now read her fourth book, Again, and remain entranced by her writing. Her poems are accessible, but at the same time, breathtaking and melancholy. What she says feels impossibly true. She gazes out and tells it; she makes us human, real, important.  

The book starts with this "Prologue":

While we slept, such heavy rain swept past
it shook the last roses loose. They lay
smashed on the deck this morning, their petals
scattered like big white tears. I shouldn't say
a thing so sentimental. But there they were.
And you, my father, so long dead, why
should I not expect to find you everywhere,
reminding me how little will be left--
vague ache in my own daughter's heart
as she sweeps the steps after rain whose mercy
is all in the coming, the coming again.

That line: "I shouldn't say / a thing so sentimental" ... that gets me. It's a sort of opening up of the heart, a willingness to embarrass oneself. 

I will be reading one of Lynne Knight's other poems tomorrow night on my radio show, "Audio Saucepan." To get to speak her words between musical selections -- it is this that intrigues me about poetry, the sounds interspersed with sounds. The sounds of the words coming to life from the page.  

"Audio Saucepan"airs Sundays, 5-6PM (Mountain Time) on Santa Fe Public Radio KSFR 101.1FM with simultaneous access via the internet at www.ksfr.org.

Tomorrow's show (March 27) is "The End of Wind Episode,” and includes the poems “In the Space between Words Begin” (from Dark Archive, University of California Press) and “In a Time of Strife” by Lynne Knight (from Again, Sixteen Rivers Press); a quote by Max Neuhaus (from SOUND, edited by Caleb Kelly, MIT Press); and a wide variety of intriguing and unexpected music. Please tune in!

Expanding the Words into Sounds

The site for all of our "Two Poets…" gigs: Counter Culture in Santa Fe.

A year or so ago, I wrote the line: "Jazz always left stains on her mind…"

The other night, I had the opportunity to figure out more fully what that line means.

I read a new poem about illness, death and secrets to a full house at the Two Poets and a Piano gig in Santa Fe. The poem was potent, heavy with sadness. I have only ever heard it as my voice, solo, but from now on, I will associate it with the music that accompanied it.

In rehearsal, I asked to create a conversation, a  call and response with New Mexico's most astounding horn player, Arlen Asher. I proposed reading a line from the poem, and having Arlen play a line in response.

I asked for a deep sound. He chose his baritone sax. That's as far as we got. We never tried it together until the audience was in front of us…

…and the audience was so quiet. I read; Arlen played. Again and again. Line by line by line. The music flowed out of his horn and into me, and my words moved back toward him. Our two forms and sounds came together seamlessly, and the audience stayed quiet.

Arlen and I have both lost necessary people. That's how we knew what to say and how to say it. 

And those words belong with that music. The music that Arlen played has definitely left stains on my mind -- and on that poem.

Reading Poetry to Greater Effect

Young actor August Markwardt in Theaterwork's production of The Tempest.
The Tempest was the Company of Poets first co-production.

I met with Theaterwork Director David Olson the other day to rehearse and determine a direction for the poems I will be performing at our "poetry performance" on April 20th, and as a follow-up to some play performances. 

It is wonderful to work with someone who appreciates poetry as much as David does, but also someone who "hears" language in such a visual way. For a theater director, language "lifts" in places; it expands and contracts. It moves into the room, and in doing so, pulls the audience along. 

David has a tough eye for nervous jitters that will distract an audience. The fluttering fingertips, the foot maneuvers, the moments words drop off. He has no tolerance for the sing-songy style some poets read in these days. 

There is, and should be, power to the words we are speaking. When we distract, the audience member loses - and if he or she loses even one word, one precious word -- the poem is less. It is uneven, an important part has been taken from it.

 Even if you aren't an actor, there are ways to begin to learn a style that grabs the audience member, grips them, captivates them, makes them each feel that you are talking directly, specifically, to them. It is this that we, as poets, need to strive for - making our words do what we intend of them.

Four Quotes to Consider

“All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie.” — W. H. Auden



“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” —  Robert Frost

“I don't think we really have very much to tell poems; I think poems have a great deal to tell us.” — Marie Howe 

“These stories emerged from my black insides to die in another darkenss. I willed their existence, but I don’t know why. Except that in some dim way I wanted, myself, to have a soul, a special speech, a style. I wanted to be responsible where I could bear to be responsible…” 

— William Gass

Jazz and Poetry - Part 2 - Tonight's Performance

Santa Fe's most versatile horn player Arlen Asher

Performing with musicians is an unexpected thrill. For a poet, hearing your words with even more melody and actual sound than you ever could have in your head or at your desk is an unparalleled experience. 

I look for opportunities to do this as often as I can. I crave the improvisations that musicians create in different configurations, and I am always looking for a way to bring my medium into that kind of musical group interaction.

In the last post, I mentioned the next jazz/poetry performance in an ongoing, loosely biannual series.

I'm the only female, very musical but with no direct understanding of music. When we rehearse, I talk to the musicians about what I want using my poetic vocabulary instead of their terminology: I need more energy here. Could you do something  angular or anxious at this part of my poem?

Somehow our languages meet, and they give me a sound that makes my poems more alive, more real, darker, more potent, more dramatic. I slow to meet the music, my voice deepening or reaching; or I stop in places and let the musicians stretch out on their instruments, play a coda, or the head of the tune. I breathe deeper, and they play. 

Please join us!

Chris Ishee - piano, Arlen Asher - reeds, Paul Brown - 

bass/oud, 

Lauren Camp and Richard Atkinson - poetry

Co

unter Culture, 

Santa Fe, New Mexico

March 22 - 7PM

Jazz and Poetry - Part 1

This is a big month for performances. I've had two very successful ones already, the first was a reading and panel discussion with three other poets, and the other a collaborative, multiphonic, poetic response to artwork that I've posted about in this blog several times.

The next in my schedule is a jazz and poetry event at a neighborhood cafe and restaurant. This is a reprise of a reprise of an event, which makes it kind of a chorus (in musical terms). The players keep changing but the feel is the same: swinging jazzy music, and words that inspire or interact with the notes.

The musicians are stellar - some of Santa Fe's best. The other poet is a man who grew up with New York's jazz scene, in the pocket of the beat poets. He's still very much there - in those small clubs with those large words. He is a wanna-be drummer with a deeply resonant voice.

I'm the fifth person in the group. I bring something different: dark words and a quietly powerful sound.

Poetry Release Forms

I hope everyone I ever meet knows that they are fodder for my writing. To absolve myself of any blame, I have created a poetry release form. I should hand it out when I introduce myself.


POETRY RELEASE FORM
Observation Site: ________________________________________

Name of person(s) being observed: ___________________________________________

Address: _________________________________________________________________

Telephone number: ________________________________________

Email Address: ___________________________________________

Date of birth: ________________________________________

By signing the form below, you (hereafter referred to as "Observed Party") give permission for Lauren Camp (hereafter referred to as "Poet") to interpret and adapt your actions and mannerisms for future poems. These poems may appear in journals, anthologies, books, the World Wide Web, and audiovisual presentations.

By giving your permission, you hereby remise, release, acquit, satisfy, and forever discharge the "Poet" of and from all manner of action(s), cause(s) of action, suits, debts, sums of money, accounts, reckonings, bonds, bills, specialties, covenants, contracts, controversies, agreements, promises, variances, trespasses, damages, judgments, executions, claims and demands whatsoever, in law or in equity, which you as the Observed Party ever had, now has, or which any personal representative, successor, heir or assign of said Observed Party, hereafter can, shall or may have, against said Poet, by reason of any matter, cause or word whatsoever, from the beginning of time until the populace of this world, with all its countries and peoples, stop reading poetry. 

By giving your permission, you hereby consent for value received and without further consideration or compensation to the use (full or in part) of all behaviors that you may hold, including the sound of your voice and/or your deportment, in whole or in part, for the purposes of literary illustration, broadcast, or distribution in any manner.

Observed Party's Name (please print): ____________________________________________________________

Signature: ________________________________________________________________________________

Date:________________________________________

Poet's signature: _______________________________________________________________________________

Date:________________________________________
Witness: ________________________________________________________________________________

(And please don't take it personally if I don't use you, after all. It doesn't mean you're not an intriguing subject, just that I haven't yet figured out how to work you into a poem.)

The Voiceless Future of Radio

A Motorola radio from 1940 in the collection of the Western Historic Radio Museum. 

New Yorker columnist Sasha Frere-Jones recently described listening to the radio as "grappling with a d.j." and I am happy to be one of those. I will miss radio if it ever disappears. 

I will miss, most of all, the voice, because that is - in fact, the very thing we are losing by switching to Pandora or iTunes or whatever else comes along. The personality, the humanness. 

For a blog about poetry and good writing, radio would seem to be "off topic," unless the radio show in question incorporates poetry, which "Audio Saucepan" does. Every week I select more poems than I can possibly fit into the show, then winnow down to two or three that suggest a theme or meet my mood, or that I want to hear from a recording. Some poems I want to speak into the microphone, to hear them reverberate in my ears.

Tune in tomorrow for a poem by Arab-American Hayan Charara from The Alchemist’s Diary, and an excerpt from William Corbett’s “The Whalen Poem” (both books published by Hanging Loose Press). Corbett is a fixture on the Boston literary scene, a man who believes that “poetry is a social act.” 

This brings us full circle back to the idea of radio. I'm excited to have the chance to read both and mix them with music. Tune in - you'll be surprised, and hopefully delighted by the combination of beats and rhythm, harmony and voice.

Audio Saucepan: The Cow and the Couch Episode

Sunday, March 20, 5-6 PM Mountain Time

on KSFR 101.1FM in northern New Mexico or streaming live at www.ksfr.org

One Day Before the Performance

Another one of the photos on display at the National Hispanic Cultural Center.
This one was taken by Soledad Cordoba. It is one of several that still
 haunts me with its beauty and strangeness.

I keep thinking about the Women and Women performance at the National Hispanic Cultural Center. I suspect the audience will feel like they are sitting inside a stereo system, and the sounds will be soothing and difficult and, above all, thought-provoking.

Using primarily our voices - both words and sounds, Jamie Figueroa, Valerie Martinez, Shelle Sanchez and I intend to give the multiphonic experience of really looking at the photos, of deconstructing them into the main character, or the woman shooting the photo, or someone else observing. And then, we move away from that, and talk instead about us, and how each photo affects us.

We've rehearsed and rearranged our script several times now. Sometimes I recognize what I wrote; other times, I've taken ownership of someone else's words, the words I'll be saying. I know enough of the script to feel comfortable with it, not enough for it to be stale.

The flow is remarkable.

It's heady stuff - writing about women, with other women, until you don't know - exactly - which of the many voices are truly yours.


Five Poets Respond to "Women & Women," Photographs by Spanish Women
Saturday, March 19 , 2011
6:30 pm
Domenici Education Center
Free

World Literature Today Considers Jazz

I created this tribute portrait of jazz pianist and composer 
Thelonious Monk out of fabric and thread. It's called "Loudest Noise."
Check out the rest of my jazz art series at http://www.laurencamp.com/art/jazz.shtml 

About six months ago, the editors of World Literature Today invited me to guest edit a special section on jazz poetry for the magazine. 

I compiled that special section, word by word and poet by poet, over the bitterest winter months. You can read my intro and hear a few poems online, or pick up a copy of the March/April 2011 issue and read it all -- the whole musical section, plus poems, profiles, essays, interviews of international literary luminaries. Good writing? Yes. A good way to learn about the world? Definitely.

I've been immersed in jazz for years and years - exploring the subject as a visual artist, a poet, a radio programmer, a performer. I've done everything I can but learn an instrument. It was thrilling to move outside of myself, outside of my country, and look at the words -- and musical rhythms -- of others. 

The way we keep music alive is by listening to it, buying it, letting it be part of our surroundings. The poems in this special section expand jazz in new directions. The words of these poets might just lead you back to more listening...

or even to some exploratory music-based writing of your own...

Performance Poetry - The Collaboration

A water photograph and female portrait by Gabriela Grech.
This is one of the pieces in the NHCC exhibit that the four poets responded to
- and will present to the audience on Saturday evening.

When I last wrote about the Women and Women performance I'm coordinating at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, the three other poets and I were in the throes of cutting up sentences into phrases, phrases into duets and triplets of words. We compiled our varied texts, all responses to the photos on display -- a thought from me here, and then a thought from Val or Shelle or Jamie. We moved words in and out until it became difficult to tell who wrote what.

We happily created something entirely new, something equally poetic, but somehow more than anything we could have done on our own.

The performance is this Saturday, March 19th at 6:30 PM. We will be offering our intermingled text in the room where the photos are - at the Domenici Education Center, an open, light-filled gallery at the National Hispanic Cultural Center on the south edge of Albuquerque. It's a glorious space. It will feel intimate. It will be powerful.

The Antithesis of Good Writing

Rock star Mick Jagger's screaming mouth

This is a harsh, quick world. Everything is NOW...


... but I wish people would write salutations when they email me. 


And I wish each person would sign his or her name (or, at least, initials), maybe adding some little nicety like "yours" or "sincerely." It just seems entirely more humane to address the person you're writing to, rather than pushing their faces right in to the meat of your message, and then exiting without a backward glance. 


As long as I'm complaining, let me say that when you type in all caps, I think you're screaming. Please don't scream at me in your emails. I can more easily assimilate straight, reliable 12-point Verdana. 


And don't write to me in fat fuzzy pink letters. Yuck. I feel like I've been splooged with vomit. 

As readers and writers, is it possible to keep the poetry in everything we do, every word we write, to let those words be full and expressive? I'm not suggesting revising emails ... just taking a moment for kindness, gentility and clarity. 

I could cry over the emails that come sans punctuation.. or with words that fit better in a text message, but okay. Those aren't rude, just sloppy. 


As a poet, I think about the language I'm using and the language you use to address me. I want desperately for it to be lifted up from that place of indifference, that place where no one calls anyone by name. I am not invisible ... RU?

Why Not Memorize a Poem?

The other day I wrote about memorization. It's lovely to have poems in your memory bank, just as you keep song lyrics there. Poems provide a meditation, something better to think about than whatever is troubling you, a new way to reflect on an issue.

Here's the Robert Frost poem my student has been committing to memory for the past several days. I've been saying it a lot lately as I drive around town:

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lak4
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Previous post - why memorize a poem?

Poetry about War

Graphic by Saknarin Chinayote to accompany  the poem "Waves" by Charles Frederickson;

the most recent poem on the online poetry-news site The New Verse News

I've felt a bit out of touch with the news lately. It's a deliberate act - the not-looking at the media. Sometimes I can't stand to know enough.  The innocence is lovely, but also unsafe. How long can I float around in the harbor of unknowing? 


I'm aware of the tsunami in Japan, the crud going on in Libya, the revolutions, the suicide bombers.... how much can we take? where do we put this kind of knowledge? where in our bodies? where in our minds? 


I did a poetry reading and panel with three poets the other night. Renee Gregorio talked about "bodying-forth" with our poetry, feeling and expressing what we know inside. How do we do this if our bodies hold only ugly and dark?


This morning I turned to The New Verse News for some understanding. Instead of a straight media overview of the world, I wanted the poets' takes. I wanted my news to be somehow beautiful, somehow breathtaking.  I read about Steve Jobs and Charlie Sheen, along with the regular horrific examples of the state of our world. I read "fears are pennies / on a dead man’s eyes" in a poem called "America's Last WWI Veteran Dies" by donnarkevic, and felt somehow better. The line was just so stunning.


NVN isn't the Huff Post where news come through in (un)manageable bytes. Check it out. I believe in poetry that tells the truth, but tells it just the slightest bit slant. It makes my body feel a little less sick at what I have to know.

Why memorize a poem?

Gorgeous photo, huh?
This would be a good place to work on memorizing - or writing - a new poem.

Thanks to www.anewenglandlife.com for capturing the moment.

I tutor English several hours a week, working with students returning to college aftr a long hiatus, ESL students, or students with learning disabilities. Sometimes, with all three combined.

Many, though not all, of the students I work with are in developmental classes or first-level college English. Their projects often intrigue me, perhaps because I never mind going back to the basics.

A few days ago, one of my "regulars" came in with the assignment to learn Robert Frost's most famous poem by heart. We had 30 minutes.

I wasn't sure she could do it. But we started. She referred to the poem as "Stopping by THE woods on a Snowy Evening." For some reason, she needed to state that article until I asked her which woods, exactly, she was referring to.

Moving on to the poem itself, I recited a line, and she told it back to me. It went along like this until she had it at least partly cemented in her memory.

Where she got stuck, I prompted her - not just with Frost's words but with his intent. We broke off from memorizing a few times to talk about the meaning of the poem. Lines she said she loved, she hadn't really thought about. She was taken with the rhythm, the rhyme, the pretty picture they seemed to convey.

When she understood more of the background of Frost, why he'd written the poem, what he meant or might have meant, she started to find it easier to memorize. We agreed that she needed to emphasize certain words, that she couldn't just throw off that second "and miles to go before I sleep."

That line means something, and what she did with her tone and inflection as she recited it would change how the poem came across to her audience.

Next post - More on the poem and memorization

The Magic of Seeing

I promised a poem about an artist. Here, instead, is a poem of mine about art. I referenced the work and processes of many artists. This is the first poem in my book, This Business of Wisdom. 

THE MAGIC OF SEEING

by Lauren Camp

Notice the yellowing tape

and the graphite hatches scattered across the paper:

a dark diagram

of saved details. Notice the pattern

scored into each layer,

then stripped and curved away, the long arc

of sunlit days gilded into squares.

Toss your small goodbyes into the sanded planes

and the grid

slumped into a vague halo of  wax. Notice the spaces

for your worries. Notice

the buoyant red and its authority

over the canvas, the way it seems to be igniting.

Notice lines that have collapsed, the ripped

and wrung-out corners

and the ruthless ones,

each a departure from perfect balance. Notice the sweat,

the swagger of trees, the shadow, and the scale.

You stand in a pinhole, surfacing again in a haze

of light – a paradox of vision; this is the view

from the constructed earth, the sea,

the future. You are folded into the shape

and stretch; your sure eye

will see the ghosts, the yeasty texture of deliberation

caked on and scraped off. Concentrate on the bruises:

the pauses –

and the breaks, each quarrel

of pigment, the devotion to luck

and the points of harmony, the drips, the gin,

the risk

and negative space; enjoy the language

of the hand and the small stroke of reason.

A shy ripple haunts the tall gray letters; notice

the horses’ hooves, the fruit bowl, the spattered bloom

of bravery, the virtue of the varnish.

Listen to the slashes, the fire. 

Notice the dots. And those

repeating orange cars. And when your hands ask,

love the hands that built this, that tilted back the paint

into blades and eyes.

Notice the white, the thunderous white

brooding with invisible butterflies in the center of the picture.

Poetry Prompt 1 - Write about an Artist

A painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat called "Untitled (Quality)."
You can see it in person at the Whitney Museum in NYC. 

I've been noodling with a poem that reflects the artwork of Jean-Michel Basquiat. As a sometimes visual artist, I find the art-making process both familiar and fascinating. I'm always trying to capture a tiny bit of another artist's creative impulse and the best way I've found to be derivative, but unique, is to write poems about art, rather than direct copying in oil or acrylics or pencil.

I've written poems of or about Georgia O'Keeffe, Agnes Martin, Cy Twombly, and other artists. Tomorrow, I'll share one of these with you.

So, as I continue to consider (and happily research) Basquiat's life and work, I encourage you to try this yourself. Pick an artist whose work takes your breath away. Write from a comfortable distance about a painting, or a sculpture, or a quilt you like. Whatever it is you adore, write about it. Pretend to watch the artist work. Or better yet, move in closer and describe process. For a short time, be the artist.

If you end up with something incredible, send it to me. I'd love to see what you've created with your words.

Woman with Butterflies

"Homage" by Ana Juan
To learn more about Ana, click here.

Today I defaced a New Yorker. It's okay; don't worry. I mean the publication, not a person.

I pulled the cover right off, and stuck it up next to me at my desk.

Yesterday, I wrote all day. Actually, I wrote and rewrote. I revised happily for hours. By the end of the day, I felt like this woman with butterflies. Butterflies were my words and the words flew out, flitted around and piled up on top of each other, all brightly colored.

And just like the photo, the butterfly-words stayed close by so I could catch them. After all, I needed them.

Revising feels like this to me - a way to make a poem flutter and become bright, or maybe - just maybe -  a moment of absolute exhilaration when all the words coalesce and lift the poem into absolute color.

Dear Editor,

Your signature matters when you're sending a submission.
Make sure it comes out looking smart and confident!

Submitting poems to editors is an act of faith.

Here's how I do it: I carefully select my poems for each journal, choosing the ones I am sure are going to make the editors swoon with delight. Then, with some kind of ceremony, I sign the cover letter. I use my best pen - the only one with a nib! -- and make sure the signature is flowing and gracious, and somehow also looks smart and poetic.

Finally, I fold the poems precisely in thirds, as though each fold has been exactly considered -- just like the words in my poems.

I even select the stamps, because editors might look at those to make their decision about my poems. I want the stamps to say something. The 61-cent Richard Wright stamp seems perfect these days. It says that I am  aware of current issues in the world (only sometimes true), and that what's in this envelope is no namby-pamby junk; it's honest, and relevant, serious and perhaps slightly controversial...

(Anyway, that's what I expect editors to infer from my stamp choice.)

So, when some months later, I find an SASE in my mailbox so skinny that it seems there couldn't possibly be anything at all in there, an immediate depression sets in.

This is not a post about those times. This is to say "hurrah!" to the editors who take a moment to write an encouraging word on those minute, form rejection slips. Rejections like these are actually uplifting -- not quite as much as an acceptance, but they make me want to get back to my desk and write, or send out another submission.  

In a Poetry Reading, There Should Be Humor

I have decided that someone, somehow, should make the audience laugh - at some point in a performance. It breaks the ice; it lets the audience move around a little in their bodies. Laughter does this; it loosens you.

I got to thinking about this yesterday afternoon. Three women I know had put together a reading at the Women's Club in town. The women were all sophisticated in their outfits (each in some shades of black and gray), and I expected the same sophistication of the poems. I knew these women's writing, and admired it.

But, there were funny parts, amidst the poems of memory and obsession, health and worry. Someone used the word "fart" in a poem, and we laughed. One of the women read a dog sonnet. I think something changed in that room when we giggled and snickered.

If poems are everything that is, poems are also body parts that don't do things right in public and snorts and stupid little imaginings.

It felt good to laugh, and then to have them turn us back to more serious subjects. Then, I was ready again for the heavier work of poetry - the grittier, powerful poetry of anything else.

I need to remember this. I so rarely write funny poems....

Poetry Is Impossibly Difficult to Define

A broadside from al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, a wonderful project
begun by San Francisco writer and bookseller Beau Beausoleil.
See the collection at http://www.library.fau.edu/depts/spc/JaffeCenter/collection/al-mutanabbi/index.php

Kim Rosen, in an interview in The Sun (December 2010), describes poetry as "containing the grit of humanity right next to the vastness of being."

The other night, at a reading in memory of Baghdad's book-centric al-Mutanabbi Street, New Mexico History Museum curator Tom Leach introduced the event by saying that poems are "the opposite of war."

These thoughts cheer me. Poems are what I turn to to smooth away the distress of war, and to express my sadness/madness/uncertainty. These are also, often, the reasons why I write, though there are others.

Yesterday, getting ready for an upcoming performance, I pulled a recent favorite poem of mine, a stream-of-consciousness block of poetic language with myriad twists and turns. Trying to find it in my collection of papers, I passed numerous poems I had written that are fragmentary and challenging.

So, I see, in my own writing, there's room for every style of poem - from narrative to abstract, from disturbed to grateful.

What Poetry Is - Part 4

They don't exactly look like their poetry!
Stephen Dobyns on the left,

 and Laura Mullen on the right 
(www.lauramullen.biz/index.htm) 

So, in the past few days, I've looked at two books that randomly caught my attention. The books are at ends of the poetry spectrum. Neither offers exactly what you'd expect from a poem. Both take some amount of work to decipher or hold onto.

Is this poetry? Sure.

Is this poetry you or I like? Well, it depends. There are things to admire in both books, but sometimes I just want a kick-in-the-stomach sort of poem, something that makes me feel an immediate response. Something I can follow and fully get on my first reading. Sometimes I don't want to float and I don't want to be pinged around. Other times, I don't mind doing the work of coming into the poem slowly, of feeling excluded, and then - slowly, included, in what it's trying to tell me.

... Or the work of being pulled around on a leash. Of being told something, but only getting it - really - at the end of the walk.

What do YOU think? What kinds of poems do you like?

Next post - a wrap up and some quotes
Previous post - Laura Mullen's Dark Archive

What Poetry Is - Part 3

 This 1976 pinball game was called Surfer. It looks so charming compared to today's designs. The game cost a quarter, and the player got five balls per game.  I found this photo at www.lyonspinball.com.

Continuing my discussion of two poetry books at polar opposite sides of the spectrum...


The other book, Laura Mullen's Dark Archive, has the feeling of an undertow. Where Dobyns floated us through one incredibly long stanza, Mullen's poems pulls us into words and phrases that jump around the page, dislocated words that are tabbed into phrases that create strange steps, and phrases that lead into ... nothing at times, or as Mullen says in a poem entitled "OWN:" "and apparently abandons that subject."

The poems feel, perhaps, like sinking. In one of the book's early poems, she says: "I fear I can no longer think / I fear I am no longer that which things / Or that a certain kind of thinking's lost"...

Mullen's poems, like Dobyns', are about contemporary society. She, too, looks around and comments on the disasters and inadequacies. In her poems, I feel like the little metal ball pinging back and forth in a game of pinball.


Next post - Putting the books together
Previous post - Stephen Dobyns' Winter's Journey

What Poetry Is - Part 2

Slapstick actor from the silent film era: Charlie Chaplin

The two books I mentioned reading in yesterday's post are Stephen Dobyns' Winter Journey and Laura Mullen's Dark Archive. Such different styles these two writers have!

Dobyns takes the reader on a stream-of-consciousness trip. The poems run 4-5 pages in a block with line breaks, but no stanzas. The words are clear and fully understandable. At times, it even feels that maybe this isn't poetry, just someone thinking out loud. He begins the poem in one place (walking the dog, for example), then moves to Germany, then touches on slapstick, then the U.S. administration (Bush, I believe), then returns back to the dog.

In a way, it's like being on a long leash, going out with the tide, wherever the tide goes, and finally (4 pages later) returning to your owner.

Next post - considering the other book
Previous post - beginning to consider what poetry is

What Poetry Is - Part 1

I've spent a fair amount of time studying John Fincher's paintings. He is an artist who beautifully captures beauty. You know his subject; he is not trying to confound the viewer. You can see more of his work at: www.lewallencontemporary.com

I've had my head in a few poetry books this morning, and now (as often), I'm thinking about what poetry is - exactly. My students ask me this now and again. They assume a poem needs to rhyme, or be impossible to understand. I tell them that there are poems in places they wouldn't expect. There are poems in grocery lists and science textbooks, for example.

I tell them that poems can - and do - make sense, and that poems can - and do - confound. I tell them that poems can also hurt. Not all poems are beautiful.

I peruse a lot of poetry, stopping when something catches my attention. I'm conscientious of starting poetry books at the beginning (as I would with a novel), because I believe the author is owed this decency. I want to understand the concept of the book as a whole.

But, I admit, if I am displeased by what I see, I begin skipping around in the book, leapfrogging over poems that don't appeal.

I almost always read the last poem in the book, too.

Tomorrow: going further with what poetry is

Apology to Other Poets

To all the poets I know who are trying so diligently to get your voice and words out there,

to the poets who have planned a beautiful reading,

to the poets who have readings that overlap on Fridays and Sundays and Thursdays (which happens often because I live in a place rich with words),

to the poets I don’t know whose book tours bring you to town,

to the poets whose readings happen when I am working at my day job, or teaching a night class,

to the poets whose events fall on my anniversary or the night of the year’s best jazz concert,

forgive me, please. Poetry matters so much to me that sometimes I have to make a decision to sit and write, to re-fill my own well with those precious moments of free time I can find. Sometimes, when I say no to your event, I need desperately instead to sit at my desk and move my thoughts around in my head and my mind, rather than sitting in the audience and holding my breath for those beautiful words you may utter.

I need both – your words and mine --  but always, I need them in balance.

Keep writing, and I will keep showing up at a handful of your events - and meaning to get to the rest of them. 

A Poem for Eric Dolphy

Here's my poem from Upstairs at Duroc, Issue 12:

RINGS (for Eric Dolphy, 1964)

by Lauren Camp

On a ledge, I align 20 stones,

dark ovals smooth as the inside of my thigh, small orbs

ringed with white.

“Something Sweet, Something Tender,”

circles written when the seas retreated,

the raw song of mourning.

Dolphy’s clarinet turns a slow tide that surges and drifts.

He holds a bag of logic and many colors

fitted into keys, an anthem of sense and anger,

the loud shadow of a burden. His reed pushes, scatters.

Vibes burble on the ocean of tomorrow

as bass strings sink spasms

of plodding sadness in cool air; each returning swell

a sphere collected on a beach the size of sound.

The trumpet comes in sullen; tones drop

like an anchor.

No one realizes, and a soul bleeds.

New language forms.

Everyone collects behind the beat

until the clarinet grabs a line and knots up dusk

with ginger-sharp thought.

Understanding makes me dizzy. My pulse syncopates

in rhythm to the plucked, torn sound,

a noise that wears itself down, the chunked voice

of five men playing a deep confusion layered by time,

the sediment constantly smoothing, forever softening,

until all that remains is dark –

rimmed with a white bracelet from another era.