In the latest installment of KNAU's series PoetrySnaps!, we meet Lauren Camp, the current Poet Laureate of New Mexico. She didn’t know she was a poet until someone attending one of her visual art show many years ago told her she was based on the blurbs she wrote for her pieces. It was a revelation that changed her life. Now, seven books and numerous accolades later, Camp shares with us her poem When the Line is Possible.
Lauren Camp:
The poem I want to read follows the artist Agnes Martin, not as a biography but more as a muse for her artwork, which is spacious and abstract and really kind of empty. So, it starts with a quote from Agnes Martin:
“I just gradually learned to stop thinking. It doesn’t help to try to shut it off forcefully.”
How often she spoke for her work of silence with a wide gaze. How little she gave with her hermetic and constant impossible answers and this was a revolution, a nest in the clouds. Where I am not, there will be vigils today. Yesterday, someone nearly fell. Someone fell. Someone stopped wearing hijab. Someone found emblems. Someone rages. Another city claims another person who needs a better question. My family believes I am overly sensitive. This is a fault of the imagination. Someone finds names to erase or to prove. Before this peninsula, I was constantly fatigued. It is morning, it is afternoon. I am sinking to worship the slipping of water. The hawks overhead. A vigil is not like the march that took place over the winter: the group moved with its variables and songs like a jagged vein and moved in its lode calm to the courthouse which remained round and steady in the center of town. This estuary is built on an exact arrangement of roads. My husband sends a love note each morning and today’s said he was blue. My father’s gait is off; he cannot get up from his bed. The nation keeps straying and I’m in the wet and dry weeds, watching the water carry on, extending its dialogue both ways with land. Space here can be inward, omitting all light. Last night the composer also staying here said he had learned in the small local church about the annual regatta. There were always boats on the river in Boston. That city for me was a tall house and a radius. Every view of the river proved it could be there, placid or angry or loose. It was easy to be a stranger, to be made of the streets, to be lush every evening with satisfactory attractions. In my other cities it was easy to be a stranger. To make a name and a flower of life. I have been long in this room reading articles and interviews with Agnes and don’t know who she was. Many people turned out for the march and I believe they will be there for the vigil and for the next lacerating discontent. There is an efficiency to a line, which builds a network right or left, which promises and remembers again and has the chance to repeat. Agnes’ blue is simple and watery with great potential. Agnes’ line is not exact, and not weak. You might see nothing, but it is a source. Considered. Reporting opinions. Significant. It is level.
(Originally published in An Eye in Each Square, River River Books, 2023)
About the poet:
Lauren Camp is a poet, educator, and the current Poet Laureate of New Mexico. She is also a former Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Camp is the recipient of an Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. Her work has been translated into multiple languages, including Spanish, French, Mandarin, and Arabic.
About the host:
Steven Law is the co-producer of KNAU’s series PoetrySnaps! He is a poet, essayist, storyteller, and the author of Polished, a collection of poems about exploring the Colorado Plateau by foot and by raft.
About the music:
Original music by Flagstaff-based band Pilcrowe.
PoetrySnaps! airs the first and third Friday of each month.
