Discoveries, Appetites and Visions: A Conversation between Karen George and Lauren Camp
Karen George’s A Map and One Year (Dos Madres, 2018) is a collection composed from words found in poems by Dickinson, Neruda, and Transtromer, novels by Anthony Doerr and James Joyce, letters by van Gogh, and a diary of Frida Kahlo. It’s a dreamscape with a narrative arc that explores love, loss, memory, and transformation, threaded with images of connection to the natural world.
Lauren Camp’s Took House (Tupelo, 2020) is a disquieting book about intimate relationships and what is seen and hidden. The unknown appears and repeats, eerily echoing need. Blame, power and disorder hover, unsettling what we know of love.
LC: I see a number of your poems grew out of your involvement in Tupelo’s 30/30 program. That’s a task — to write a poem each day. Were you already involved in this work when you started that daily effort?
KG: Yes, I began writing found poems in the summer of 2013 when I joined Lexington, Kentucky’s Challenge to write a poem a day during the month of June. I tried to think of poems to write quick drafts of. I’d recently discovered The Found Poetry Review, and started researching and reading various types of found poems, so decided to write a found poem a day. I have a large library of poetry collections, as well as favorite fiction, and non-fiction, that I used as source documents for the found poems. I liked the idea of my poems being a kind of homage to my favorite authors. Once I wrote a week’s worth, they became addictive, and I signed up a month later to write a poem a day in August for the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project. When I later examined those drafts, revised them, and continued to write more, I noticed repeated patterns of images and ideas, and recognized ways in which the poems connected to each other in a narrative arc. That became the impetus for A Map and One Year.
Speaking of repeated imagery, in Took House you refer to tables and knives frequently. Do you remember what led you into employing this imagery of food and drink to accentuate the wild nature of the relationship? Did you have any hesitations about it?
LC: I only had hesitations about the poems when I got to the point in the revising that I realized there might be readers. But the specific details—the serrated implements and the raptors’ talons, for example—didn’t give me pause. It’s enticing to include that kind of specificity. That edge wakes me up. I came to poetry from a career as a visual artist. I was often looking for something to include in my artwork that would add tension, which could be a strange color combination or … well, I included barbed wire in one piece, cut glass and rusted nails in some others.
Situating at a table means, in a way, writing about appetite. I did it very clearly, and quite differently, in One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), by focusing on hunger for heritage. I think those impulses are where the intrigue lies, in the things we feed ourselves, what we choose to sate our needs (body, mind and the emotional self)—whether those needs are healthy, or simply cravings.
Thinking about hungers and cravings, intrigue and edges that wake you up, did your play of language in your found poems stay fully as pleasure, or can you give an example of something darker that showed up?
KG: Yes, darker things did show up in the form of nightmarish dreams after a loss—images such as a chamber of claws, snakes, and bloodworms; caves with mouthfuls of teeth. Mentions of punctures and deep wounds, images of cutting into pain, and pain as a knife. Descriptions of grief as torture that turns you away from beauty; grief as an edge, and a high rope held taut. Oddly enough, in the poems about sexual desire the image of need as a blade also turned up, and the idea of opening oneself to a relationship invariably means opening oneself to hurt.
I want to say how much I appreciate the sense of mystery, things intentionally left unsaid, in your poems, too. It creates curiosity in the reader, something to pull them in, something to puzzle and mull over. “Repetitions” and “Remember It Was” are two consecutive poems I found mysterious and enthralling. Can you talk about the poems a little and maybe what you were trying to convey?
LC: Thank you for calling out these poems! “Repetitions” is a modified pantoum, though it didn’t start that way. The language was there, but initially, I couldn’t find the shape of the poem. The form allows me to circle around a subject I can’t release, and the rules push me to re-examine the words and redirect toward new meanings. In “Repetitions,” the melody set up by the call and response of each line counteracts the subject, providing a friction that satisfies me.
My notes show that I wrote “Remember It Was” nearly 8 years after I started writing the other poems in this body of work. I don’t recall anything about how it originated, but I feel certain I started with that first line: “I will speak of this wind: name it continent, name it / dredging.” That line feels Biblical to me in tone.
You use syllabic forms such as haiku, tanka and cinquain. You also work with a variety of line lengths and sometimes incorporate tabs (or pauses in lines). How did you make your decisions about these? Was this decision based on sound or visual approach, and did it have anything to do with the way the source material was formatted?
KG: When I first began writing found poems, I thought it might be advisable to start with short poems, that’s why I originally chose to use syllabic forms. But it was interesting how it became a challenge within a challenge—to only use a specified number of syllables and lines, besides only using the words of the source text to compose the poem. I also found it energizing to compose short poems, because more emphasis is placed on each word, so I tried to use words, phrases, and images that worked on several levels, that held multiple meanings. The sound of the words was equally important to me.
As far as the line lengths for each poem, those became intuitive decisions that sometimes resulted from the subject of the poem, or from an image or sound I wanted the particular lines to end on. This was also true for my choices of using pauses in lines. For instance my poem “Contrapuntal” which used Chapter 14 of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses as its source document, takes place in the sea, so I envisioned the long couplets echoing the expansiveness of the sea, and the white space between stanzas as the spaces between waves. The pauses within the line came to represent the choppiness of the sea, its inconsistent rhythm. I specifically did not want my found poems to echo the source documents meaning or formats, but in “Contrapuntal” I intentionally mimicked James Joyce’s way of combining words to make a new word, so I created new words such as “bellycrab,” “wombchamber,” and “wellbuilt,” because the poem was written for a special La Bloom Issue of Found Poetry Review that was being published on Bloomsday—June 16th –a celebration named after Leopold Bloom, the main character in Ulysses. In my poem I also chose to echo an aspect of Ulysses’ Chapter 14, in which a character visits a woman who gives birth to a child. In thinking about birth and origins in a broader sense, I decided in my poem to create an alternative version of the creation story in Genesis.
In Took House, I marveled at how seamlessly the ekphrastic poems you included connect with the other poems through images of box, wall, corner, door, tongue, light and dark, and themes of hunger, desire, time, and wreckage. Did you pick the artwork intentionally with that in mind?
LC: Over the years, I have returned to the arts as subjects in some of my poems. I’m fascinated by artists and their processes. These poems are an unintentional palate cleanser from other work. I look at, or listen to, something that mesmerizes me, and write to figure out more: maybe why it exists, what it says to me.
I have quite a collection of these types of poems. Deep into the revising process of Took House, I thought some might belong. Around the same time, I was writing the raptor poems with the intention to add those. There was a lot happening on the manuscript at that point, much of which was intuitive—a response I learned to trust when I was making art. I chose to include ekphrastic poems with some edginess or repetition and/or a feeling of enclosure, but that doesn’t mean I found the artworks dark—just mystifying or spacious enough for a variety of interpretations. For example, I’ve long been enamored of Eva Hesse, as a person and as an innovative and ambitious artist. Her works are not easy to categorize or explain. I like that complication.
It was only in returning to the manuscript some time later that I understood the many connections between the art poems and the other poems.
Are you in the poems in A Map and One Year? Were you working through any issues in these poems? What did you discover in the process of collaging them?
KG: I intentionally set out to exclude myself from these poems, in the sense that they were not specifically written about something I was experiencing personally at the time. That had to do mostly with the fact that these found poems were rising from the words in the source documents, and seemed to take on a life of their own, as if the words I chose to use created a persona or narrator separate from myself. But as often happens, the poems many times ended up speaking about, and examining, subjects such as relationships, loss, grief, longing, desire, and memory. Which was no surprise, because during the years I wrote and revised these poems, I was dealing with the illness and loss of my father, and my first and second husbands. Plus, my mother’s health was deteriorating, and she went through horrific bouts of depression. She died three months ago. I was her eldest daughter and primary caregiver. So, in reading some of these poems now, I get the sense they originated not only from the source documents, but my own subconscious, such as the line “Coming apart is never easy” in “Blind believing.” …And of course, I also learned again and again, that writing and examining, diving deeper into the pain, is what leads me out of it.
I was particularly curious about the longest poem in your book, the ekphrastic poem “Empirical Theories of a Box-Maker,” with what I would call an experimental form—using various lengths of prose sections and regular line-delineated sections, with and without punctuation, separated by literal boxes of varying numbers. Within this poem, there is a page-long unpunctuated section in which the repetition of the phrase “this untitled box of “ followed by things such as “choices,” “absence,” “grudges,” “caution,” “confessing,” “sorrow,” “conscience,” and “shadow.” Can you talk about what your process was is arriving at this format?
LC: Like you, I see the source material as an energizing agent, and also want to push beyond it. That is true when I’m writing art-inspired poems. In “Empirical Theories of a Box-Maker,” I had no interest in recreating or describing the art, nor strictly giving voice to the artist.
I am drawn to minimalist art, though not exclusively. This kind of art that isn’t easily understood lets me find my own meaning or space within.
I had heard a great deal about Donald Judd’s magical art realm in Marfa, Texas. Many years ago, my husband and I decided to make a road trip there. To be honest, I wasn’t sure why I was going. Maybe to confirm that 100 rigid metal boxes would be no big deal? But that wasn’t what I found…
I was utterly moved by the mass of those boxes, individually and collectively, and the way the light shifted through the former gunshed where they were housed. I imagined that each box held, or could hold, its own discrete contents.
I began the poem in 2011 as an unnumbered list of exactly 100 imagined contents for those boxes. I made a note to myself on an early version to write about: “how he worked.” I was interested in Judd and his mastery of such minimalism, but I also wanted a variety of points of view in the poem: mine, Judd’s, maybe even the box’s viewpoint. For some of the sections, the prose format seemed to reflect the firm structure of a box. But I believe a pattern set is a pattern meant to be broken.
Judd’s boxes are repetitive, but that doesn’t mean they are the same. They are open to interpretations and disturbances. I brought who I was to that giant room, and then brought another me to the revisions. The boxes could hold all of it.
In 2015, the poem was narrowed a bit to what you see now and published in The Seattle Review. When I started thinking of what I might add to the basic body of work that encompassed Took House, the art poems were a logical place to look. They had been well received and showed a certain alternate way I see the world.
Speaking of shifts… what are you working on now? I often found, especially in my work as a visual artist, that projects suggested other ways of doing them. Have you done all you intend with found poetry or is there more you’d like to explore from it?
KG: I’m not currently writing more found poems, unless I see a specific Call for Submissions for found poems that interests me. I am intrigued by visual poetry, combining a photograph with the text of a poem, for instance. But I do have another manuscript of found poems that I'm doing final revisions on, tentatively titled A Hinged Nest. There are two other poetry collections I’m finishing up. The first revolves around actual dreams, daydreams, and visions. The second involves my obsession with art—ekphrastic poems inspired by the work and life of Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, and Emily Carr. Many years ago, while I was in college, I became fascinated with art and in particular the Impressionists, and how the novels of Virginia Woolf compared to Impressionist art. Then, in 2012 I travelled to Paris with Spalding University’s MFA in Writing Program, and fell in love with the Impressionists, and art in general, all over again when I visited The Musée d'Orsay, The Louvre, Musée Rodin, and The Pompidou Centre. I wound up writing a series of poems about specific Monet paintings I saw in Paris, which led to a collaborative ekphrastic chapbook published in 2017, Frame and Mount the Sky, with three other women poets (Donelle Dreese, Nancy Jentsch, & Taunja Thomson). It doesn’t feel like I’ll ever stop writing about art. I’m not a visual artist, but I do take photographs obsessively, though I’m only self-taught.
And you? What are you working on these days?
LC: I’ve been writing drafts of poems that interrogate daily life and current events and the skin and rock of the desert—my regular topics. Each time, I want to see if I can find a new way in.
And I continue to write about art. For the last few years, I’ve been interrogating my understanding of the work of painter Agnes Martin. I’m turning thoughts about my life and societal issues through a lens of her unknowability and her very still paintings. Eventually, these poems will find their way together. Or not.
I learned with Took House that any collection I assemble wants time to breathe, time to deviate from what I expected for it. I know that it’s the working through and stepping back, again and again, that makes the joy of this work.
Karen George is author of five chapbooks, and two poetry collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim Your Way Back (2014) and A Map and One Year (2018). She has appeared in Adirondack Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, South Dakota Review, Louisville Review, and Naugatuck River Review. She reviews poetry at Poetry Matters, and is co-founder and fiction editor of Waypoints. Visit her website at: https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.
Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Slice, DIAGRAM and other journals. Winner of the Dorset Prize, Lauren has also received fellowships from The Black Earth Institute and The Taft-Nicholson Center, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. More information and some poems are available at www.laurencamp.com.