Featured Book: The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost, by Michael T. Young

The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost. Michael T. Young. Poets Wear Prada, 2014.

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Michael T. Young has published four collections of poetry, most recently, The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost. He’s the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award for his collection, Living in the Counterpoint. He’s also received the Chaffin Poetry Award. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Fogged Clarity, The Louisville Review, The Potomac Review, and Rattle. He lives with his wife, children and cats in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Description:
. . . explores the difficulties and necessities of violating expectation, both one’s own and those of others. Through this necessary risk meaning and growth are found. Throughout the exploration, questions of memory and history, loss and identity are probed.

Blurb:
In The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost, poet Michael T. Young writes with a “dangerous brilliance.” Keening through histories, personal and collective, Young guides the reader to unimagined destinations. Rather than feeling lost, however, the reader arrives at termini of discovery, finding them to be inevitable, necessary, earned. Young enacts these journeys through cognitive leaps that defy reason and syntax, performed by his prodigious wizardry. And as the unknown becomes known, what is lost is regained, for these poems are redemptive. Each one is bathed in a luminosity of phrasing Wallace Stevens would have envied. Young writes, “[H]ear the voice in light / whose only utterance is melting snow.” Unlike snow, these poems will not disappear as long as important poetry continues to matter.  (Dean Kostos)


The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost

The secrets of a place are in its small streets,
its narrow passages, the alley in Venice
with cobblestones worn down and wet
by the humidity and dank progression of centuries,
the way we turned the same corner as others
in different years had turned into that dead-end
with its dark alcove, back doors and a wall
gaping with a niche containing a statue
of the Madonna and child, or in Florence
along a street where we pressed
into the painted brick to let a bus go by
while you pulled my backpack out of the way;
gnarled streets in Amsterdam, lower
Manhattan, passages like crooked fingers
pointing the way back to childhood,
when I liked to hide in closets, crouch
in a hamper full of clothing or make a tent
out of a bed sheet. Or the passes
and cul-de-sacs stumbled on in a beautiful
moment of being lost, the way we come
into life, without intention, snug in the primal dark.


More Poems:

The Adirondack Review

Rattle
with audio


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Featured Book: I Carry My Mother, by Leslea Newman

I Carry My Mother. Leslie Newman. Headmistress Press, 2015.

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Lesléa Newman is the author of several poetry collections, including Nobody’s Mother, Signs of Love, and October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard (novel-in-verse) which received a Stonewall Honor from the American Library Association. Her literary awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation; the Burning Bush Poetry Prize; and second place runner-up in the Solstice Literary Journal poetry competition. Her poetry has been published in Spoon River Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Evergreen Chronicles, and others. From 2008-2010 she served as the poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts.

Description:
. . . a book-length series of poems that explores a daughter’s journey through her mother’s illness and death and how she carries on without her. The book starts with diagnosis and ends with first yarzheit (death anniversary). The poems are written in accessible form that will resonate with all those who have lost a parent or dearly loved one.

Blurb:
After the introductory poem I thought, "Oh dear, I’m going to cry my way through the whole thing." And then, the exquisite first-rate poetry—using forms like triolet and rondeau—took me to a much deeper place than tears can possibly reveal. This is a very beautiful book.” (Judy Grahn)


Lost Art

The art of losing my mother is hard to master;
Like a little girl lost in the woods who can’t find her way,
I’m afraid I will never survive this disaster.

Of course, somewhere deep inside I knew I would outlast her,
Though I did all I could to keep that notion at bay.
The art of losing my mother is hard to master.

She might return. Who knows? I wouldn’t put it past her.
Denial is not a river in Egypt, they say,
But it is one way to get me through this disaster.

As days slip by, the distance between us grows vaster,
my fading memories add to my growing dismay.
The art of losing my mother is hard to master.

Surely God made a great mistake when he miscast her
as Dead Mother, a role she was never meant to play
in the movie of my life, now called “The Disaster.”

If time heals all wounds, can’t it do so any faster?
Though I never did believe in that tired cliché.
The art of losing my mother is too hard to master,
I cannot get a grip on this crippling disaster.


More Poems:

At Length Magazine

Lavender Review


Watch the Trailer


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In Carbondale by Cliff Fell

Consider the glue
that holds all this together,
be it the cold light
of the diamond in the mine,
the gold in its seam
below the forest
or the shale oil reserves
of the Arctic Circle—
each in its way a party hat
that pays homage
to DJ culture
or signals the slow
corruption of thought.
But right from the start
let it be said
that to our knowledge
the art of the oil slick

Featured Book: Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, by Kerrin McCadden

Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes. Kerrin McCadden. New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2014.

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Kerrin McCadden is the author of Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, winner of the 2013 New Issues Poetry Prize, judged by David St. John. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Vermont Studio Center, she also received a Sustainable Arts Foundation Writing Award and support from The Vermont Arts Endowment Fund. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and Verse Daily, and in such journals as American Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, and Poet Lore. She holds an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Plainfield, Vermont and teaches English and Creative Writing at Montpelier High School.

Description: 
Lyrical, honest, descriptive, Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes by Kerrin McCadden is a thoughtful meditation on wandering through a human landscape, one full of loss and desire. Often elegiac, this collection of poetry accepts the world before it, acknowledging the quotidian value of our lives while also seeing the beauty in it.  (Katie Rensch, NewPages review)

Blurb:
. . . one of the most compelling and powerful debut collections in recent American poetry. These exquisite meditations on the lived life are often nothing less than stunning, and are at times truly devastating. This gorgeous collection is both mature and tender in its reckonings of our shifting relationships with family and loved ones. Kerrin McCadden is especially accomplished in considering those who've engaged in constructions of daily happiness only to discover that what they'd begun in dream has ended in quiet wreckage. Poem by poem, we are consoled by the poet's remarkable reflective ease and her profound intimacy. The beauty of these poems is matched only by their sense of triumph in resilience, and its resulting peace. (David St. John)


Intersection

At the four-way stop I wave you on,
a kindness. You wave no no, you go. I wave, go.
We keep on. You insist. Me: no you,

please. A bird shifts, a sigh. The penned
horse tosses, pacing. I mouth you go.
There is a fleck on your windshield. I notice your hands.
Rain falls. Your hands cup the wheel
at ten o’clock and two, then float
past my knee and only sometimes land.
One hundred times on my back, they tame me.
Cars line up. Birds lift. I nod my head into your chest.
There is a trail of clothing. I walk to the
plank door of your room. This takes hours
and hours. This is a small cottage and there is sand
on the floor and nothing on the walls, crows calling,
dishes in the sink. Days go by. We are still making
our way to the bed. This is an inventory:
black telephone, board games, frayed chairs,
coffee table spotted with the old moons of drinks,
curtains pulled back on tiny hooks, single pane glass
windows like the ones I used to sneak out of at night, lifting
them as slow as this stepping, and when you talk
into my neck the words settle in the hammock
of my collarbone, puddle there and spill,
slide over my breasts and I am slowly covered,
and rinsed. I do not close my eyes. Nothing hurts.
The dust rises in swirls. Dogs bark. You turn
your windshield wipers on intermittent.
Your car rolls into the space I have built between us.
I am up to my belly in a northern lake, cold. I am afraid now.
When I get home, everyone will see.


More Poems:
Failbetter

American Poetry Review


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Experimental Histories & The New Narrative

Recently, I've been interested in using experimental forms of story within my creative work. Of course, this is not new in the field of literature (poetry, fiction, drama, or memoir), and it also isn't new in the field of history. Historians grapple with narrative, and they search for ways to convey several, even conflicting, perspectives. In historiography, the writing of history, some use experimental methods to provide a more complete story. In an article about designing a college course in experimental history, Martha Hodes wrote "complexity is a crucial component of sound historical analysis." It's also a crucial component of story-telling.

History archives offer rich resources for details, characters, settings, and plots; the story I've been working on recently mines historic archives to create a world that explores the effect of the past on contemporary life.

Stephen Muecke. "Experimental history implies a gap between what has made sense in the past, and what no longer makes sense, whether it is past events or new ones demanding to be gathered into the fold of meaning."  It used to be that people believed "objectivity" could be achieved. But now, no longer can readers accept "one story" that may reflect the dominant group in power. There is more than one gaze: male, female, and in between. There are many cultures on any point on a map, and many political perspectives. There are many species. There are class differences. Multiple subjectivities bring all of us closer to "the truth." The experimental form allows for more points of view and more connections.  

Of course, the historical record should reflect the materials in the archives and empiric evidence. Initially the juxtaposition of the word experimental with the word history may seem problematic, but certainly it is a more sensible approach.  Experimental does not need to mean fictitious. It refers to the process and structure of the narrative. Perhaps it might bring together old sound recordings with artifacts, images of now extinct species (for it is not only humans who have cultures), and old documents. Perhaps it might overlay maps and narratives and crop reports to reflect changes over time. The writer of fiction and poetry often embraces juxtapositions, a variety of voices, and other surprises. In the final form, the story must be believable.

What does experimental history look like?  Merle Patchett kept a blog, Experimental Geography in Practice: exploring correspondences between geographic research and experimental and artistic practices.  She wrote:

Through my PhD research I developed an experimental historiography that drew creative resource from the purposeful assemblage and rehabilitation of diffuse historical fragments to form unorthodox archives. My adoption of a form of historical ‘assemblage method’ (Law 2004) is to be read as a challenge the historian’s fidelity to conventional empirical and archival evidence, in that I attempted to make the materials I assembled count precisely by not forcing them to fit within a pre-determined narrative, recognising instead that materials themselves can create knowledge, or at least encourage open and imaginative thought. 

In this way I sought to craft a form of historiography that is alive to the ultimate alterity of past lives (human or otherwise), events, and places, recognising that what remains of them is always going to partial, provisional, incomplete and therefore what is being presented is always already, to invoke Derrida, “sous rature” – under erasure. 

I am now attempting to develop my form of experimental historiography into a form of curatorial presentation.

The phrase "the ultimate alterity of past lives" suggests that each historic personage holds a degree of complexity.  One version or one interpretation can be discarded over another version or interpretation. This scholar of geography and creative artist brought together sound recordings, old photographs, and excerpts of documents into beautiful and haunting presentations that allowed her to interrogate the cultural bias and assumptions of past explorers. These disparate elements, when placed in close proximity, express much more than a single-threaded narrative. They serve as collaborating evidence, and even more, the reader/viewer grasps possibility, tension, and meaning in the gaps.

Narrative has also a potential for healing. For awhile, the term "cultural competency" was used in human service organizations as they attempted to understand and provide services to diverse populations. A better term is now arisen: cultural humility. We should not presume that we can know enough about a person, a culture, or a landscape to make blanket statements. Deep listening helps a writer build believable characters and good poems. In poetry, a spare style will evoke multiple meanings.  It's best to avoid assumptions, and to listen to the gaps and silences.

Creativity can be a transformative force that gives breath and sustenance to people who are suffering. Artistic and activist memory work recognizes the effects of past atrocity on landscapes and their new inhabitants.  Mapping Spectral Traces is a group of scholars, writers, artists, and activists who attempt to address trauma in communities. The Creativity and Madness conference in Sante Fe, intended for mental health professionals, investigates the psychology of art and artists. Madness is analyzed in relationship to creativity.

Lewis Mahl Medrona, MD, PhD, spoke about the power of story-telling and history in the practice of narrative medicine. This practice can be surprising. He related a case study, the mental health treatment of a Native American man who suffered from alcoholism, diabetes, and post-traumatic stress from childhood.  Medrona's brilliant intervention involved a ceremony giving the man a new childhood. The line doesn't necessarily have to be drawn between fiction and nonfiction. What he offered this man was a new interpretation of his life, and new possibility. Interpretations of a real event demonstrates vastly different perspectives among eye-witnesses; different possibilities evoke different outcomes.

In "A Long Note on New Narrative" by Robert Glück, the author identifies and defines a method of literary practice termed New Narrative:

We were thinking about autobiography; by autobiography we meant daydreams, night dreams, the act of writing, the relationship to the reader, the meeting of flesh and culture, the self as collaboration, the self as disintegration, the gaps, inconsistencies and distortions, the enjambments of power, family, history and language.

This writing acknowledges multi-faceted life. If we lack imagination, we lack life's necessary tools. New narrative is conscious of meta-data, similar to other experimental forms. Many writers and poets employ these methods to present a more complex and bigger story. Experimental history, or literature, or music offers us new perspectives and new patterns. This dynamic and creative field brings new gifts.

Featured Book: Bird Watching at the End of the World, by Lisa Mangini

Bird Watching at the End of the World. Lisa Mangini. Cherry Grove, 2014.

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Lisa Mangini holds an MFA from Southern Connecticut State University. She is the author of the poetry collection, Bird Watching at the End of the World, as well as the poetry chapbooks Slouching Towards Entropy (Finishing Line Press) and Immanuel Kant vs God (Red Bird Chapbooks), and a fiction chapbook, Perfect Objects in Motion (Red Bird Chapbooks), all released in 2014. She has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets, and won the 2011 Connecticut Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured in McSweeney's, Weave, Words Dance, Silver Birch Press, and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of Paper Nautilus, and teaches English composition and creative writing at handful of colleges in southern New England.

Description:
Bird Watching at the End of the World explores the consequences of living in a body, the psyches of philosophers, and the tenuous nature of human connection. Using a range of poetic styles from formal verse to sprawling prose, this collection returns again and again to the persistence of doubt—even toward those we love the most.

Blurb:
Fabulous in their diction, the poems of Lisa Mangini present a world of sadness and grace, particle and wave. Victims of the body, shadowed by the eighth Deadly Sin—not to be loved—these lovely vessels stuffed with philosophical gleanings and lyrical meditations make possible a future for poetry, and thus, for us.”(Alan Michael Parker)


Every Time We Go to Ikea

it’s raining.  It starts as a light spray
across the windshield, so slight the wipers squeal
against the glass. But there’s no fighting

against the allure of clean lines, the illusion
of better organization, despite that no
number of cubed shelves can tidy up a life.

And every time, there is a young woman
assessing the sturdiness of a crib, sometimes alone,
sometimes with a man or her mother beside her,

and I do my best not to meet your eyes.  Every time
we weave through the model kitchens, I make a bee line
to the sink — farm apron, stainless steel, undermount —

and press my palms against its cool basin; if it’s not
crowded, you’ll lean your hips along my back, rest
your chin on my shoulder, trying to see what it is

I’m seeing.  We’ll look for a chest of drawers
for your apartment, debating Malm versus Hopen,
birch finish or espresso, and I’ll scribble

their dimensions in inches with a tiny golf pencil.
We’ll emerge with a cardboard box on a dolly
to a downpour, and against your wishes, I’ll insist

on moving the car to the loading area myself. Every time,
I will lose a sandal while running in the slick lot
and have to turn back to retrieve it.  We’ll maneuver

the box in some impossible diagonal in the back seat
of the sedan, wipe the rain from our faces, prepare
ourselves to go home and build something.


Other Poems: 

Found Poetry Review

Lunch Ticket


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Featured Book: This Visit, by Susan Lewis

This Visit. Susan Lewis. BlazeVOX, 2015.

Susan Lewis lives in New York City and edits Posit. She is the author of eight books and chapbooks, most recently This Visit, How to be Another (Červená Barva Press, 2014), and State of the Union (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2014). Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in The Awl, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Connotation Press.

Description:
An elegy to "this visit" of the living to our own existence, This Visit is a pastiche of lyrical and probing dissonances assembled from intimate voices yearning for a connection as deep and ephemeral as “your desire and your embedded thorn.” Like our mortal trajectories, the world of these poems is captured in its struggle to take shape, like Michelangelo’s slaves emerging from the half-hewn stone, or Duchamp’s nude descending a multitude of unsettling but resonant linguistic staircases.

Blurb:
In the fissures and gaps of a malleable lexicon, Susan Lewis’s playful, punning, musical lyrics create spaces for a reader to explore. In her “mythic stickiness” edges are blurred in service to an “everlasting loop.” Her poems are oddly intimate, full of a wise skepticism and a quirky grace—perhaps more of a place to live in than to visit. (Joanna Fuhrman)


This Visit

1.

This time
which is “yours,”

that face you covet,
the hurt it bleeds,

blows landing
puff with satisfaction

shamefaced as childhood,
as roundly accidental.

What is to be done
with cliff-edged blunders

howling & hollowing
your unfathomed deeps?

—As this time,
your time,

whittles you,
explodes?


2.

They too must age, decay
& slowly quieten.

& can only live,
more or less.

& choose,
more or less.

& search furtively or not
for the nonexistent exit.

(Mother, what you could have told me)
(Stranger, what you might have known)

On the wall with no writing
through the dark glass

(floor littered with doll heads)
the grenade of your despair

plus sleep, that sweet rehearsal
(fingertips in love)

wistful bones withering,
winding down—


3.

these mountains seeping
sighs on loan,

lording over
our boundless lack,

impassive as viscera exhumed,
impulsive as firmament festooned

with friction &
aimless fury

while the debt of the body
on loan

(this stray ferocity)
(that frayed caress)

or other ephemera
sauced & musical

hurtles, to be contemplated
for signs of betrayal

which should be banished—
the word, I mean, reeking

its sly promise of rectitude
as if we know what should be done

(should we glisten
or should we judge?)

the brittle shell of disappointment
lying in wait

too early or too late
while mountains right themselves

in the purple distance,
blind men send me to offer 

this mast,
this hour,

hanging on the weakening light,
bluing in the deepening night

like a hoarded memory from our
secret past—


4.

& you who are leaner
& more intricate:

float with me in this
brittle bowl,

drink the cruel juice
jagged as sunlight

untying us,
shedding notes like jewels

    (against the grain)
    (beneath this petaled canopy)

never glance at what I am
unless to offer

    (enough)
    (or boldly go)

    (this fear,
    or other jagged edge)

cold mountain
waking to our shame

 & smitten
        gaze


More Poems: 

Word For/Word 

BlazeVOX Journal  


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Lauren Camp: An Interview and Review of THE DAILINESS

The Dailiness,  How do you measure your days?

                                  Review and Interview by Caroline LeBlanc

The Dailiness

            by Lauren Camp

          Edwin E Smith Publishing,
                2013
 
                    67 pages

          ISBN: 978-1-6192755-6-0

          Available on Amazon



About Lauren Camp & How I Know Her

Since moving to Albuquerque in 2012, I’ve noticed that one name, Lauren Camp, keeps coming up in email notices about poetry events—readings and workshops—in the Albuquerque/Santa Fe area.  Her readings are captivating.  Finally, I took one of her workshops and experienced what all the excitement is about.  Lauren is down to earth, energetic, and generous in manner and well versed in literature, art and music.  Since that workshop two of Lauren’s poetry books have won awards. The Dailiness, reviewed here won the National Federation of Press Women 2014 Poetry Book Prize and a World Literature Today “Editor’s Pick.”  A third manuscript, entitled One Hundred Hungers, was selected by David Wojahn for the Dorset Prize. The book will be published by Tupelo Press in 2016.  Lauren is also an award winning artist whose work has been exhibited in solo and group shows as well as other venues around the world.  She also hosts Audio Saucepan, a weekly music & literature Public Radio program (http://ksfr.org/programs/audio-saucepan-ksfr).  Much more information about Lauren, including voice samples, is available on her web page, http://laurencamp.com/index.shtml. The web page itself is an enjoyable experience full of Lauren’s poems, sounds and images.  It is safe to say that Lauren is both a Renaissance woman and a Southwest poetry treasure.

The Review 

The Dailiness contains fifty poems in three sections.  The poems are lyrical journeys through days with the familiar and unfamiliar.  Themes include nature, sound & music, improvisation, time, direction (especially sideways and back looking), place, medical conditions (insomnia and cancer), and family.  In several poems, Camp’s lines give a nod to other poets and writers, including Tillie Olson and Sharon Olds (“Drama Class, 1989”) and Mary Oliver (“To Be Still”).  The list of acknowledgements for journals that previously published the poems in The Dailiness fills 1 ½ pages.

The language and music of Camp’s poems makes them so enjoyable to read that it takes a moment to realize the tragedy of some of the topics, or the riddle created by some of the imagery.  While most of the poems are free verse, there are also a number of form and prose poems.   Before looking at some individual poems, I’d like to share some lines/phrases that grabbed me as I read.

 “I grew/moldy and without promise” (“Unpacked”). 

“And you will not understand the language/but are willing to be carried backward/into the space before sense//where sound rolls sideways in your mouth”(“And Now You Would”).

“Do not get out your knife./My skin knows its angles already” (“Let Me Live in Your Tolerance”).

“The way his hyphen flattened the beveled air” (“The uh-huh of Desire”).

“In the absolute, every moment can go wrong.”(“Clarity”).

“This ground is voracious, but clogged.  We do what we can./We are a people of anticipated guilt”(A Colloquy on Water”). 

“The man who bore/this cross lugged the weight of pardon, mounting it here,/where the shoulder of heat is heaviest”(“Atonement”).

“The merciful comfort of data…. Maybe she had no taste for the soup of her children….[S]he gently read me each drop of the rain” (“How I’d Explain What Kind of Mother She Was”). 

“We walk…into the waltz and step of the ocean, into waves that become blue apostrophes…. Everyone is angled, held in the ever-shrinking linen and spandex of self”(“A Week in L.A.”).  

“[S]top the suffering and ask for exactly what you want…./Crouch into the smear of a tulip, the tragic palette of time”(“When”).  

Next, let’s look at three very different poems.

“My Grandfather and His Eggs” is written in irregularly rhymed couplets and lines of irregular length.  It is about the speaker’s mother’s father who spent his life candling and sorting eggs before he “headed home to boiled eggs.” “He carried his lungs in a shirt pocket, his humor/in a highball glass…./fried his fears.”  This image of a life full of eggs becomes a conceit that crosses generations as the poem moves into first her mother’s reaction to his death, and then the effects of the her mother’s death.

                My mom was fragile when he died.
                We watched her eyes go runny,

                how she slid into the pan
                of what was missing.

                I tell  you grief can lay eggs anywhere.
                Pale and delicate, Mom dreamt her daddy

                in the bowl of heaven.
                She saw Papa in her photos, heard Papa

                in her whispers.  Papa drinking gin,
                Papa over easy.  Now Mom has moved

                through that same membrane, and without her,
                life in our house keeps breaking open.
          

“What You Might Hear” begins with a quote by Ornette Coleman, an innovative jazz musician in the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornette_Coleman). In 2007 his album Sound Grammar won a Pulitzer Prize.  The quote reads, “…when I realized I could make mistakes…I  decided I was really on to something.”  The poem is written in irregularly broken and spaces stanzas, the white space between lines and stanzas like the “silence [that] travels sideways, that …is careless and quirky.”  The second stanza warns that “[i]f you/ want answers, you must haul the questions behind you/for a long time until the music starts up, faulty/and brooding.” After several lines describing Coleman’s playing and “[h]is horn, that pliable prophet of conduct,” the poet declares: “If you cannot respond,/he has proven his point, the rate of the measure, his sounds wrenched in error./Where he got them won’t matter.”  The first two lines of this last quote are right justified. 

On the page, and in the auditory pacing, the poem is as innovative as any jazz improvisation.  It ends,    

                                                                                                 He may offer a cure

                                                          contradiction                           

                                                                        paradox    

                                                           a possible

                                                                       furious anthem.

                                                                                              

                                                                                If he offers you meaning, accept.

 

The theme of mistakes, naiveté, recovery and redemption in the face of mistakes, appears in other poems in this collection, but, by far, this poem is the major celebration of the potential hidden in mistakes.

The last poem I’d like to look at is, “The Coming Day,” the penultimate poem in the book.  Its fifteen line pattern is 2/1/2/2/1/2/2/1/2.  Again, line lengths vary, and the rhymes are imperfect, their pattern irregular.  Again, it is the music—the lyrical rhythm and imagery—of the poem that captivates.  It begins with the speaker’s dream—as she puts it “My eyes are inside.”—of song and playgrounds. The focus shifts to the “small seed in the (speaker’s) back yard,”/just a murmur now, but in seven years we will be locked in/with something that really happened, a world that germinated/while we loved.”  These lines are a great example of the poet’s ability to time travel and take the reader with her.  From sleep to a barren but seeded back yard to a world germinated by love. 

The poem’s line breaks are also skillful.  The above break transposes from “a world that germinated/while we loved” into “while we love. The birds will merge with the invisible.”
The enjambment and multiple layers of meaning continue: 

           God will move to the outside, forget us and

           our five-minute increments of sanity.  We are asleep,
           touching particles, sowing atoms of air.  In the morning,"

The poem is pregnant with the liminal fecundity of time, place, the natural world, and dimensions of reality. Passions grow everywhere. 

             ....  Flickers impregnate the eaves.

             The grasses grow.  I hear your heart beat across the down,
             feel your eyes burn along my face.

The last three lines cross the threshold into waking reality, anchored in the ordinary task of eating, but full of promise on the extraordinary table of the bedspread.

                When I am more awake, I sit up, split clementines

                  into sections, line them up along the bedspread
                  count the ripe parcels of the coming day.

We are grounded in the ordinariness of the day even as we “embedded” (forgive me) in the sensual depths of the images.

In summary, The Dailiness, is a stunning collection of evenly intriguing poems that vary as much in content as they do in form and style.  Their music and imagery makes them at once easily accessible and endlessly minable.  

Lauren Camp

 

 

 

The Interview 

Thank you, Lauren for agreeing to this interview in conjunction with my review of The Dailiness on our Poetry Matters blog.  Since you are accomplished in visual and musical venues, as well as poetry and essays, some questions extend beyond this book.  That leads me to my first question. 

 

 

Caroline:  Would you describe your journey to and as a multi-media artist—visual, musical and writer—and how the different media inform your work, overall and each in the others?

Lauren: I came to poetry from art, and to art from magazine writing. I came to music in between, and music informs both the art and poetry. Then, I set art aside because poetry asked me to trust in it, to find it more moments. Poetry writing is filled with what I like about art making: the composition and texture, the negative space, the line.

I had very little exposure to art growing up. I created — sure. I always did. But I had no formal direction, and almost no awareness of any of these forms of expression.

After graduate school and a few jobs, I spent 12 years as a professional working artist. My medium was fabric and thread. I knew nothing of how to manipulate either when I started. This was, perhaps, the joy of it — and the angst. I learned that I like to experiment, and that I won’t do something that has been done. That way of creating has carried over to my work with music and my poetry. (To be clear, I am not a musician; I am a radio host and producer, sliding sounds together to create new associations.)

Poetry lets me color every line and stanza in ways I never dreamed words were meant to be used. I found poetry well into adulthood, and love using it to careen through the visual and sonic possibilities of everything I write.

Caroline:  As the book’s epigraph signals, Dailiness is a travelogue through time and places: inner and outer, public and private, wave and particle.  In fact, the borders we take for granted between these realms become porous in your poems.  For instance, in “What You Might Hear,” you write, “If you/want answers, you must haul the questions behind you/for a long time until the music starts up again, faulty/and brooding.”  What do you understand about how your mind navigates and often erases conventional borders of association?

Lauren:  I don’t understand any part of how my mind works. I know that if something feels too easily “captured,” I must start again — randomizing what I am after. I want both rhythm and curiosity in my work. The material of my own curiosity, I mean. I want to let the why and how of what I’m looking at surprise me.

I know enough to remember to put in the when and where as grounding. After that, I figure I’m free to fly around.

I also want to disrupt rhythm, to throw in some friction. I learned this while making art, and it carries over. Always allow the unexpected, the unplanned, the strange. This is often where the power lies.

Caroline:  Would you speak about how you arrive at such a nuanced balance of narrative, philosophical reflections, and lyricism in your poems?  

Lauren:  Every one of these elements is critical. Narrative provides the detail, but can be flat by itself. Too much reflection becomes some attempt at capturing the conscious self. I like a dark side, but I want to extend that darkness into an understanding, and maybe, hope. Lyricism — oh, thank god for it. It is what makes the process of crafting a poem such a trial and a treasure. The music isn’t there until I’ve almost completed it. I eye every word with suspicion, and go through a lot of revising, playing with spaces and order, the pitch of sound, the pictures I’m drawing with language. I need the words to be much more than words, to be precise and intense and unusual. I need them to stack together, but be sort of slippery.

Caroline:  The book includes both titled and untitled poems, in which the first line serves as the entire or partial title.  What is your decision making process regarding titles?

Lauren:  I have titled hundreds, maybe thousands of poems and artworks. I even give each episode of my radio show a new title. I believe fully in the value of a perfect title. It could be soaked in what is coming, could lay out the echo of the poem, or misdirect the reader.

For example, the poem “When You Leave, Reiterate the Alarm” had several drafts with another title. At some point in the revising, this phrase showed up as the last line of the poem. In the next draft, I pulled it up to the title, and left it there, knowing that was the strongest opening I could give the poem.

Some titles place the reader, as in the poem “At Echo Canyon,” which investigates a phenomenal stone amphitheater in Abiquiu, New Mexico.

Perhaps the quickest to title was “Let Me Live in Your Tolerance.” I wrote the poem shortly after hearing the awful news report, and couldn’t find even the ghost of a title in me. That first draft got by with “Title” as its stand-in. I did one revision (unusually paltry for me), and gave it that title. It came to me whole—almost as a sort of wisdom.

Caroline:  Your poems are full of creative combinations of imagery such as “the enzymes-fixed juice of conclusion (32),” “silence travels sideways (17),” “a furrow of calories (1),” and “The man…lugged the weight of pardon, mounting it here,/where the shoulder of heat is heaviest (34).”  Would you describe how you arrive at such unique combinations of imagery?

Lauren:  I ask my students to look for new ways of describing, to hug unexpected words together to make new concepts. I do this all the time. It requires that I first untether from the normal way to say something, and then “shop” for new ways to approach the subject. I keep a messy desk that drives me nuts, but gives me a whole surface of wild possibilities. I just have to look around, blurring the actual into chance happenings.

Caroline:  What poets most inform your writing?

Lauren:  Many, many, many. Because of my work with Santa Fe Public Radio, I am exposed to a tremendous amount of what is currently being published. My goal every week for my radio show, “Audio Saucepan,” is to find magical or powerful poems that will itch at a listener’s ear. The show interweaves global music and contemporary poetry. I want to select poems each week that offer a way of looking, a truth that is also surprising.

I have stacks of books, and read a lot, often just dipping in. Other times, I find a delicious hour to sit with one or two books, and form a friendship. In this way, I discover a lot of poets, styles, even words. Reading so many books for all these years, I appreciate all the different prisms that writers use to build a sensuous presence.

Certain poems, poets and styles fill me with jealousy (why didn’t I write that?). I know what I like, and I learn easily from these poems. Those that are odder or discomfiting to me, well… I trust them to tell me what I can’t get away with in my writing, or to pull me into their lair so that someday I might claim that approach.

More than anything, after holding all these books and turning their beautiful pages, I am filled with a sense of community. The writers… how extraordinary we are, caring to point to certain places and times, to a certain emotion!

Caroline:  Would you talk about your teaching and how you attempt to impart some of what you know about writing to your students?

Lauren:  I approach teaching with a sense that it is important to share magnanimously whatever I have learned. I work mainly with older adults who wish to write about their life experiences. They don’t care too much about technique at first; they simply love their stories. They need a gentle guide to help them craft their simpler forms into something more fulfilling.

As a child and growing student, I didn’t have any real support for either my artistic or literary impulses. Every week in my classes, I give what I wish I had been given— direction, encouragement, approval. I think of my role as cheerleading for humans who have something to say, and introducing them to the possible techniques and approaches to say it better. I prod them to shape their stories, and encourage them to let the language ripple in front of them. That’s good, fun work.

Caroline:  Anything else you’d like to say about your work as artist, writer, musicologist?

Lauren:  I love all three of these disciplines, and adore even more when they cooperate to make something new.

Thank you, Caroline, for shining a light on my work.

Caroline:  Thank you, Lauren, for your time, poetry, art and love of music.

 

 

 

       

Featured Book: Upon the Blue Couch, by Laurie Kolp

Upon the Blue Couch. Laurie Kolp. Winter Goose Publishing, 2014.

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Laurie Kolp, author of Upon the Blue Couch and Hello, It’s Your Mother (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming) serves as president of the Texas Gulf Coast Writers and belongs to the Poetry Society of Texas. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including the 2015 Poet’s Market, The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop, Scissors & Spackle, and Blue Fifth Review. An avid runner and lover of nature, she lives in Southeast Texas with her husband, three children and two dogs.

Description:
Upon the Blue Couch is a compelling collection of diverse poems certain to intrigue the reader with its courageous look into one woman’s turbulent journey through adulthood. With a comfortable blue couch as the common thread throughout the years, we are shown all the highs and lows of life while some things remain a constant source of peace. This blue couch, if only it could talk, might just reveal the secrets to happiness based on the experiences it has unwittingly been a part of.
  
Blurb:
Laurie Kolp's poetry jumps from playful to gritty, from tender to dangerous. In other words, Laurie is a poet who takes chances and dares to surprise her readers with each poem. (Robert Lee Brewer)


Snowed

They say it's snowing somewhere
off in the distance, past the ocean's
line of separation,

up north where leaves of yellow, red and orange
fill the black and white page with passion,
and lined coats are more than closet fillers
soaking in the acrid smell of stale mothballs.

Yes, it's snowing where you are
while I sit alone on the cusp of indecision,
the warm breeze drifting through my car
like the whisper of your voice.


More Poems:

City Lit Rag

Poppy Road Review


Click Here to Purchase Upon the Blue Couch

The quiet life at Glenfinnan (1877, Runs 458/468) by Robynanne Milford