Abram: Hello, I’m Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And I’m Joanne Diaz. Abram: And this is Poetry for All. Joanne: And today, we are truly delighted to welcome Lauren Camp as our guest to read and discuss her poem titled “Inner Planets”. Lauren Camp is the author of numerous poetry collections, the most recent of which is Worn Smooth Between Devourings. She is the poet laureate of New Mexico, and in 2022, she was the astronomer in residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Abram: That is so cool. Joanne: It is the best. I’m so excited to talk about this. Lauren, we are so glad you are here. Welcome. Lauren: Thank you so much. What an honor to be here and to be in a conversation around a subject that I particularly love. Abram: So we’d love to just jump into the poetry right away and would you do us the honor of reading “Inner Planets”? Lauren: Absolutely. “Inner Planets” [To read Lauren Camp’s “Inner Planets”, visit this link: https://www.quarterlywest.com/vanitas/camp] Abram: Beautiful. Joanne: Yeah, I love this poem so much. Wonderful. Abram: You know, you are our first poet laureate to join us on this program, and, a lot of times, students don’t even know what a poet laureate might be. And so, I’m just sort of curious, what is the poet laureate of New Mexico? What does your job entail as the poet laureate of New Mexico? Lauren: Yes, I am the second poet laureate of New Mexico, so it is a very new role for the state. The only absolute requirement is to show up for certain civic occasions, and, in my case, that is to read a poem for the opening of the legislative session each year. Besides that, I have been asked to, in some way, interact with thirty-three counties of New Mexico, and my choice in doing that has been to try to get to every single county in New Mexico. It’s a big state. It’s the fifth biggest, geographically, in the country, so that’s a lot of travel. It’s great. It’s truly wonderful to get out there and talk to people. But I would say that, really, the underlying element of being a poet laureate is bringing poetry to people in some way to people, introducing them to it, opening the possibility that they might take it in, that they might consider it, that they might see that poetry is or can be part of their lives. Abram: Well, we could definitely resonate with that mission. Joanne: Yeah, and I’m so glad that you are the poet laureate of New Mexico because, for a long time, I’ve admired your work for a lot of reasons, but especially for the way that you are so sensitive to and attentive to place, how it works on us. Abram: Does it shape your own poetry, to be the poet laureate of New Mexico? Do you find or do you feel like there’s a certain responsibility to speak to or for the state of New Mexico in your own poems? Lauren: I think a lot more about who the audience is for what I am writing. Before, the audience was always me and it still is. When I’m writing, I’m still very much in the little world of me and writing for my ear, and my interest, and my curiosity, my discovery, even. But now, I also think about who is going to receive it and what they will come to the poem with. What knowledge or what experience or what location, even. What they know about where I’m writing from. And so place continues to be important to me in many, many ways and audience is beginning to be. Joanne: Is it true that this poem was in part inspired by your residency at Grand Canyon National Park? Lauren: One hundred percent inspired by the residency. I wrote it while I was there. I spent a month as astronomer-in-residence at Grand Canyon National Park, perhaps the most exhilarating month of my life. I was by myself for a great amount of it and I was so extraordinarily inspired by both the Canyon during the day and the skies and the natural darkness over it at night. Abram: And this poem begins with after (after the light). And so it's turning to the darkness, it's turning to that night sky. Maybe we could read just that first sentence. Here’s how the poem begins: “After all day in the sun blitz, the hectic heat / calling for argument and splurging / on low spots, I wanted most to be / busy with less.” I love this opening sentence. And then the second sentence begins with another after; “after the terraces of light”. How are you imagining yourself into this poem as you begin it? Lauren: I write a lot about the sun because I’m in New Mexico which has some three hundred sunny days in the year. The sun is a major character in my home area, it’s in a lot of my poems. I think about the way that I write about place as not writing about it, but writing into it. I’m using whatever the place is as a sort of holder for something else I want the poem to do. But it’s not an empty holder, it’s important information. So, in my case, being in the Grand Canyon at the month I was there (it was August), it was extremely hot and luckily I was not there to explore the Canyon so much during the day. I was there with the motivation to be out at night, which was a bit of a relief, honestly, in terms of weather. And so, after all this, after all this, after all the people are out perusing, leaning across the barriers of the Grand Canyon where they shouldn’t be, climbing over to the other side, looking, all the noise, all the everything, then there’s this quiet. Then there’s this slowing down which was gorgeous, like just even the space of it, the fact that I was out there walking around with my headlamp in the dark trying to pick my way through places and I had a lot of space and I love space, I love bareness, I love quiet. Joanne: That desire that you articulate in that first sentence of the poem, I mean, who wouldn't want most to be busy with less? It’s such a perennial problem and, you know, Abram and I were sort of really struck by the sense of deep awe and wonderment and surprise that inhabits and animates this poem. And it seems like part of your ability to get us there is your ability to get us there is a product of the openness of the voice and sensibility, but also the way you arrange your sentences and your lines and your jumps from one stanza to the next. So look at this next sentence that you write: “After the terraces of light, the spreading / iron and groping of it, / I walked alone, never / to an end and quietly, yes, sat there and sang / the intimate shapes / of earth’s history, the fringe above / and the physical flourish / of stars.” Oh my God that sentence is amazing. It's so grand. We are all so big in our own personal day-to-day lives, right? But when we feel awe, we suddenly feel small and there’s so many people who have said “actually, it’s good for us to feel small as often as possible, to be in the presence of the cosmos, of the planetary movement.” And already in the second long sentence, you have us going there. Could you talk a bit about those terraces of light, the spreading iron, the intimate shapes of Earth’s history? These word choices are so stunning to me. Lauren: The language of the poem and of all my poems is the pleasure, I think, more than almost anything else. Like figuring out how I want to say the thing I want to say. Typically, I'm slowly grasping at this little part of this description and this little part, but I will say that the Grand Canyon was so inspiring to me and even overwhelming to me in so many ways. When I first got there I knew I had a task. I was pretty promptly given a request to get something up on the Grand Canyon social media site within about 2 days of getting there. I stood in front of the Canyon and thought I can't do this at all. How do I take this huge wonder of the world and make it narrow enough that I can do this? Which goes back in a way to Abram’s question about audience. I was very clear that I was describing my subject which was not really a canyon. It was the darkness over the canyon as something that people might never have seen and might never get to see. How do I show all without just saying it was amazing? It was large, it was Grand, it was beautiful. How? How? How do I share this with you? Abram: Well, and I think that gets at the difficult task of poetry, which is not just to say I was amazed, but to create the experience of amazement and wonder so that when we read this poem again, outside the context of standing there at the Grand Canyon, we can feel that, we can experience that. The second stanza ends with these words, “sat there and sang.” I love that as a break, because it creates this sort of suspense. What did you sing? And then the third stanza takes up the song and, in a way, I mean, Joanne was pointing this out to me earlier, it feels sort of epic, like the ways that so many epics begin with the Song of the Muse. And oftentimes, there’s a kind og beginning or creational story related to this great song at the start of The Iliad, The Odyssey, Paradise Lost. There’s always the Song of the Muse. And here you are, you’re talking about the shape of Earth’s history. It’s this huge, grand scope of things that the muse is standing over the darkness and beginning to sing into being. Lauren: I love that. Another thing that was happening for me was I was there for a month, I kept writing drafts of poems, and each time, I had to come at the subject in a new way. That was my requirement of myself. So each time, it was “how do I take this thing?” And so my drafts all had different ways I was trying to hold or figure out the material. Joanne: Yeah, that’s beautiful. In this poem, you’re singing of intimate shapes in Earth’s history and I love that word, intimate, because when I look at the night sky, when I think of Earth’s history, intimate is not the first word that comes to mind and it makes me smile a little bit. Why intimate? Lauren: Well, I mean, partly, the down in part of the Grand Canyon is not for everybody. So you already have to have a willingness to explore depth, but you also have to have a willingness in the dark to be alone with it. Even when I was walking around in the canyon and there were other people around at night, I was still very much alone because I was sort of surrounded by dark. I came to poetry from working as a visual artist, and I folded a lot of what I did as a visual artist over into poetry, which included color and composition and texture and shapes. I guess I think of words in a way that is like “okay, I want them to have some of those elements or maybe all of those elements all together.” And my choices are not interesting enough until they do a little something. Like, I loved how you said it made you laugh or it made you smile, that word “intimate”. I want words that make me a little giddy, and this was true when I was making art, too. I would put colors together looking for something that made me just a tiny bit uncomfortable. Joanne: You have this heightened sensitivity to texture, sight, color, sounds, but you want to create it on the page that creates and sustains the tension, right? And look at how you deepen it in that next sentence. “It was like being in love / with the world / as a stranger, alive / in the slagged dark that made this / out of nothing!” I love it that this experience of being with the night sky is a defamiliarization process, that it's almost like love at first sight. At the same time, though, it's alive in the slagged dark and I had to look up slag. I was like, why slagged? And I looked it up, it's like the scum that comes off of the surface of molten metal. What? I mean, what is your thinking about these details? It's so beautiful and so ugly at the same time. I love it. Lauren: I’m taking that as a total positive, thank you very much. Don’t you keep word banks? My word and phrase bank is probably thirty-five pages long now. I just keep pulling language that, a lot of times, I’ve written into drafts that I then pull out of drafts when it's not working. But I just have like a 20 year document. Abram: The next four words, “I was not prepared,” I mean, it feels like the whole poem is about that. I wasn’t prepared for this. And then, of course, what you’re not prepared for, as we find out in the next stanza, is this coming storm, the storm of thrilling embellishments. But yeah, the storm is thrilling embellishments. It’s just adding to what’s already not prepared for, already creating this sort of sense of a miniature self in relation to the intimate shapes of Earth’s history and the physical flourish of stars. It’s almost as if a grand storm is just a little thing. Lauren: It’s just part of the whole. It’s a part of the great picture that is happening. Abram: Can I step back and ask you a question? Nature poetry is a long tradition. How do you sort of refresh a very long tradition? Because I feel like this poem is very fresh and part of the freshness of it is where you have line breaks and stanzas, how it looks visually on the page, but also this sense of slagged dark is not an expression I’ve heard before for example. How do you see yourself as doing it fresh or making it fresh? Lauren: I don’t know if this is appropriate to say, but nature poetry by itself for me is not interesting enough. I don’t want to describe something and say “there it is.” As an artist, I never wanted to do a landscape. The landscape had to also hold something else. It had to lead to something else that I need to activate it and shape it and move it somewhere. Abram: And we get that exactly in this poem, which I think is so amazing. All this credible, careful description that you’ve given to us, and then there’s this leap, this insight, this movement, this turn. “I sat still / in that struck concentration, cleaning up / the ways I believe.” And that’s not where I saw this poem going. I’m just sort of curious how you get there and where we go next. Lauren: Some of the answers are not in the light. Some of the answers are in the place that is, for a lot of people, a kind of absence or a danger or a discomfort. That’s a place worth exploring and understanding and better appreciating. Joanne: That’s really nice and it really helps as I think about the rest of that sentence. Abram and I were noticing “cleaning up the ways I believe”. Not just one way, but multiple ways that I believe. That’s really interesting. And then, “how so often we are given to evidence / the dark robs us / of hope, and we can’t see that it isn’t that / we need to see. Noble, it climbs through / persistence and lets us turn / our cold faces up to it, unfit, but astonished.” I love that astonishment. What is the it that climbs through persistence? Lauren: The sky, the dark. Joanne: That's beautiful. So that it is sort of doing double duty, the literal darkness of the sky, but also that absence of hope, right? Lauren: Yeah. When I first got to the canyon, I was talking to some people who said, like going back to what you said about being inconsequential, “Oh, I'm scared of this place. I feel so small. I feel insignificant. It makes me feel not important.” And for some people that was a negative. But it's kind of nice to be a small, very small part of a long history of the world and to know that my little traumas and wonders are really tiny. They're important to me, but they're not everything. Like look at everything else that plays into this, all the many parts. And, you know, when you're at the Canyon, if you move around at all, many, many languages. You're seeing many cultures, you're seeing lots and lots of people. And that's another reminder of how we fit together as a people in this natural space that is doing its own thing with its own critters and its own flora, fauna, everything, and history, and eons, and erosion, and all of it happening around me. I'm just a tiny part. And I like that. Abram: You know, there's this whole, very long, large tradition of mysticism, which is about absence, about not knowing, about clearing away, about God is the thing that It is what you can never say anything about that to accredit anything to God is to mislead because it is the absence or the complete abnegation or cancellation of all that we have said and that feels to me like where we're going in this poem because it's just clearing one thing. In that line, “cleaning up the ways I believe” is in a certain sense, scrubbing out the things I have claimed so that we get to one more absence after another. And the poem ends with the changeability of the sky. The sky is never the same thing. And then these absences, “there is no air in space, no sound, the higher you go”. And I love that as an ending, because of course there is this sense of rising through the poem of the speaker rising spiritually and in other ways through the poem. But it is a rising that comes about through a kind of absence and a clearing away and a cleaning up of things. Lauren: I was reading a lot, I was learning a lot about astronomy and about natural darkness and about light pollution and how we are messing with that natural darkness, which was a very important part of my thinking in that month and since I've been there that particular fact of how what I know here It's not a whole reality. Joanne: That is so beautiful. And, you know, this is the mark of a great poem, is not only that it creates a world unto itself, but that it points to so many things that I'm inspired to think about that relate to it. As I read this poem, I have so many associative leaps, and those final lines really surprised me a lot. The sky does what it must, and it is never the same thing. “There is no air in space, no sound the higher you go”. That is an acknowledgment. That beyond our little blue planet, you wouldn't even be able to hear this poem or speak it or have the atmosphere to know it. Lauren: Absolutely. And, you know, if I go back for a second to the sentence right before that, that you read, “the sky does what it must and it is never the same thing”. I took a lot of pictures while I was away. And when I returned home, I made my husband look at all 810 pictures of sunsets and like, we spaced it out over a little bit of time, but that is really a good example of how it would change and how each time I would see a little something different, I would walk a little ways and turn and look at the canyon again. And it would. It would be just unbelievable over and over and that kind of looking is a good reminder for me, even when I'm not there. Look longer, look, look more, you know, that looking carefully again and again, that's a valuable lesson for me. Joanne: What a wonderful insight for everyone, not just poets. Just for us as human beings. With all that you've taught us about this poem would you be willing to read it for us one more time? Lauren: Very glad to. [Poem] Abram: Beautiful. Joanne: Thank you, Lauren Camp, for joining us today. What a pleasure to talk with you. Lauren: Thank you both. This has been marvelous. Joanne: To learn more about Lauren Camp, you can visit her website. We encourage you to borrow or purchase any one of her beautiful books of poetry. And we're delighted to report her collection of the poems that were inspired by her astronomer in residence experience at the Grand Canyon, those poems are going to be published in a collection titled In Old Sky. So keep an eye out for that book, everyone. It's going to be great. Abram: Please, everyone, subscribe to Poetry for All, share it with your friends, leave us a review, and send out the word. Joanne: And of course, be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Abram: Thank you. Thank you again, Lauren. Lauren: You two are amazing. Thank you both so much.