Lauren Camp Journalist Profile

Articles

Poetry from Daily Life: Let your poem be imperfect and incomplete for as long as it needs

Sep 22, 2024 | news-leader.com | Lauren Camp

My guest this week on Poetry from Daily Life is Lauren Camp, who lives in Sante Fe and is the New Mexico Poet Laureate. Lauren worked as a magazine editor for 12 years. She wrote wall text to accompany her artwork, and people called them poems. To learn more about the genre, she read poems on her radio show, among other self-taught approaches to understanding the form. She loves fiction but poetry is her favorite form. Lauren was Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park in 2022.
Summer Letters - Orion Magazine

Jul 30, 2024 | orionmagazine.org | Lauren Camp |Todd Davis

Poets Lauren Camp and Todd Davis exchange letters in which they discuss devotion to details, belonging to place, and saying yes to love. Dear Todd,I feel like we waited so long for summer, and now it’s here, full force with its brusque attitude. Truth be told, though, these days, every season seems to be overdoing itself. It rained for a full day and night and the ground is wet, which is extraordinary here in the desert. The bee balm is standing up, gleeful at its bounty.
Into Heights and Pauses

May 31, 2024 | terrain.org | Lauren Camp

In this series curated by Currents editor Leonora Simonovis, current poets laureate write about what it means, in the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, “to become native to place.” Each of them explores the deep connections they have created with land and people, stressing the fact that belonging is a reciprocal process, not a given right.
National Poetry Month: Lauren Camp

Apr 11, 2024 | therumpus.net | Lauren Camp

Had I known anything teachers wouldn’t have taught me civil wars branches of government Iroquois longhouses teachers most days said how to scrape from their mouth what was ancient trident or surrendered habitat and would know that the spill of formaldehyde gave us webbed frogs to dissect geologic shrines how to tune a flute so much negative capability in me I couldn’t play notes even as instructed yet without learning I memorized seasonal notches like drowning rain with its gathering...
Countermand - Tahoma Literary Review

Dec 14, 2023 | tahomaliteraryreview.com | Lauren Camp

We told her someone she loved had died but her memory was busy working in a pastrami shopdown the block from the ocean. Now she asks, Am I alive and each time we say Yes, and Are youalive, she asks. Our work is to keep our verbs ready. Every minute might revoke a former purpose. We tell her we are no place but welcome. Us with our velvet exaggerations. And you ask, did it last? No— The ocean at her window wound along in a seize and escape. For some hours it screamed, more act than atrocity.
The Pleasure of Taking the Long Way: On Puzzling the Route to a Poem

Jun 29, 2023 | lithub.com | Lauren Camp

In so many ways, the things we have to do in our lives have to be done right. So much seems to be about speed, utter clarity, and efficiency. I am bored by all of that exactness. Perhaps this is one of the reasons poetry is so appealing. It’s a time of extreme permission—at least the way I teach it and practice it myself. Sometimes my emerging students say they don’t like revision. I’ve learned this often means they don’t know what to do to their poem.
An Anecdotal Mind

Apr 27, 2023 | terrain.org | Lauren Camp |Katy Smith

“Feelings,” he says, smug. “This is the problem with my female assistants—excuse the phrase.” Editor’s Note: Told through a catalog of the plants that take root in the Roman Colosseum, The Weeds is the story—or rather two stories, one set in 1854 and the other in 2018—of two women finding out what it takes to survive.