Lauren Camp on Exploring the Dark

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Lauren Camp about her new poetry collection, In Old Sky.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: In your very last poem, it’s called Open the Tireless Sky, you talk about the empty page and struggling to see the dark and understand and seize it and feeling like you needed lessons. So, I’m curious about when you have such a specific type of residency, like this one as Astronomer in Residence at the Grand Canyon National Park, about that pressure and how that relates to craft and creativity?

Lauren Camp: Yeah, it’s a great question, and I love the poems you’re picking actually to talk about. So, as I said, I hesitated about saying that they didn’t ask anything of me. They didn’t, except for the public programs. But when I got there, within about an hour, the Dark Skies Ranger met me and asked if I would do what he called dispatches for the social media. So, I mean, I had just arrived. I hadn’t even gathered all my stuff from the car. I had packed the car overflowing and I said, dispatches. What do you mean? And he said, you know, just little things that kind of address what you’re doing here for Grand Canyon National Park’s social media platform.  That suddenly was a kind of huge responsibility. Of course, I said yes, and because I was there as a poet, not as an astronomer, I felt compelled to offer poems to prove that they picked the right person to be there or something I don’t know.  And that was so much pressure to put on myself, because I don’t write that way. I don’t write fast, I don’t write and finish something quickly, but there I was with this suddenly big ask. And I said, Okay, when do you need it?  When do you want the first one? And he said, Oh, you know, a couple of days. So, I got busy really investigating dark.  Really figuring out what there was to say very, very quickly. And part of that was not just what do I have to say, but what’s out here in this particular place that people are dealing with. The first poem that I gave him actually is in the book, it’s stayed almost, I think, intact. It’s called No Other Place to Go. And it really just happened, the experience of the poem kind of happened the first second night I was there. But that’s where that seizing comes in.  I couldn’t seize the dark and put it down on my paper. I had to kind of wait, to feel it all around me, and to feel how other people were out to see the sunset and then as soon as the sun really had disappeared, they were off and done with it, and I would stay out for another hour or whatever I could manage and just watch the light continue to shift.

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Lauren Camp is the author of eight poetry collections including Worn Smooth between Devourings, An Eye in Each Square, Took House, and In Old Sky among others.  She is the Poet Laureate of New Mexico and was awarded a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.