Lauren Camp Is Is Enough
Lauren Camp
I know the in word right now is agency, and I guess that's appropriate, some ability to do something with what was happening, not just to watch it, not just to see it happen, but to also grab on and take it and put language to it, and the the joy of finding language counterbalanced the the sometimes despair of Watching this super interesting person lose who he was.
Tayo Basquiat
Well, welcome to the study podcast, a virtual room for thought where there is always room for you. I'm Teo, and joining me in the study today is poet Lauren camp. You've been having quite the round of experiences these last years, astronomer in residence the Grand Canyon, three years as Poet Laureate in New Mexico. I've asked you here today to talk about your poetic practice as a whole, but specifically related to a collection titled is is enough.
Tayo Basquiat
What's this collection about?
Lauren Camp
First of all, it's great to be here. Thank you for the invitation. This new book is, is enough is what is it about? It's a, you know, I think sometimes I think poetry is not doesn't have to be about something, but the collection tracks my father's plummeting settling into Alzheimer's disease, so It's me watching what's happening and gathering details and just putting descriptions to the situation as it was happening in the present time for the period of three and a half years that I watched as his memory continued to create holes in his history. You know,
Tayo Basquiat
I've heard recently that statistically, dementia and Alzheimer's rates are declining, but I can't really square that with my own experience. It just seems prevalent and touching a lot of people's lives, both experiencing the disease for themselves, but as caregivers, loved ones, friends of people who have it. So I really think that this collection is going to be a real gift to folks. So let's start with the title is is enough? Can you speak to each of those words and maybe how the title relates to the collection as a whole.
Lauren Camp
Absolutely the title. I like the title for its ability to be both a question and a declarative statement. There's no punctuation in the title. So could it be is is enough? Or could it be is is enough? Like that's as a definite, I love that it can be read either way. And possibly, maybe there are other ways that I haven't thought about the title itself comes from one of the poems, a line in one of the poems in the book where my father It's a poem about some something in my father's history where my father is asking the question, how much enough? Is enough? And that's that's really where I derived the title from, and started playing around with the shape of it and the title was hard. It was, it was actually difficult to title this collection. I believe in titles. I have. I have faith in titles and how they can lead someone into a poem, into an artwork, into a book, into anything. I've titled 1000s of things by this point in my adult life. And this title, I came to it early. I shifted away from it. I came back to it. It settles me, because it is not, it's not, it's not easy access. You don't know exactly what you're getting when you read that title, I think, or I hope,
Tayo Basquiat
yeah, as a writer, titles give me no end to anxiety. But when I read this title, I. Yeah, I read it as a declarative so I love this reminder that there is no punctuation. So it could also be a question, which is very helpful, because as I took hold of it, it expressed a certitude that I was like, I'm not sure I'm I'm willing to to get on board, like, maybe it's still a question for me. So how wonderful that even even in this moment like that, has opened up something new for me. You have offered up a couple of poems in other websites or other places, like on your website. I don't want to give away a lot of the poems here, but there's one that I found out there that is titled father to narrow than stranger. And there's these lines in it that go I smiled with terrible tangles in my love. We were told to expect such nots and you express, I think, as only a poet can, what made me think about with diseases like Alzheimer's or dementia, the medicalization of a disease in a particular framing means that, you know, we'll be told to look for signs and symptoms of the diseases progression, almost like a map of sorts for, you know, the person and the caregivers and stuff. But your poetic version made me imagine kind of the value of having a poet on the care team, you know, like making the rounds with the other like the attending poet along with the attending physician, because I think poets notice and attend in a different way. And it made me wonder, what did you as a poet notice about the experience of the disease that your father was having?
Lauren Camp
I love this question, and I do think poets maybe attend in a different way, or attend to very particular thing and hold those as the or claim those maybe as the detail that the experience rotates around in some way for the purpose of these poems, which, as I was writing them, I'm not even sure they were poems I was writing at the time, I was gathering bits, really, and crafting lines and descriptions out of the bits. I was noticing I didn't have a big agenda to write a book. I didn't have a big agenda to write a poem. I just had the the effort, which was a pleasure, to hold on to some details, even if those details were difficult, even if it was my father is not remembering something, or if it was a detail of, I don't know, like how, how I tried to describe something to him that would help ease his anxiety in that moment, or his confusion about how to get back to his room, or whatever it was, the shirt he was wearing, you know, whatever it was I it was it. I know it sounds crazy, but it was such a pleasure to grab on to these details, run them through the way that I like to play with language, or utilize language to hold something, but in a way that is new To me, and in that way, to kind of tack down that moment of me with my father, or on the phone with my father, whatever it was I was doing, of his experience and my understanding of it,
Tayo Basquiat
in one interview that I read, you, spoke about writing as a ritual, and I'm curious, you know, given what you just said about you know, you weren't intending to write a book about this. You were. You're really just bringing who you are, it seems, and how you go about experiencing something through a poetic practice to this, maybe that that word ritual, just jumped out at me. What about this? Was a Ritual, and is did you speak about writing as a ritual before this? Or is this a new feature of writing for you?
Lauren Camp
Well, I believe in rituals. Yes, in general, I think they're, they're appealing, they're they are comforting, in a way, they are satisfying. I think for me, poetry from the time I began, it has been a kind of ritual and a kind of joy as well. But perhaps that's because I enter the practice of writing without any demands on what has to come out. So the ritual is in the crafting of it, and maybe that even includes the the later, re crafting or reshaping of it. I am pretty generous with myself in the writing practice, in that I'm not I'm not judgmental about how I'm writing what I'm writing about, the ritual in this project of my father's of tracking this was, you know, I didn't, I didn't have to do it. I mean, my, I have two siblings. They were around. They didn't write things down. I wrote things down because, maybe because this is a practice and an art form that I hold close to me, but, but really more than that, I think it was a way I had some I know the N word right now is agency, and I guess that's appropriate, some ability to do something with what was happening, not just to watch it, not just to see it happen, but to also grab on and take it and Put language to it, and the the joy of finding language counter balanced, the the sometimes despair of watching this super interesting person lose who he was,
Tayo Basquiat
that makes a lot of sense To me when, when I think about ritual, I think of a very participatory experience. You can't just really, I suppose you can observe a ritual right from the outside. You could watch other people, but it evokes, for me, more of the participation. Like, how are you participating in this ritual agency works, I guess, for for that, but I was very, very much struck by that. And maybe you could just give a little color to that, like on a on a daily basis. How did the flow of writing work with you? Know, maybe a visit to your father or like, how did the days progress? How was each day ritualized by the writing practice for you,
Lauren Camp
I think, in general, the way I the way, the reason I write, is to capture something, to hold on to something. I mean, I've said this for a long time. I'm I'm either trying to hold on to something or occasionally trying to let go of something that is bothering me, but more often, I'm holding something And with dementia, you're, it's very clear that you are losing something. You are losing the person in front of you. You are losing the person you care for, or you're caring, you know, you're you're caregiving for, or both. And so holding on to something became like it was wide open. I could hold on to, you know, anything? So for me, it was the a lot of times it was the really quirky things, the things I couldn't quite make sense of. But I wanted to keep thinking about. I wanted to remember this, this odd time. So for example, at the beginning of my father lived in a memory care facility for the, I guess, the about three years and the last three years of his life. And towards the beginning he was, he was pretty paranoid about that they were poisoning him. And I found that whole scenario very interesting. Like that he was worried he was hungry, but he was afraid to eat the soup, for example. And when my sister took a spoonful of the soup and put. In her mouth and said, This is good. He he visibly panicked, like she she was going to be poisoned. You know, if with someone who has all their cognitive abilities, you just say, No, that's ridiculous, but you can't say that to someone, or it's not helpful to say that to someone who's holding this worry. So that detail became of interest to me. The fact that he was not changing his socks was of interest to me that at one point I bent down, sat by his feet, and said, Dad, you have to change your socks. You know, it's the they do laundry here. It's not, please do this. It's good for you, you know. And I and I pulled, and I think about this a lot, I me pulling off these sweaty, icky socks, off his sweaty, smelly feet, because he had kept putting on the same socks over and over. It was details like that. It wasn't like grand pronouncements about the disease. It was little details. But that makes sense to me, because poetry narrows to those little details. You know that's that's what makes our experiences, is the little details, not the grand, sweeping overview.
Tayo Basquiat
I think that's a great place to have. You read a poem for us from from this collection, we can talk about it a little bit.
Lauren Camp
Okay, I'd be glad to his kingdom of brooding dad paced the 12 by 15 room with a green cap in his hand. Only when he was bereft did he call. His calls came unending. Then many messages we had bought him the recipe for safety. He mumbled about the locks now he could no longer travel the aisles of clothes. Of course, we apologized each time we entered his room. He pulled open a drawer after that another. He named objects and light each hour, he saw different afternoons in panes of wide rectangles. He called me deer, which was a shimmer. The eggs came all runny with biscuits, and he made it clear he'd never take part in the singing, though he'd voice the familiar rhythm of anger, he said he missed bread with crusts. He did nothing each day, but the outside was pleasing bougainvillea and mandolins, or that's how it seemed. He was cleaned of all but the worries he had cigars but wanted only the tin. He smoked in the garden and said they were worthless in his room. He again walked in circles. Could we return him the city concrete would do well? He reminded could we drive him to places with outlines? We were delicate in our answers. We interrupted him and his thoughts mingled departed. Dad used words like otherwise and washed up he wanted to organize paper clips in his old apartment. We taped his beautiful face on the door and told him to always turn left at the orchid.
Tayo Basquiat
You were kind enough to send that poem to me ahead of time, and as I heard you speaking about these details that you captured earlier. This poem is certainly replete with those kinds of things I think about. I can, I can see him opening these drawers and and just over again and again, like when you come into the room, open the drawer, and you're like, why? You know, and it's, it's the sort of those details that you're latching on to. And the very end, those lines, we taped his beautiful face on the door and told him to always turn left at the orchid. I was trying to feel my way into that, and was asking, who's the photo for? Like, does he? Does he remember his face? Is that part of what's being lost as well? And this charge to always turn left at the orchid, is that something that could be remembered? And all of these different questions. And started popping up for me about, like, the act of remembering. And I'm wondering if you could talk about those two lines, and maybe some thoughts about remembering.
Lauren Camp
Yeah, the, I mean, the book is not for him was were not for him. The poems were for me. I mean, that was the writing I was doing was for me. It was a way to hold on, as I said, but the and so part of the remembering, or maybe all of the remembering, was for me to remember, for me to remember certain things. But also the memory care facility was confusing to him, and I think it was designed intentionally so that it seemed to be an, I don't know, a place that had a lot more to it than it did. Perhaps it had a lot more opportunities to explore than the, you know, whatever three hallways it had on each floor, but he would get turned around there. And I think that was true of everyone there. And so the the rooms were all decorated with different things, and that was part of how you could find your room, how or it might help anyway. I mean, you know, in the later, in the later months that he was there, at one point, somebody, I was with him, and somebody walked into the room because they thought it was their room. So I think there was great, there was great confusion among all the people there, where they were going, what they were doing, what they were doing with their days, you know, how they were getting to the dancing on the second floor, or meals, or, you know, anything. And so it was, it was us, my siblings and I, trying to help him navigate, trying, trying to ease his mind and help him navigate in the smallest ways, in how to get down the hallway, or how to be comfortable, satisfied at ease.
Tayo Basquiat
I can imagine how destabilizing that is for somebody to move in to a completely new place. You can't put any markers down for yourself, as you can't remember them. And then you know, as a family member trying to help in that process, and you're just like, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to make this this better. This might be an impossible question for you to to even contemplate, given who you are, but you know, what do you think you would have lost in this experience if you were not a poet,
Lauren Camp
I would have lost a lot, actually, because even as I was reading you this poem, I was back there. I was back there on one visit and another visit and another visit, just walking the hall with him, hearing his voice, hearing him tell me about something you know, that I already knew, most likely, but showing me something, pulling out the drawers, his phone calls like I I would have lost the fact that all of that is is is in ink, you know, is, is kind of permanent. It's made more permanent in my mind. Also, I mean, I'd like, you know, to go back to your question about remembering. I'd like to think I would remember everything, even without documenting. But that isn't true. You know, life moves on. You know, I'm my days are busy. They get filled up. I think about things. I think about the next things. And when I think back six months or six years, there are details I don't remember. So for me, this was a way to, I guess the short answer is, it was a way to keep my father very alive, and that has remained very important to me, even when he's not here,
Tayo Basquiat
you mentioned that you have siblings, and I imagine the whole membership of extension that comes from having siblings. But have they read this book, and do they, have you talked at all about, you know, their experience and their reading of it? Does it function that way for them? Or is it mostly. For you. As you said, you wrote this for yourself, but yeah, well, and
Lauren Camp
I think I wrote it also to share this one experience with other people. The book is brand new. They haven't yet read it, but they've both expressed great interest in having it and spending time with it. My sister has heard some of the poems in the book and and expressed a tremendous amount of gratitude for the fact that I was documenting they didn't see what I was documenting but, but I think the experience as a whole for the three of us was was so profound and different for each of us, our each of our relationships with my father were different growing up, and they were certainly different as he lost his memory and what we needed from him differed and so, so I would guess that it would be impossible to write on their behalf. I really, I really don't know how I how I could do that. I hope what I wrote will feel resonant to them, even if it is not their experience. And you know, recently I was thinking, I was reminded of Lorraine hansberry's quote about specificity leading to a kind of universality, and how if I write my particular experience of something, someone else can take that and react to that and feel like there's space for their own. So I hope that's what happens, not just with my sister and brother, but with anybody who has any experience of of memory issues in any way, and that's a lot of people, as you said at the start of this, show many people have some kind of connection to someone who's lost or losing their memory.
Tayo Basquiat
Yeah, that's that's why I firmly believe this is just going to be such a gift to a lot of people. Because, as you say, it's not again, returning to that medicalization. You you get these general markers, right? Like, okay, first you'll see this, and then you might see that, and then, like, this is typical of somebody at this stage, you know? But what all of that doesn't say is, like, you're just going to be tangled up in these knots, like, it's, it's just like this, the experience of the general it's, it's one thing like, yes, every This is called Alzheimer's, but everybody has their own remembrance of these little details, of the things that were hard, that what they like, what you just said about what you what you needed from your father and growing up, was different from your siblings and and that's true for everybody, right? But this does allow people to sort of hang their own story, to open up to that permissiveness and also just like an affirmation, like somebody else sees how difficult this journey is and has been on this path. I think that's a really important companionship that poetry, literature in general can offer, you know, you've you've mentioned elsewhere, and you've had projects where you've connected community poetry, gone into different, you know, counties around New Mexico, and had people write and then compiled a poem for that community after, afterwards, you've just said, like, that's part of your your aspiration for this collection in connecting with other people. Is that accurate?
Lauren Camp
Yeah, that's That's very true. And I think also one thing that was important to me in the assembling of the poems into a collection was not to have it be a book of despair. I wrote probably three times as many poems as about this time period as are in the book. The poems that ended up in here are very clearly, of of the present moment as it was happening. They are not they I don't think they are sad. I don't think they are tragic. I think they are kind of, here's what's happening now. Wow, here's where we are, and that shifted. And you know, as you said, there, there are certain stages of Alzheimer's. I think they overlap. I think they backtrack. Sometimes it's not a direct this happens. Then this happens. Then this happens because once in a while there's clarity, and once in a while there's confusion where it there maybe shouldn't be or should be. And so for me, the other part about the book is also a sense of the beauty of certain moments, the the luck even, of certain moments that only come because of this disease, only come because of the situation we're in.
Tayo Basquiat
So just a couple more questions for you. Is there a before Lauren and an after Lauren having written your way through this experience, do you? Do you note any changes, either in things that have been part of your poetic concern previously, or just things that you didn't know before and now you know, maybe in a different way after, after, I'll just say after, performing this ritual of having written your way through this particular experience.
Lauren Camp
What an amazing question there is, I'm sure, a before and an after, and somehow, I don't know what it is, but somehow I think it's partly filled with some greater regret and some greater love, and they are very tied up together.
Tayo Basquiat
My thanks to Lauren camp and to you listener and fellow student for joining me in the study today. Before you go, we'd love to welcome you into the wider work of the study. Head to the study, nd.org for free and low cost, online classes, lectures, living history performances, study clubs and other ways to curate your own study, practice on your own terms. Join us when you can and bring a friend you.