Lauren Camp selects poems that each inhabit a place, a music, another person—shaping a cosmos large or small in language. She introduces Beckian Fritz Goldberg synchronizing past and present (“Black Fish Blues”), Olga Broumas moving through shadows toward individual lives (“The Moon of Mind Against the Wooden Louver”), and Lisel Mueller cherishing names as a beginning (“Naming the Animals”). Camp closes with her poem “Ode to Two,” where land, house, and lovers are celebrated by light.
Listen to the full recordings of Goldberg, Broumas, and Mueller reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Beckian Fritz Goldberg (1994)
Olga Broumas (1988)
Lisel Mueller (1981)
Lauren Camp selects poems that each inhabit a place, a music, another person—shaping a cosmos large or small in language. She introduces Beckian Fritz Goldberg synchronizing past and present (“Black Fish Blues”), Olga Broumas moving through shadows toward individual lives (“The Moon of Mind Against the Wooden Louver”), and Lisel Mueller cherishing names as a beginning (“Naming the Animals”). Camp closes with her poem “Ode to Two,” where land, house, and lovers are celebrated by light.
Listen to the full recordings of Goldberg, Broumas, and Mueller reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Beckian Fritz Goldberg (1994)
Olga Broumas (1988)
Lisel Mueller (1981)
Julie Swarstad Johnson:
[00:00:03.17] You're listening to Poetry Centered where you'll hear archival recordings of poets reading their work, introduced for you by a contemporary poet. The show comes to you from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and our online archive of recorded poetry readings called Voca. I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson, the Center's archivist here to welcome you.
[00:00:26.91] We're joined today by Lauren Camp, New Mexico's current poet laureate and author of seven poetry collections. She has two new books out this year, An Eye in Each Square and Worn Smooth Between Devourings. In this episode, Lauren invites us into poems by Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Olga Broumas, and Lisel Mueller, celebrating what she calls the music and pulse of their poems. Poems that shapeshift as they create.
[00:00:57.29] Lauren closes by reading her poem, Ode To Two, entering the conversation of self, other, and place that she pulls from the archive. Lauren, thank you so much for hosting us today.
Lauren Camp:
[00:01:12.54] Hello. This is Lauren Camp and I'm recording this from my home in a small farming village in the high desert near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The first recording I'd like to share is Beckian Fritz Goldberg, reading "Black Fish Blues, recorded on February 2, 1994. In her introduction, Goldberg speaks about the duality of poetry. How as a whole, it can hold the present and the past. This seems like a true benefit of the genre, and is one of the reasons I am drawn to it. That it can inhabit both temporalities, often synchronizing the two.
[00:01:57.57] In a 2006 interview with the journal Willow Springs, Goldberg talked of loss in her writing saying, "How can you love something and not mourn the fact that it's going to disappear. To me, that's the essential question of the human condition. And if you avoid it, I don't think you can write an honest poem."
[00:02:21.13] In "Black Fish Blues," images open to new images, as when the poet writes about coffee and muddy water. And then shifts into the dream world of the child. We are calmly and steadily deepening into memory, to the house of the speaker's childhood, and the heart of that house. There's a bit of humor, or at least lightness in the shoes, the way they are placed, as she writes, for conversation. That feels delightful, ready for action.
[00:02:54.35] But from there, we springboard to this line that follows. I'm talking about being all right when you meet yourself coming or going. It's in the middle of the poem, rather than prominently set at the beginning or end. I love when poets do this. When I remember to do this, to leave a crucial bit sandwiched into the whole. The sentence shifts what the reader or listener will carry forward. We receive the line and continue along. But now, with this awareness as the underpainting for the rest of the poem.
[00:03:32.90] Throughout the piece., there is great musicality. The poem is flexible. It accrues and shapeshifts in a sort of call and response. It reverses on itself without ever saying the same thing. It pulls us along with its narrative and with its images. It repositions, displaces what it holds, and what is hushed up, and what is now truly impossible to put to rest. So here is Beckian Fritz Goldberg reading “Black Fish Blues.”
Beckian Fritz Goldberg:
[00:04:11.94] We lead a double life, all of us. The double life of past and present. And I think that sometimes, that's an artificial division. The idea that the past is that which is finished. I find, at least, that it keeps reincarnating itself. And consequently, the present is reacting to it. This poem requires a lot of breath so I'm taking a little time. Involves that transparency. And it takes its form from the blues. It's called “Black Fish Blues.”
[00:05:01.52] I've got a cigarette and a bee outside my window. The window is dusty, speckled like an old pair of skin. I've got a cleaning woman coming once a week, a pomegranate tree with its red bomber lips ticking the wind quiet outside. Wind you can see but not hear. I've got a cup of coffee, an hour's the size of my palm. A cup of coffee and the taste of muddy water stubbing my teeth. Muddy water like the child in me finds in her dreams. I don't know why I go there.
[00:05:40.37] Bee with its striped brain, loves the curl, light shaves in the air. Curl you can follow but not see. I've got a view and a neighbor with a drainpipe running off his roof. I've got a feel for the plumbing broken in those shadows. I've got my light coming in strong on all stations and branches, knocking their shadows flat on the blocks of the fence.
[00:06:08.68] I've got a whole cluster of black fish bobbing in the top block. Fish that touch you quick constellations, below the water. I remember this. I've got a third hand and a third leg, another skin that remembers things. I've got that leg half way up the road, I'm walking with my sister in the snow of 58. There's the body of a rabbit trapped beneath the ice. There's the marble of stillness and shadow.
[00:06:43.06] It's a long way to the heart of our house. It's a long way, sister, to here my good legs crossed as I sit in my chair. I've got shoes waiting over in the corner like I've died, red shoes that go with nothing I own. They've got their heels near each other for conversation. I'm talking about being all right when you meet yourself coming or going.
[00:07:13.09] I've got to be talking soft zeros near a tree outside my window. I've got an eye that can look right through. I've got a soul full of salt like an olive. I've got a cleaning woman who comes and touches all my things. Who raises them up and sets them down. I've got an idea. They love her, not me. I've got an idea each girl, dumb like the spring, thinks she's the first and only. I've got a notion to sit here all day and get the blues about the light, and how it will feel in 10 years. I don't know why.
[00:07:58.46] Sometimes the past walks right through me like an old boyfriend. Sometimes the past, like an old boyfriend, walks through me. I don't know if I say goodbye, or hello, or drink coffee. If I answer its question or get distracted hearing my mother and father come in late and drop their coats. It's spring, 60. Their dark feet swim near my door and their voices hook on the taut line of whispers.
[00:08:34.04] I've got a line on those whispers. I've got them hushing each other. My mother and father coming in strong and late. They're saying words low as wounds given underwater, wounds without lights on. And I'm bursting to tell them, hushing each other. My mother and father, I'm awake, and still awake, wide awake.
Lauren Camp:
[00:09:09.54] The second poem I'd like to share is Olga Broumas reading “The Moon of Mind Against the Wooden Louver,” recorded on October 26, 1988. I am interested in this poem right away, entranced by the title with its deep ooh sounds, which make me feel like I am entering a tunnel. I want to see in and through. And it is Broumas' voice to the intensity she begins with, that contributes to this.
[00:09:42.87] The poem catapults us into a particular place. And what is this place? It seems institutional. We are moving into it but also somehow against it. We turn through as outsiders learning who is there. She gives specific details and motions. The rooms are physically real, as are the people in them. We see the collective, oblivious to anything but their own intimate situations.
[00:10:13.69] The poem advances through as she writes invisible or merely transparent shadows, to tighten to a particular set of individuals. We see a hand, the hand of a caregiver. A nurse in this case. Cinematically, the poem closes in. The nurse is taking care of her patient, Barry, and gives that help tenderly. And we see the speaker watch that humane help.
[00:10:43.66] There's so much we don't know in this poem, but we know enough. We are allowed to piece together what we need. We can feel the ache. Sometimes poems open a perspective or a situation that I might not have experienced. The poem makes me hear it, witness it, read it, and wonder. I begin to ask where I would be in such a situation.
[00:11:06.57] I find myself doing so in this poem, evaluating where I would fit on this compassionate care taking continuum. I don't have to announce what I learn, but it stays inside me long after the poem ends. The final lines beginning, for its duration like a cyclone. On the page, there is a stunning stanza break here. Lead to the consuming power of the final line. So here is Olga Broumas reading “The Moon of Mind Against the Wooden Louver.”
Olga Broumas:
[00:11:47.35] It's called “The Moon of Mind Against the Wooden Louver.” The visitors in room 8509 stand in a circle chanting something Russian. The hayseeds down the hall have come in segregated silence. Men roll their thick white stockings in the lounge. Mother and sister still between the door and bed each time I pass. We step across invisible, or merely transparent shadows making up their mind to speak, to intervene, to call.
[00:12:23.32] A firm hand, like the AM nurse sponging the last few hours of confusion from the somehow child like emaciated limbs and face, she lifts a bride. I swear, swathed in sheet back on fresh linen and then clips the bottoms of the flowers keeping the family at bay while Barry naps. In her unbridled trust, we lack.
[00:12:49.31] Not without prayer, not without the pluck and humor of the song your bones thrum while the blood still lives. They're broadside and their flank. I kiss your bones. In mind, each rounded pinnacle of rib is white against an O'Keeffe sky and light, their lingua franca. Such thinking heals the moment. It divides us for its duration like a cyclone fence from our despair, our rage, our bitter, greedy fear.
[00:13:23.36]
Lauren Camp:
[00:13:32.24] The third recording I'd like to play for you is Lisel Mueller, reading “Naming the Animals,” recorded on October 28, 1981. In her opening remarks, the poet humbly expresses concern about clarity. She questions whether it is even possible to get this right, to make a poem clear enough for every person who might receive it. It's striking, her uncertainty.
[00:14:02.12] There is a Chinese proverb in which Confucius says, "The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name." In the poem, the world is invented by the names. And specifically, at first, the horse and the cow. The fish is described as having skins of yellow and silver oil. And with this, the fish is created. Or maybe more accurately, light is created when the fish is named.
[00:14:34.53] Mueller is spare, economical. The world is being brought into existence. Rather than continue with example upon example, she adorns her few choices with valuable unusual details. We fill in the shaping of the whole cosmos. Mueller begins the poem with until. She lands us in the middle right at the start. We are compelled to read or listen on, to pry loose the subject, the action, the full thought.
[00:15:08.26] I often suggest to my students that if they set a pattern, they should also somewhere break that pattern. And Mueller does this. The poem doesn't stay where she starts, until, but pushes forward to only. And to the very soul of naming, the grammar changes here. He had to name, she says. As opposed to what she wrote previously, he named. My ear perks up with this shift. There is an insistence, a demand.
[00:15:42.37] The endpoint of this poem is not an inventory of history. It teases this approach, finding a word to call a new person, place, or animal. To tip us toward where the poet needs to go. This is a poem of cherishing. It assembles into the most essential name, and offers one single diminutive and equally powerful detail for that. This gentle beauty of a poem is quite small, four short stanzas. So here is Lisel Mueller reading “Naming the Animals.”
[00:16:20.46]
Lisel Mueller:
[00:16:26.16] I feel intimidated tonight because just before I came to Tucson, we were at a poetry reading given by Robert Pinsky. And someone afterwards asked him to justify a poetry readings why he gave them. Because the person who asked said that it was too difficult to understand poetry when you just listened to it. And he agreed. And so I am very much under the influence of that. The person who asked it was a poet herself.
[00:17:11.64] Well, nevertheless, I'd like to start with a poem called “Naming the Animals.” This is what Adam is supposed to have done, as you know, given names to all the animals.
[00:17:32.23]
[00:17:39.88] Until he named the horse horse, hoofs left no prints on the Earth. Manes had not been invented. Swiftness and grace were not married. Until he named the cow cow, no one slept standing up. No one saw through opaque eyes. Food was chewed only once.
[00:18:07.48] Only after he named the fish fish, did the light put on skins of yellow and silver oil, revealing itself as a dancer and high jump champion of the world. Just as later, for he had to name the woman love, before he could put on the knowledge of who she was with her small hands.
[00:18:33.66]
Lauren Camp:
[00:18:43.59] It has been a pleasure to settle into the Voca archives, listening to a great many treasures before selecting these works. I'm honored and humbled to add one of my own poems to this mix. After listening to these poems, each with their own music and pulse, each written into place, either close to home, or of a larger realm. Each with its connection to others or an other. I chose "Ode to Two" from my book, An Eye in Each Square, which was published in June 2023 by River River Books.
[00:19:23.77] "Ode to Two." Every day lucky that every person is one of the two. We are glad there aren't others, not even when the valley enters winter bluster, muck sludge, and gesture. And angular then or whenever, we can sit by ourselves. Together, there can be silence. Whether the flesh of the ground is dry or the axis ignited, the night before, the night after, and during those dreams of insoluble edges. Those can be ours.
[00:19:58.50] I can wake to him with the arc of a thigh, my body jutting our ongoing conversation about spaces. And no other person will come any more. No other will be a third person, a fourth. The days will gallop and tilt, but hours may slow. And after carrying all our luminous attentions, we will find sentences settle between bloom and flame at the table.
[00:20:25.02] When the door squeaks, we let it already tired of fixing what happens around us and outside. The pink cloud in the fragile thrum of our sun, there will be no one to call but each other, or the cats hurrying out sleeping it off. We are the two as colors remove again. And trees cling to wind, we two only as we misapply another obstacle and a horoscope suggests we find more.
[00:20:52.56] While at the other side parents, go into the forest to find children. And centuries pass waiting for word that they've been brought forth, terrified perhaps but unscarred. Here, we remain with rusted sky in this anonymous small scrape of day and another in our house of wood. Our tall ceilings, just us many late mornings. Our little perfections, each strain of drought as light rises, reinvented with us as its favorites.
[00:21:31.23]
Julie Swarstad Johnson:
[00:21:40.78] Lauren, thank you so much. I love that line, “settle between bloom and flame at the table.” Thank you also for your wonderful selections from Voca. Listeners, thank you so much for sharing this time with us. Have you visited Voca to explore the archive? The address is voca.arizona.edu. You can find more than 1,000 recordings of poets reading their work between 1963 and today.
[00:22:10.30] And today really is today. We add new recordings from our reading and lecture series, which is ongoing. New episodes of Poetry Centered are coming your way soon. In two weeks, look for an episode with Sally Wen Mao. Thanks again so much for joining us.
Aria Pahari:
[00:22:27.46] Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world class library collection of more than 80,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center library and buildings are housed on the Indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui.
[00:22:55.27] Poetry Centered is the work of Aria Pahari, that's me, and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audiovisual archive online at voca.arizona.edu.
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