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. She wrote enough poems to make a book — and that book, “In Old Sky,” was published by Grand Canyon Conservancy this spring (April 2024). Another favorite project is her Poet Laureate project — New Mexico Epic Poem Project . ~ David L. Harrison
How do you start a poem? What if there is no right way? I like to locate in a particular place, which for me, is often the high desert where I live. From there, I’m often writing toward something I want to hold onto or release. Maybe an interesting smidge of conversation, a memory, something precious or sad.