Lauren K. Carlson

The Interview

Your poems often reference and examine the concept/phenomenon of time. They deploy clocks and other time tools. What is time, to you? How does it lend itself to a poetic exploration?

There are many directions I could go with this question. I think of time as a fourth dimension, both crucial for perception and poetry. Rhythm and meter, sound, and rhyme. These need time in order to exist. I can’t remember where I read it, but it stuck me when I came across the concept that there is no music without time. That resonates with me, applied to poetry. There is no poetry without time.

Wanting to defy the human scale, to make more time or take time from others, feeling that we lack time, or that there’s not enough—there seems to be a way that the human relationship to time is about our relationship with each other. Exploiting people is a way of robbing folks of their time, controlling a timeline.

Last, one thing I try to say to others—and to myself—take the time you need. I feel like time is an essential aspect of being human, time is needed for deep attention. Time, for me, is bound to our embodiment.

Also, much of your work focuses on the body. How do you see the body as a poetic object?

This is a good segue. You’ve made the leap that my work often gets after. That’s incarnation, embodiment. I’m perpetually chasing the mystery of being embodied. I’m compelled, called even, to resist dividing the mind and body. One of the driving forces of my work is paradox, non-dual thinking.

I committed to writing poetry as a daily practice during my training as a spiritual director. There’s a deep religious, mystical, Christian aspect of my focus on the body here. It’s an urge to reconcile the inner life, the internal reverie, the daydream, with the physical, visceral, corporeal. I don’t like the easy peace, I guess, of an internal ascent that separates oneself from physical space. I bristle at terms like “meat sack” for the body, or the idea that the body is a vessel for an ethereal, hi-floating consciousness that’s above it all.

But…I’m a contradiction. The reason the body comes up frequently is because I’m a disembodied person! I’m an abstract thinker, I space out, often the core of my attention is elsewhere. The future. The news cycle. Accomplishment. Production. Being good, being pure. Some attempt at civic righteousness. Deep attention to the physical world, then, is a vital practice for me. A fruitful disruption—that’s the language I most often use. Too much order is stagnancy, but on the other hand too much disorder is destructive. The “both/and”—is where the body is, it’s where life (literally) takes shape; the body engenders the disruptions which result in growth. The physical world disrupting the inner life, the inner life imagining a better, more whole physical world.

Several of your poems rely on carefully constructed lists. Can you please comment on the way lists cause the accumulation of meaning in your work?

List poems are foundational for me because I write as a daily practice, a habit. I must keep my expectations low for what makes a complete draft. A list is one of the simplest forms. A list poem may be the only poem I write in a given day. Suzanne Buffam is a poet I admire for her work with lists.

Revision is where I look at ways to add that sense of accumulation. An organic way to give a sense of accumulation is to disrupt the list in some way. For example, maybe all the words have been one-syllable, but suddenly the list bursts into multi-syllabic phrases. Think of a time-lapse image of a flower blooming—patterns are first created and then broken. The broken pattern then becomes the new pattern—that’s the sense I’m after when I’m revising a list.

I’m drawn to abstraction in poetry too, and lists can be a way to scaffold abstract ideas or concepts. There’s a pattern of concrete objects, then the list veers into abstraction. Or the title can be abstract while the list is very concrete.

Structurally, you often employ both quite long and quite short lines for varied effects on the reader. How do you decide which structure fits which poems, and how do you feel line structure changes the way a poem is read?

There’s both intuition and intention in long and short lines. I find I reach toward two extremes. On the one hand, I use condensed elided sentences, short lines, concrete images. But there’s another maximalist style I utilize which includes long lines, ruminative and obsessive thinking, and heavy repetition. This style is usually more lyric, more abstract. I studied this kind of variation in Lorine Niedecker and Jorie Graham, for my master’s thesis. It’s exciting to me that you’ve named these gestures in my work, because I conceptualize this variation as a way to keep the language embodied. I see the lines as movement, there is the elongated reaching—the flourish outward, and then, in opposition—there is the contraction of the muscle, the rooting down through the core of the body. Martha Graham oddly enough, has helped me articulate what first I could only intuit. Graham is well known for her theory of contraction and release in dance. And that’s how I see the lines in a poem. The poem needs to breath and move. The writing must contract and release.

You end your poem “The First Miracle” with the phrase “ceaseless thirst.” And indeed, there is a thirst in all of your poems. What do you feel you are thirsting for in your writing? What is it that’s just out of reach, that your poems keep reaching for?

In my work I’m searching for integrity. Wholeness. As a person I feel I’m often complacent and cruel. But I’m also generous and kind. How do I reconcile these fundamental oppositions? How can I face my own complacency? How can I recognize love? What do I offer my community? How do I maintain a sense of self and independence?

I don’t think there’s a way to answer these questions, without paradox. And to me, the place they can be approached is in creation. These answers must be created, I suppose. They can’t be known—

In your poem “Stoneware Plate And Flaked Salt”, you write “If the world could run on ruin,” which it sort of does. Though it’s never overt, there’s a sense of human (be it political or cultural) ruin in your work. There’s a touch of human wrongdoing and of human suffering. Can you speak to how people interact, harm, and continue on in your poems, and how they affect the world around them?

This question is really challenging for me to answer, but I’m going to attempt it!

Part of the sense of human ruin comes from a desire I have to believe that imagination and creativity can save the world. If only, if only we as a collective could imagine better ways of living and being, there’d be no violence, no oppression. More harmony, more justice. Total equanimity, the kingdom of heaven on earth. A whole healthy planet, generous lovingkindness.

Then I catch myself…imagination is not an unqualified “good.” Systems of evil, harm and violence were imagined. Furthermore, many imagined “goods” turned out to be evil. And many, many times, evil has come from those who believed themselves to be morally just, and superior—than those they were systematically destroying.

For this reason, self-interrogation plays a big role in my work. And on the other side of self-interrogation is self-compassion. So: how to continue in the face of suffering? The response is two-fold, with introspection and compassion. Where am I complacent? What are the evils in which I participate? With this knowledge, can I have compassion for myself and others?

Next, what does compassion look like in practice? To me it’s first letting go of the impulse to solve or fix, since so much harm has been done in the name of good, and second, leaning into—going deeper into suffering, in order to connect. To recognize, to pay attention. Paying deep attention is a form of disruption. There are a couple of folks who have expressed this paradox better than me. One is Simon Weil, and the other is James Baldwin. I’d recommend folks look up Weil’s essay “The Need for Roots” and Baldwin’s “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.” From Baldwin:

“you must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less. Then, you make — oh, fifteen years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces, God knows how many broken friendships and an exile of one kind or another — some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are.”

Finally, you are the editor of Tinderbox Poetry Journal. As a poet yourself, what does the editorial experience feel like and how does it contribute to your larger creative life?

I just began serving as the editor for Tinderbox this year and the first word that comes to mind is gift. There is a considerable amount of generosity that I’ve experienced firsthand as an editor. Poets generously sending their work, supporting our contest, tipping the magazine when possible. Subscribers and readers gifting their time and attention to our contributors. Staff volunteers who offer their time and skill and expertise to creating an issue.

On the one hand I feel very exposed, have made a few mistakes, and have had to grapple with the shame and embarrassment of learning something new—but on the other, I’ve been given a tremendous sense of peace. Being gentle with ourselves and others has made the work sustainable. And it’s freeing to know that in the face of considerable uncontrollable circumstances, we can still expand the definition of what a poem can be, we can connect work to readers, and participate in vital literary community.

I’m grateful.