To Unfinish Weariness

A Review of An Eye in Each Square

An Eye in Each Square. Camp, Lauren. River River Books, 2023. 73 pp. $18.

In the opening poem of An Eye in Each Square, New Mexico Poet Laureate Lauren Camp offers a narrative framework for the collection: “To reset, I’ve come to the distance, to watch the ocean repeat / how to unfinish. I brought with me a light jacket and a thick book // about Agnes Martin” (1). The title of this poem—“Must Learn Neither”— provides an imperative that sets an agenda, for the experience: “What I want to figure out // is what could be in the neithers” (2), Camp writes, like a plea, or a prayer.

Abstract Expressionist painter Agnes Martin, famous for her large and largely unphotographable canvases of horizontal lines and grids, spent the last several decades of her life in retreat. Many poets have obsessed over Martin’s work, and how could they not? Martin’s enduring influence is ironic, given she did not believe in influence, and is not only due to her art, but also her choices, and the manner in which she lived her (ultimately) long and solitary life: how she burned most of her work every year for twenty years.

Martin represents (also ironic, as her art was resolutely non-representational) freedom in containment—a solid poetic tenet. Her measured yet wavering graphite marks suggest a continuum, like a held note whose vibration remains in the body after the music has stopped. “A line, a line; it never leaves you” (1), as Camp writes. 

In Camp’s book, the speaker isn’t clear as to why she brought Martin’s book along for the ride: “I’m not sure / why I packed it, what it celebrates” (1), and thinks, “Maybe I’ll hear thin strands of refuge / apart from the chaos that circles” (1). Martin didn’t care for circles—“too expanding,” she says, but they are also, perhaps, too suggestive of a trap, or of death, as when, in Camp’s “Emptiness Prayer,” “ravens circle” (10). It’s the line that compels, the middle distance—not a shape, not a representation, not conclusive. 

“What am I looking at?” (5) Camp asks in the first poem of the first section, a question that is genuinely and unexpectedly funny in its frankness. The poet is in a marine landscape engulfed in fog, reading about an artist whose work—pale, pale colorations of penciled horizontal lines and rectangular grids—is described as minimalist and abstract. What, indeed, is she looking at?

Light and color, for a start. Camp, a visual artist herself, communicates light and color from the perspective of someone familiar with both the canvas and the page. Sensory experience is not limited to the eyes, however. In all the fog and grayness, the poet feels, through all her sensory entry points, the ocean and its “unfathomable salt” (6), ancient and elemental. 

This first section poses the additional question: “What is available to us?” (6). In “Cow,” the speaker recalls a childhood family vacation: “A family with an eye / in each square of window” (22). What the square contains is ever changing, given the car’s movement, but the shape dictates the parameters of perspective. Camp writes, “And we couldn’t be anywhere else” (23). Suddenly the family is not only contained, but also restrained to a particular view. Consider the aggressive influence of the Instagram square, the anxiety of it. How rigid is the box, how forgiving? 

Martin had a lot to say about squares, how she thought they were excessively hostile, how she employed the friendlier rectangle in her grids as a softening agent for her six-foot by six-foot (and later five-foot by five-foot) canvases. Containment was essential for Martin, her grids the structure that kept “her ravaged mind held in / containment” (18), as meter, or a stanza, might serve to contain the poet’s wild associations.  

Camp shifts, in section two, from orientation to contemplation. In “The Arrangement of Habitat,” sensation and feeling—lightness and weight— displace more intellectual understanding: “The day does not retain meaning. // The view: a gray above and beneath. / Sand grains and mounds between moon jellies on the beach” (30). The poet considers the idea of retreat as compulsion rather than choice. For Camp, Martin’s experience with schizophrenia and its treatments may not be understood, but needs to be considered. The chaos of caring for someone with dementia while maintaining a public life, a creative practice, and intimate relationships, all in an era of political divisiveness and runaway environmental decline may not be comparable to a life of mental illness.

There is a bit of dark humor in “Fire and Tidal,” the first poem in section three, when Camp writes, “on the quiet where even the trees have only the task // of staying upright (53)—a wry observation salted with envy. Martin talked about the innocence of trees, and how it was easy for them, as they were trees.  A kind of clarity emerges at this point of the collection, mixed with desire: “I want to start over, understanding what I need is so little” (56). Embedded in the wish to start over is a memory of the poet’s younger, less tethered self. The abnegation of regret feels less like a harkening for the so-called freedom from responsibility that comes with youth, and more like a prodding to regain a sense of one’s own desires and purpose, apart from, but not to the exclusion of, life’s inevitable entanglements. 

The absence of regret is a kind of muscular innocence, and a call for synergy between artists. How can the painter speak to the poet, the paint inform the poem? The need for creative people to draw strength from one another in this time of environmental catastrophe and social unrest is made plain in “Self Portrait with Agnes Martin”: “The earth lives under these various spaces // in the open. Inside itself. Inside, even, what cannot continue” (70): on this compromised earth, inside these damaged bodies, we persist. 

Martin warned against influence outside of one’s own intuition, waited for her imagination to conjure an image—literally put a picture in her head— before she set brush to canvas. She lived and worked alone. But poetry and poem-making have a deep relationship to lineage. This shows up in Camp’s titles, some of which borrow directly from the names of Martin’s paintings. Martin is not a model (much less a muse), but a lens; she is, more than anything, a comrade across disciplines: “In the end, no matter how much I read, watched, thought, or looked, Agnes Martin remained an enigma, and her work did, too. And that was just as well. It was very much what I needed” (79). 

This is the idea and purpose the artist and the poet share—the power and expansive possibility of the line, and their devotion to it; Camp and Martin shared, as well (in vastly different proportions) access to a slice of time in which they could create, to operate like the tide, to retreat and come back, through the immensity, to “unfinish weariness” (38).