A Poetry Craft Essay by Lauren Camp
ON WRITING MY FATHER INTO THE FUTURE

I’ve never intended to write a book, but then a situation appears — a month at the Grand Canyon or Alzheimer’s or the next large thing. Over and over, I write of where I am.

In the midst of our ordinary busy lives, my sister and I planned a celebration for my father’s 80th birthday. A few days before, at his home in Philadelphia, I started to see how strange his habits were. Awkward with unmeasurable breaks. He looked at my sister and me with our differences of appearances, styles, cadences, and energies, and said, “Which one are you?” 

Danger flooded in as we made sense of the slipping of his memory and where the leaks were worst. There was hardly time for sadness. After the party, we moved fast to ensure his safety from our homes states away. With each complication in elder care — insurance, the choice of a facility or aides, medications, an understanding of how to speak to someone who is forgetting — I wrote. The angle of his shoulders as he lost track of how to hold himself upright. His panics. His twices and thrices. Each haphazard, but sufficient, moment was a way to build strength for the day-to-day details. 

I could’ve made excuses for why there wasn’t time to write these things down, but if I didn’t capture them then, there would never be another opportunity. Besides — I wasn’t writing poems. I was daughtering while catching what I knew would disappear. I was a guest at his reality and a shadow alone. My scribbles and phone notes gave me a purpose, between screaming at banks because I was on the lost side of his logins, scrambling to gather money to pay his bills, and every other small and large urgent issue to deal with.

Later, as I built the lines out into poems, it felt appropriate and necessary to keep them unresolved, with a sort of distended, convoluted narrative. This was different from previous work I’d done. I didn’t see it as experimental writing, but writing that matched the situation I was in. Each poem was my way of smuggling a bit of my dad into the future. In the stanzas and poems, he was alive — and yes, confused, but also sweet. I could hear him, see him, hold his hand. My complicated father, who I loved and who I had had years of terrible disagreements with, disappeared a little more each time I saw or spoke to him. I was realizing that love looked like all the small actions: him on the dance floor, him organizing his top drawer. His affair with the woman across the hall, the way he charmed her, though he could not remember her name.

Writing of Alzheimer’s Disease meant I was circling and writing into an unfastened sort of absence. Nothing was exact. It had matter and also spyholes through which I could see what had fallen off. Each poem in what became my book Is Is Enough lived in the present with its last chances. I couldn’t write the poems to be clear and precise because life wasn’t that. Each day and venture were built in that moment by what my father could understand and manage.

My father was gentled by dementia. He had forgotten his grudges, demands, and the need to control. His financial concerns were passed on to me, his power of attorney, to handle. Because his brain was emptying, he could finally relax after years of worry and objections.

I tell my writing students to be “fiercely specific” in their details, which for me was easy this time because I wanted to hoard my father’s statements and behavior. As a witness, nothing was tragic. Nothing was more worthy than anything else. I wrote what I was perceiving. I set my feelings to the side and grabbed at each peculiar thing. That these poems had less order was not disordered. It was truth. There won’t be another book about my father. When my father died, I wrote the obituary and then I wrote a poem about the writing of it. Then, I put down my pen and stopped.

Lauren Camp is the author of nine books, most recently Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026) and In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Other honors include an Academy of American Poets fellowship, a Dorset Prize, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and Adrienne Rich Award. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, and Beloit Poetry Journal, and have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. She served as New Mexico Poet Laureate (2022-25).

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