The Swerve of Thought
An interview with Lawrence Lacambra Ypil
Lawrence Lacambra Ypil holds MFAs from the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author The Experiment of the Tropics (Gaudy Boy, 2019) and has taught creative writing and poetry at Yale-NUS College. Beginning in Fall 2025, he is Asst. Professor at University of Hawai'i at Manoa.
What we discussed
‘I Know A Man’ by Robert Creeley (from Selected Poems, 1991)
Lawrence: What was attractive to me, when you reached out, was this idea of thinking about poetry and furniture. I’m quite interested in furniture as temporary space, whether a space for the body to just sit, or a place to eat a meal, or read a book. That notion of furniture as temporary space makes me think about poetry, and writing in general, as temporary space. So rather than thinking of the poem as permanent space — like a house or a room, though maybe those are transient too – maybe the task of poetry is to provide a kind of transient space for speaking or thinking or feeling. That’s an important aspect of the craft.
And the idea of design and furniture, such that this space is meant to be a space of intervention, or not only intervention but engagement. The chair is only as good as the person who sits on it, right? So it’s not just for me a relationship between the maker and the thing.
Theophilus: A space of response, perhaps?
L: A space for a reader, for sure. It’s not just about you and the making — it’s a kind of making that anticipates an engagement with a reader or a sitter, and therefore the making is always most powerful when it thinks about the sitter and the reader, and not just the maker, or the thing in itself. This triangle of interaction is important, to me, when thinking about craft.
I also thought about Robert Creeley’s ‘I Know A Man’, which is one of my favourite poems, because I felt like reading that was the first time I encountered a poem that was really about something that is transient. There’s some momentum in the poem. In many ways it’s really a poem about riding in a car with a friend, and not having a destination. The car is a temporary space that holds the speaker and his friend, and I love the way it moves through that moment. It’s less a poem about destination, and more about a temporary being with someone.
For me, this was kind of revelatory. It suggested a kind of temporariness or transience that the poem could hold, while offering no destination but the space it was in. It was basically a revelation about the space that the poem could make, without a permanent kind of message, that informed the beginnings of writing for me, that liberated me from the sense of finality. That a poem could just be as good or bad as the company that one temporarily has.
T: A poetics of company, then?
L: A poetics of company, but more specifically of transient company. A poetics of moving, too? All of that comes in.
T: These are really good starting-points, and I want to pick up on three ideas in what you’ve said. The first is this idea of transience as opposed to permanence. The second is about the relationship with the reader, and the third is about the Robert Creeley poem.
On that first point, you were talking about poetry providing a transient space much like a chair or a table: we might encounter it for half an hour as we take a nap or eat a meal, then move away. This also points to the fact that in the rhythms of our life, there are certain acts that bring us to the table, certain seasons that bring us to each piece of furniture. Do you think about poetry in the same way, that the poem is there to receive the reader at certain points of the day, or of a life?
L: Definitely. There are what I would call poetic seasons, seasons in life where poetry is fitting. Times of transition, love and eros, mortality — those are hotspots for poetry. There are times when we need poetry, and times also when we feel the urge to write poetry. But this transience is interesting to me, as it suggests a different kind of making or craft. I think poetry traditionally comes with the onus or responsibility of making something that lasts, written in such a way where we cannot change a word. The inevitable fixity of a powerful poem is so ingrained in our traditions of making. Yet thinking about transience eases up that kind of pressure to be permanent.
Or it may be a different concept altogether. What does it mean to make something when you know that the person or reader will not necessarily stay there, when it is in the passing that some sort of magic can happen? I think that naturally changes the kind of craft and making of a poem. As a writer this has made me think more about unfinished phrases rather than complete sentences, asymmetrical stanzas rather than fixed or orderly ways of forming a poem. There’s a certain kind of gestural quality that I prize more, that I enjoy making more than the urge to make a really solid thing. Maybe some interest in the half-baked, the half-formed, the temporarily comfortable couch.
Right away, this approach brings out a whole different set of ways of living that a poet or a poetry attends to. Less the permanent home, than the kind of overnight on a couch. I hesitate to bring in liminality as a word, but maybe I’m thinking specifically about a way of being in the world… where one might find home in a certain way of being in the world?
T: What do you think are the qualities of a poetry that make it an appropriate form to capture something so half-baked or transient, as opposed to other genres or forms. I mean, brevity is the natural answer, but beyond brevity?
L: The word earnestness also comes to mind. A couch can be worn, or it can be uncomfortable, but if it’s offered in a really busy city, or if you’re strapped for cash and crashing in a friend’s home, then there’s a kind of generosity in the fact that no matter how small a person’s apartment is, you’re allowed to crash on their couch or have a meal in their home. It suggests a kind of magnanimity in the transience. There’s a hugeness that poetry is able to hold even as it is small and tiny. That kind of disproportion is what makes poetry beautiful to me, magnanimity in a minute form. It’s a sort of discordance, to be able to pull off a grand move in a small space. That asymmetry makes poetry interesting.
T: This is interesting to me because, just before we started recording, you were talking about potentially working on some poems about the house that you grew up in. You also mentioned that you’ve previously written about your father’s and mother’s houses. All of these subjects seem to refer to memories that last way beyond what is transient — so it’s interesting to me that the form they would take is one that, in your mind, is so preoccupied with transience.
L: Maybe that project is still in its formative stage — yes, and maybe it’s an interesting counterpoint in my own work, and in my circumstances. I’ve been moving around a lot, and yet my writing returns to many of these permanent spaces, either ancestry or childhood. Right now, it’s less the permanence of that home. I want to title the new project salud, which is a Cebuano word for “inside”. I’ve been thinking about interiority, and rooms, and interior spaces. Maybe I’m also thinking about how the house needs a bit of repair, and I’m thinking that it’s going to be a very middle-aged project that is as much about interior spaces that have not changed even as the wear and tear of life is starting to show on its exterior. Maybe that’s a different tension than this.
T: Thinking about repair and restoration, that could also draw very much on the power of furniture to configure a space — whether your bed is against a window, or at the opposite wall from a window, has the power to change the configuration of a room. I’m wondering if poems also relate to space the same way, by configuring the space around us so that we know how to approach it.
L: Yes, they provide a kind of spatial direction or a configuration; in that sense, they design a way of living in a space. They signal where things are habitable, or not habitable. Or they offer new spaces of habitability, they suggest that you can live here too, even if there are corners of the room where you might not go. I mean, really good poems point towards spaces that are new, in the sense that while we do not normally think of them as automatically poetic, they have a way of convincing us of it. That’s something I tell my students a lot. I always tell them I’m not here to teach you how to write a poem, but to help you begin to think of places that poetry might occupy, that you did not think of before.
That’s where originality is to be found — writing poems from spaces where we think the poetic is otherwise not to be found. It’s for me a huge thing to either train a poet to do, or for me to learn. That was what poetry was about, finding those unlikely spaces.
T: This ties back, in a way, to the second point you made earlier, the element of design in the poem — similar to furniture — the poem with the reader or sitter in mind. How do you design the poem around a reader who might be transient, or an encounter that might be so ephemeral or so brief?
L: Memorability becomes important for me. The chance encounters that may only last a while but you remember for a lifetime — what does it mean to create poems that are like that, with a certain echo or effect?
There are poems we write for readers with whom we share a lot in common, readers we imagine from our own community, or readers familiar with the same things, so we are confident they will get what we are trying to say. But those assumptions are based on notions of stability, so I wonder if what I’m gesturing towards is a kind of more mobile readership: one that is more dislocated, who are on the way to somewhere or not really in permanent spaces. Their sense of space is always an elsewhere. Maybe those are the readers I’m writing for, and maybe because I’ve also become that kind of reader, as I keep moving around. Where notions of ‘nation’ or ‘home’ presuppose very stable notions of place, I think my experience has been otherwise, and maybe I’ve learned how to appreciate that way of engaging with the world that is less permanent or less committed.
What does it mean to imagine a poetry that is from that kind of moving around — which I think is more and more the common experience? To remain in a place is a privilege, I think, more and more. There’s a certain kind of disposability if you will, no, in furniture? I mean we’re just near IKEA now — where the idea is to buy and dispose of things quickly. I’d be interested to know what kind of furniture finds its way into the space that you’re going to be in.
T: When a poem is crafted around this mobile or transient reader, I wonder if the poem tries to provide the reader something that is more permanent, like a space of belonging. Or does the poem try to mirror the condition of movement, and move along with them?
What you said about memorability — there is the idea that the poem provides comfort or anchoring, and gives the reader something to bring along with them on the journey. But at the same time, because the poem itself is transient, the poem recognises that the reader will not stay.
L: Maybe I’m thinking more about the word familiarity, I’m conscious that I’m writing poems coming from a place you may not know of, and you’re coming to my poem from a place I may never know of. And therefore, the biggest hope I can have as a poet is perhaps that my poem may remind you of somewhere or something I will never know. In that way, you will never really know where I’m from, and I might never see where you’re from, but there’s enough in this point for us to stay for a while.
I think I’ve become that kind of writer, Theo — the moving. Having said that I don’t know yet how I might write about Singapore. Maybe I’ll only write it when I’ve left it, and maybe that’s just part of how I’m built as a writer. That’s a different topic altogether!
T: That’s a whole other coffee!
Who are some of the poets who come to mind when you think about writers that imagine a different kind of reader, and not just in the explicit way of writing about movement and migration — but writers whom you can tell have a different kind of reader in mind?
L: Maybe that’s where I’m interested in framing Creeley. I mean Creeley was not known to be a kind of migrant poet, or dislocated voice, or New York exile. But for me he’s a poet from the moment.
I think of him in relation to William Carlos Williams, and they’re usually seen in the same school of thought — the objectivists. But with Williams, in his wheelbarrow poem for instance, there is a kind of theme to that, a kind of longevity of attention that he is able to afford the object of his poetry. Whereas I’ve always felt that Creeley was already coming from a time where the circumstances of that kind of staying were not afforded, and there was always something left unsaid. Like the poem would never promise that it would say everything, and the sentences would not even promise that they would end.
I love how he changes his mind in a sentence. His lack of patience did not even afford him a way of finishing a thought and going on to the next. I’ve always thought that one could change one’s mind even as one was just saying the sentence, and that to me not only indicated a kind of personality, but a kind of being in the world that found beauty in either impatience or a lack of attention or focus. His attention was given to other ways of swerving, the swerve of the thought — this is where I find Creeley important. So yeah, to come back to your question of craft. Maybe it’s a craft that’s attendant to that swerve, that change of thought.
T: That’s interesting because ‘I Know A Man’ envisions two characters, right, or two voices, side by side in a car — and actually to me, they represent two different sorts of impatience. The first character dominates the first three stanzas, and his impatience is all about dreams and desires, “why not buy a goddamn big car”? Whereas the second character says “drive […] look where you’re going”, and that’s a different, a more practical kind of impatience. Which is interesting in relation to the impatience of the poet himself.
L: I mean to me the interesting part there is the moment where he admits that John — he says — is not even the name of his companion! And you get the sense that whoa, these are complete strangers who happen to be in the car, and for the sake of the telling his real name was not even important, like for the sake of the story a name just needed to be said. Almost like it wasn’t even John, but let’s just use it. A kind of impatience with the telling: let’s just get this story out, the details don’t really matter.
You’re right when you bring up that notion of dreaming — or fear, too — in “look out, watch where you’re going”. I don’t know if it’s a moment of panic that the voice has, or an urge for survival. Again these are, I feel, terms and values that come from movement. I come back to movement, and the capacity for craft to capture that movement. Not craft as a sort of patient making, the figure of a sculptor chipping away at something across the days, but a kind of gestural signature, if you will.
T: Impressionistic?
L: Impressionistic, yes. But I go with gestural, because it’s closer to the hand – impression to me is closer to the eye. This to me is maybe like the work of Cy Twombly, strokes of the hand that are rendered permanent either on a page or in wood. Yeah. But what you were saying about “goddamn big car” really makes me think it’s such an American poem. It makes me think also that America has shifted, right, like when poetry like this was being written. It was less stable, it was… this is also like a road poem, right? Like Kerouac also.
T: “Big car” — I suppose, there’s the notion of the possession of the car.
L: Yes — the aspiration, the dream of it, right?
T: And the going.
L: Mm. But I love how you’re also like, there’s a brief moment of sanity, like, watch out!
T: We’ve talked about the capacity of craft to capture that sort of impatience or transience, and I’m thinking about how crafted this poem is. Four stanzas, three lines, it’s in some ways very precise, and the syllables as well, so clean. These are two tensions in the poem, right, on one side this rigid, traditionalist idea of careful crafting, and on the other side, this longing after the naturalness of speech. The abbreviation of “sd”. It’s almost as if this latter force thinks of the craft of the poem as too artificial, too slow, too rigid — what I really want is to “go”, in the big car.
I wonder if you see that as a tension in your own writing, or in Creeley’s? The idea of craft as something that’s artificial and weighs you down, as opposed to natural speech?
L: I think what you’re pointing at is how this poem is able to capture that speed and transience, which is not to say this poem was written quickly. That’s also part of the craft of this poet, a way of capturing speed through our careful attention or precision. A way of capturing the changing of one’s mind that calls for its own kind of patience, and that’s where the craftsmanship comes. It’s not like it was written fast, but the poem is able to make it seem like the thoughts were moving. And therefore, the kind of craft that is able to embody or capture that movement on the page — there is that tension of a slow deliberate chipping away, all to make it appear as if it was just two seconds.
Precision, maybe, is a word that comes to mind, rather than a kind of concentrated, consistent looking. I mean you see it in sculptures too, there’s a wonderful movement — we imagine it’s just a moment, and yet we have the permanence of stone. I think there’s something about craft that can be articulated more, I think it’s leaning towards that — the kind of craft that’s able to capture the shift in the mind. Not the thought that has come to terms with its own conclusions, but the thought that is still in the midst of determining its direction. I love that. I’m not really interested in the fully-formed poem, I’m really interested in the shifts of mind. And I think poetry can capture that.
T: Perhaps one thing the poem is saying to us is that in the hurriedness of action — we often describe that as a “blur” — maybe Creeley is saying there’s no need to sacrifice the clarity of movement.
L: It takes craft to make that “blur”, right? It’s a very deft hand that is able to capture that blur.
T: As I was reading this Creeley poem, I was also looking at some of your poems in Experiment of the Tropics. Your poems, especially ‘In The Manner Of Thinking’, feel like a very precise but quick sketch. And you are a poet who, I know, weighs the music of each word quite carefully, but you also take a lot of joy in simple phrases and expressions. I wonder if there’s something in this quickness and transience we’ve been talking about that makes space for joy and lightness. What do you think of the relationship between these ideas?
L: Thanks for noticing that. Many thoughts — surprise is one, the element of surprise. And the surprise of precision, when you have finally found the word. I don’t know if that’s worthy to call joy. But it’s the oh, my gosh of hitting the mark, especially when you’ve all but given up. That sort of surprise, that precise surprise? That sounds corny. Or maybe just the surprise of precision, that comes with making a poem. Especially when the making is not too tied to a predetermined notion of what you want to say, and the act of writing is a form of discovery of what is being said, and then you hit the moment. That to me is the ooh, finally the thrill, the discovery. Maybe that needs a certain kind of craft.
There’s a word “crafty” that suggests a more mischievous notion? A craftiness? Does that have resonance for you?
T: Crafty — like a fox!
L: True — yes! Maybe it’s that kind of craft that I’m interested in.
T: Just one last thought. We’ve been talking about how you approach these elements of craft as a writer. How about as a reader? You mentioned earlier that you’re starting to imagine yourself as the transient reader. What’s the sort of writing that holds you well for a moment?
L: I feel like I’m not answering your question, Theo! But there is for me the wonderful recurring image of someone who slouches in a couch, that to me is the ideal reader. There is something about the slouch that is infinitely attractive to me. A reader in the middle of a lazy afternoon, who cannot be bothered to stand up, but has many thoughts running through his head, and suddenly stumbles upon one that is quite beautiful, if you will? And maybe that is what spurs him to finally get off the couch… or convinces him that there is no reason to get out of the couch, that he is perfectly fine staying and slouching there, until evening comes.
I have not answered your question but that is my ideal reader. Both for the work that I do, and for me as a reader.
T: I think you’ve painted beautifully the idea of a state of being that the poem should put you in, or that a poem would flow most naturally from.
L: Both the making and the reading.
T: Thank you – from one sloucher to another!
Presented at the Supper House installation at Journey East, Sept 2025.
