Katie Schmid : part five

How did you first engage with poetry?

I think I first started writing poetry because it was short and I got praised for it. Being “good” at something was the only time I ever felt safe as a child, so I learned how to highlight beautiful things in my writing so I could keep the praise coming. I didn’t have a sense that I should want to say something in particular, I just liked how it felt and what it got me. 

I remember reading an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem and being “tested” on the meaning of it. Most of the teachers who taught poetry taught it like that: you put a coin in and pulled the lever and meaning came out, hooray! Then Li-Young Lee came to my school and read all these tender poems about bodies, and love, and his feelings about his father. So then for a while I thought about poetry as homage. I think that’s definitely a reductive 16-yr-old’s reading of what Li-Young Lee does in his work, (it’s often far closer to worship/ecstatic communion) but it got me thinking about how I could expand my ideas about what poetry could do. 

I did have a sense that poetry was something that someone did when they were bruised too easily, so I had a sense that it could be for me because I was always being told I was too sensitive. 

In high school I took a drawing class where the teacher told us that it took a really long time to be able to see something accurately, you had to stare for a long time. That was my first introduction to what art asks of you, to dig in and cultivate an angle of approach. That was one of my first lessons in writing, even if I didn’t know it. 

Katie Schmid : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

I like this question because I think asking it of poets is a really interesting way to think about their poet family tree, and because it’s interesting to think about the ways that poets are formed from other writers who might be stylistically very different. 

I fell hard for Sandra Cisneros as a teenager. Loose Woman was the first book of poetry I read cover to cover. I was raised conservative Christian and I had never heard a woman talk like that! I had never seen poetry that seemed to speak to parts of my experience like that. 

Li-Young Lee was another early favorite. He came to my high school to speak because he was a Chicago poet, and he completely blew my mind. I skipped class to hear him talk to the AP kids after his reading. He wrote about the sacredness of the quotidian in a way that made me understand that other people saw that too, other people were sensitive like that too—it was very freeing. 

Frank Bidart came next. I write nothing like him, but I think his poems are so muscular, sharp and tender. I love the way he writes certain poems like logical proofs. Music Like Dirt is fantastic, and one I read often. 

Atsuro Riley for the playfulness and the seriousness of his language, for the way he reveals that the violence of childhood coexists with childhood’s sense of play. We like to think that childhood is safe, that it isn’t scary to be a child, but it is far from safe, and it is very scary to be a child.

Claudia Rankine for the way she can zoom out and see systems and landscapes in her poetry. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a wonderful book.

Lucille Clifton for writing about the body. And she’s so funny! I’ve memorized the poem/excerpt oh antic god and return to its oracular voice and its knowledge about lineage and death often. 

Aracelis Girmay is who I’m most obsessed with right now. The Black Maria utterly rearranged my sense of what poetry as a practice of mapping ancestry could do. She’s changing what poetry is capable of. 

Katie Schmid : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I just finished reading Jazz by Toni Morrison as part of this literary correspondence program I do with Pen City Writers, a writing program that I’m lucky to be a part of, where I get to talk about writing with writers living in maximum security facilities in Texas. Toni Morrison writes pure poetry. The lyricism in that book, in particular, is out of this world. I don’t know how she does it: the language is exquisitely wrought without feeling artificial. It’s stunning. It’s a place I want to live. You know that kind of writing where it feels like prophecy? That’s what reading Toni Morrison is like, for me.

I’m reading Ana Castillo’s new book, My Book of the Dead, and enjoying it very much. It reads like a book of this particular moment, and I’m finding it comforting, that women smarter than me will keep casting their minds into the future and coming back with wisdom to tell me how to live.

I’m also reading Natalie Shapero’s Popular Longing. I thought Hard Child was one of the darkest, funniest books of poems I’d read in a long time and I’m looking forward to reading more of this one. It really was so pleasurable to read a book that engaged in the dread of being a woman and a mother and a thinking person, and not only that, but it somehow made that dread funny! I’m not sure how poets write funny poems. It’s amazing to me. 

I’m also reading Heavy by Kiese Laymon and I think it’s one of the more brilliant books I’ve ever read. I’ve been a fan of his since I read an essay a while ago on Gawker, but I finally picked up this book because my dad recommended it to me. I think it’s oracular, almost. The prose is exquisite and the tension that he manages to build in the work is stunning. He’s got such a sense of pacing, and I think he’s one of the best writers that I’ve ever read on navigating received family narratives, received narratives about race, and thinking about how truth lives underneath the stories we tell ourselves and underneath the stories that are told about us. 

Katie Schmid : part two

Why is poetry important?

As a practice, it’s like writing proofs or doing algebra. You build something based on some half-heard scrap of something that has its own rules, its own logic. You’re trying to delve into it, to come to the illogical conclusion. You work in concert with it, or let it lead you around on a leash to where it’s going to go. It has made me more sane to write this way. Frank Bidart in that famous interview in In the Western Night talks about using poetry to think his life, and knowing that if he could do that there was everything yet to be done. I’ve been listening to a lot of J. Krishnamurti recently and he has this beautiful thing that he says to his students or querents, “Don’t just guess! Go into it! Carefully!” That’s what I’m trying to do when I write a poem: I’m trying to go into it carefully, and then all at once, and come back with something that helps me understand myself and the world a little bit more. I think that’s really the only kind of peace I know outside of being outside or having sex. I mean peace in the sense that I’m not trying to escape myself, but am deeply, deeply present to myself.

Katie Schmid : part one

Katie Schmid’s first book, Nowhere, is out from the University of New Mexico Press. She has work forthcoming in The Nation and The South Dakota Review.

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Yes. I think less of what it could get me monetarily and in terms of job prospects and think more about what it gives me as a meditative practice. I’ve always used poetry to help me think about my life, but I spent many years waiting for someone else to authorize my work, to tell me I was okay. A little of that impulse has been shaved off of me. I’m more at peace with myself as a person who makes things if I’m not always attempting to extract something from the process of making beyond the thing itself. This awareness came from my own health struggles, in part, as well as from watching friends, much more successful than I am, get everything they wanted and still being left with the problem of how to honor themselves and re-parent themselves. It was very helpful for me to see that being successful gets you something, sure, but it doesn’t allow you to escape your self. Nothing does. And that was kinda a major myth for me, one that I had to spend years breaking down. A lot of how I survived what I needed to survive was about being “good”—at art, or at being a “good” person. Now I’m more suspicious of that impulse in myself, because I’ve used it to hide the ways I didn’t feel I was deserving…of peace, of the feeling I’m okay, that I am deserving of safety, love, security, whether the work comes or not. 

It has been easy, at various points in my life, to think that stuff was going to make me happy: a new couch, recognition from someone famous, winning awards. In the past few years, I’ve started thinking about what I actually want from the process of making something. It turns out that I need very little to be happy about writing: the writing itself, and every once in a while someone reaching out to tell me they like a poem. It’s still an enormous privilege to have a book published, of course, but everything after that is a delightful surprise and something that I’m trying now to hold onto very lightly. I don’t really want any of the rest of it. I still have an ego, I can’t avoid that, but it torments me a bit less.