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.