To read Lena Moses-Schmitt’s poems is to take a walk with her, over hills, through towering redwoods, past the lit windows of houses. To read Lena Moses-Schmitt’s poems is to take a walk through her mind as it wanders through these places, along the streambed of selfhood, picking up memories and examining them, tossing them aside. In the poems, I find the presence of a mind-body in the world, a consciousness equally aware of wind through grasses as the tiny glowing screens that seem to follow us everywhere. One of the images I often use with my own poetry students is “the golden thread,” the thread that we use to guide our reader through the poem, the magic pathway that might weave and bend but—hopefully—not break. This thread, like Hansel’s white stones glowing in the moonlight, allows us to trust the poet to guide us on our journey, may it be dark and winding or blinding bright.

Read on for my conversation with Moses-Schmitt as we discuss intimacy, technology, the natural world, “shower brain,” artistic process, and ice skating. She’s also agreed to share two additional poems with our readers—“Celebrity,” and “Some People”—to accompany “The Hill” and “Dear Future Me #11” from Issue No. 39. As you read these poems, keep your eye on the glint of golden in the branches. Follow her where she goes.

—Sarah Rose Nordgren

Lena Moses-Schmitt is a writer and artist. Her work appears in Best New Poets, The Believer, Diagram, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, The Rumpus, Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Poems:

“The Hill” (from 32 Poems #39)
“Dear Future Me #11” (from 32 Poems #39)
“Celebrity” (featured below)
“Some People” (featured below)

Interview:

SRN: When I read your poems, I feel invited into the poet’s conversation with herself. The poems feel intimate and vulnerable, and the speaker’s self-consciousness seems to be self-directed rather than a result of performance for the reader. How do you (and do you) think about your poems’ relationship to intimacy? I’m thinking both in terms of what’s revealed, and also how: Perhaps this sense of vulnerability, of confiding, is more about tone than content?

LMS: I am so glad you feel that way. I do think of my poems as conversations with myself (and more broadly, the reader) so it’s nice to hear that that translates. I can be a fairly anxious person, and during the last few years, when of course anxiety—my personal anxiety but also global anxiety—was at an all-time high, I started using poems as places where it’s safe to think, inquire, and process during a time where it often felt unsafe to allow myself to think, because my mind would go to some very dark places. (This is partly what I’m describing in my poem “Celebrity,” where I write, “I often think about things so hard / I kill them.”) Writing poems provided me an escape from my daily life, where we’re expected to perform in all sorts of ways (performing competency, cordiality, sociability, enthusiasm, punctuality, what have you). I don’t want to perform when I’m writing poems; or rather, I don’t mind performing but I want it to feel more authentic—places where I can perform or explore a self I can’t always be in my real life; where I can still surprise myself. A place where I can, literally, talk to myself.

When I’m writing I’m also thinking a lot about, like, okay, am I subconsciously trying to sound like a capital-p Poet—based on whatever my inherited assumptions of what a ~Poet~ should sound like—or am I trying to sound like myself? I can’t completely describe what the difference is, but I usually know it when I read it. If it’s the former, I’m usually writing in some lofty, lyric voice that ultimately sounds hollow when I read it over; or maybe it sounds profound but it doesn’t carry a lot of weight or meaning. So I’m always thinking about: how can I sound like “myself” (whoever that is) but still make art that’s elevated beyond the self? What I’d really love is to sound even more elemental than myself—I’d like to sound like a tree, or a whistle, or one of those rocks that looks really nice when it’s underwater.

For me, creating intimacy is kind of about trying to follow the energy of a poem as I write it, following what it wants instead of what I want. There’s this game my friends and I used to play as children where we’d make drawings in the dirt with sticks, but we couldn’t just draw whatever we wanted; we had to follow where the ground wanted to take the stick—the ground had these hidden grooves, its own intentions that we tried to trace. I’m often chasing that same kind of inevitable, “predetermined” feeling when I’m writing. I think that is where the energy of intimacy, vulnerability, whatever you want to call it (the word that also comes to my mind is immediacy) comes from in all poems: it’s a kind of deep listening—not only listening to yourself but listening to whatever is happening beyond the self, in the air.

And yes, I do think it’s more about tone than content, and I think it’s also about surprising yourself; again, putting yourself in this mindspace where you’re never quite sure where you’re going. For me, the decision of what to reveal is never entirely conscious—whatever I’m not revealing in a poem is the mystery, the crucial unsaid thing at the center of the poem; I don’t necessarily know how to articulate it so instead I’m articulating around it. If I spoke it, then the poem would immediately go from honest and vulnerable to saccharine and on-the-nose. There would be no mystery. I’ve definitely had the experience of writing a poem and straining so hard to find out what I’m writing about that ultimately I have to toss out the poem. (“I often think about things so hard / I kill them.”)

But more practically, some specific things I’ve been doing in my poems recently as a way to convey that intimacy or immediacy (or at least to trick myself that I am): I write a lot of questions to myself as a means of clarifying what it is I want to say, or in the hopes that I’ll just hear a response in my head (as “Some People” begins: “I tend, lately, to start off with a question. / I want to make the universe talk back.”). Sometimes I delete the questions after writing the poem; other times I leave them in because I feel like it creates that conversational, personal tone. Or using left-justified lines, instead of indented lines that rove and flow all over the page—I love writing poems whose lines flow all over the page, but aesthetically, I think left-justified lines sort of grab your shoulders and hold you in place. I’ve also been writing a lot of short, declarative lines or sentences, which to me accesses and mimics a style of certainty and immediacy, even when I’m completely writing into uncertainty. I find that juxtaposition intriguing.

SRN: I love that your answer about vulnerability and intimacy led to discussion of your poems’ relationship to consciousness and the composition process, since that was also something I wanted to ask you about. In the poems, there’s a sense of meandering through thought or mood in a way that captures the workings of the mind while also being in close relationship to place. I love your analogy of the childhood stick-drawing game, the directive to collaborate with one’s environment, and indeed, your poems seem to take presence in environments (or what many people might simply call Being) seriously. Whether it’s hiking in “The Hill,” or observing trees, or even being aware simultaneously of the trees outside the kitchen and the smartphone screen inside in “Celebrity,” the speaker of the poems seems to acknowledge herself as existing in a specific moment in time, connected to/part of the natural world. Is the natural world (and perhaps the relationship between it and human anxiety and technologies) something you think about directly in the writing of your poems?

LMS: Yes, insofar as I like thinking about how place—literally, where our bodies are in space—affects how we think, and I’m interested in using poems as opportunities to observe and enact consciousness. To put it simply: I love reading and writing poems that are mostly about thinking! But practically, or at least ideally, I need a scene in which that thinking can play out, in order to create some sort of drama. Or maybe it’s not drama I mean so much as imagery, which is my favorite part of writing poems, and the natural world lends itself nicely to imagery. (Brb, writing a craft essay about how imagery is drama.)

As for technology, I like thinking of our screens as places, with their own scenery and place-based imagery; and I do unfortunately spend a lot of time inside the space of the screen, so that will naturally find its way into some of my poems.

The way the body’s relationship with place affected thought was made even more clear to me during the pandemic, when I was in the same rooms all the time, and my thinking became incredibly claustrophobic. (In a similar vein, the first day I worked from an office after a year of working from home, I was shocked by how traversing through the space of an “office”—my shoes clicking across the lobby, taking an elevator up to the third floor, opening a heavy door, walking into a room with desks and computers and printers—automatically made me feel more confident and capable. That was not something I had ever noticed before.) I’ve always loved walking, but in the early pandemic, walking outside became a necessity: it was a way for me to lighten the weight of the mind, and to expand the cramped routes my thoughts were taking, let them stretch their legs a little. Most of my poems are first drafted as I walk because it’s easier for my mind to wander—it’s like a balloon that trails behind me, occasionally getting tangled in trees and signs and telephone wires.

It’s impossible to think about place and the natural world without also acknowledging that the natural world is endangered, and so, by extent, are we. I find myself gravitating toward humanity’s relationship with nature fairly often as subject matter, though not always consciously. Even the definition of what the “natural world” is, what it means and where it exists and how it relates to us, I find incredibly complicated. I don’t think I believe, for example, that there’s a difference between humans and nature—we are nature, even if we’ve done a pretty good job of cordoning ourselves off from it—but because we’ve been steadily altering and destroying nature, treating it as though it is separate from us, we’ve caused a rift between us and the natural world, and so we often feel really alienated from it. (Or at least I do.) That sort of rift is often on my mind when I write. I think the speaker in a lot of my poems seeks comfort in the natural world, because she wants to merge with a consciousness that is much larger, older, and smarter than herself. But she also realizes it’s an increasingly threatened and threatening place, and she doesn’t know if she deserves to find comfort there.

SRN: You mentioned that many of your poems begin as drafts while walking. Could you share a little more about your composition and revision process? What happens after the walk?

LMS: It usually just starts with a line or two, or an image. I think walking is kind of like the extended edition of shower brain—how you can get all your best ideas in the shower because your mind is left to its own devices while your body is on autopilot (sometimes I think that showering is one of the only parts of the day I’m truly alone with myself: not with my phone or my computer or listening to music or thinking about my to do list). Walking is the same way; because my body is moving in some sort of rhythm, it can often jog a cadence and some lines out of my mind. So it often starts with those lines that might feel as if they “descend” on a walk, but it’s also getting me out into the world, where I see things that might later end up in poems (this also means that, for better or for worse, I have a lot of poems where I’m walking around, ha). Walking allows me to notice my surroundings undistracted, but it also allows me to notice the way my mind is moving: I can really hear myself, unlike when I’m answering emails or scrolling on my phone or reading or doing whatever else.

If I get ideas for lines, or overhear something, or see something I find compelling, I’ll just jot those down in the notes app on my phone. Whenever I’m back at my desk, I’ll open up the file, dump them into a Word doc, and see what happens—sometimes, the notes I have from one walk might all end up in one poem, other times, they might be a couple different poems. The best walks are when I’ve walked myself into an entire poem, or the entire beginning of a poem, and I have to rush to my desk right after. That doesn’t happen all that often, but I like to think that the more I walk the more opportunities I’m creating for that to happen.

I used to walk to and from work, and since I also write in the mornings before work, my walking commutes functioned as extended writing time—a nice half-hour chunk where I could mull over what I’d just written and think about where it would go next. This usually wasn’t even intentional; it was just where my mind automatically went, because I had just been actively writing, and it was often the best time for unknotting any problems I was stuck on in a poem or an essay. I think that “unknotting” is deeply tied to the fact I was moving my body through space. Now that I don’t walk to work anymore, I miss this time: I would like to be more careful about what I do with my mind after I “stop” writing in the morning; if I look at my phone or check email, it effectively ends immediately whereas if I go on a walk, I can continue writing, but almost accidentally.

SRN: You’re also an illustrator and essayist and create graphic essays/comics. Can you tell us a little about how your ideas filter into these different modes and genres? When are you compelled toward text, and when toward visual illustration? Also, can you share a little about what you’re working on these days? What are you excited about right now?

LMS: I don’t always know why I choose text over illustration and vice versa. I’ve loved drawing ever since I was a kid, and that probably also has something to do with why I’m so compelled by imagery in poems. I like that drawing and painting provides me with a space to work outside of language, so I often turn to art when whatever idea I want to capture feels especially visual or ephemeral.

Other times I decide to do graphic essays or comics just because I feel like I haven’t been drawing enough, and I want to make myself draw more; it’s a way of drawing where I still feel like I’m writing. And I also love to think about the interaction between text and image, and how the relationship between the two, when done well, can give rise to a third level of nonverbal meaning. The few graphic essays I’ve published all started out as intentional experiments to see if I could do them—with those, it was never a matter of choosing which form to use for a certain idea; I started from the space of wanting to make a graphic essay. And then occasionally I’ll make smaller comics because I have an idea I don’t consider “big” enough to expand into an essay or a poem. I’ve always been drawn to diaristic writing—journals, notebooks, sketchbooks, etc; all forms that seem to work toward gatherings of aphoristic thought and non sequiturs, or elevations of mundanity—and sometimes think of those shorter comics as ways of working within that form. A way of preserving smaller, more daily moments or fleeting thoughts.

As for poems versus essays, I used to think they really informed one another. And I’m sure they sort of do, in ways I’m not entirely aware of, but I now find it very difficult to casually switch back and forth between them. They require completely different mindsets. I went through a few years where I barely wrote any poems at all, because I was mostly focused on finishing the first draft of a nonfiction book I’ve been working on, and anytime I tried to write a poem the voice was all wrong. When I returned to poetry, it took me several months to be able to write a poem I thought was good again. I think poems allow me to explore a feeling, impression or moment in a way that makes intuitive rather than logical sense. Whereas essays allow me to explore a series of thoughts or an idea, ideally in a way that makes more logical sense than a poem might. Or at least that’s what I think now. This is the sort of thing about which I’ll probably disagree with myself later on.

And as for what I’m working on right now, I’m currently finishing up what is hopefully the final (or at least . . . a final) draft of my nonfiction manuscript, which is about ice skating, womanhood, art, and writing. The book explores my teenage past as a competitive figure skater juxtaposed against the last half of my twenties, when I was trying to figure out what kind of adult, writer, and artist I want to be—a time when I realized that a lot of my ideas around success, ambition, femininity, beauty and maturity, first instilled in me as a skater, were often counterintuitive to who I actually wanted to be. It’s not a graphic memoir, but it does have some visual sections. I’m also slowly putting together my first book of poems. And always thinking about what I want to do next. (More poems, more paintings; a graphic memoir about cars, public spaces, my love of walking and my anxiety about driving; and maybe, one day, a novel.)

Featured Poems:

CELEBRITY

Late at night I stand in my kitchen with the lights off.
It’s my favorite room in the apartment, and the largest.
I enjoy walking the dark, looking out at a sky
energetic as static, a black packed with light
so I half-expect a commercial to project upon it.
All the roofs, the squares of yellow pixels cut into houses.
Other times I get bored just standing, and look down
at my phone. I have forgotten how to read.
My screen displays curious, somersaulting shapes.
Those are called letters. An actor is going live,
filling my phone with his familiar face
I’ve watched from so many angles.
People I can’t see release their helium hearts
into the room. Someone asks
a question about crying scenes
and he says in some takes he cries easily
while in others he can’t manufacture tears. I exit
the app and plant my phone facedown on the counter.
What do celebrities do
when we’ve turned them off—do they watch themselves?
Do they forget who they are
in the dark? In the dark,
the magnolia trees are glossy, a coat
of plum nail polish on each individual leaf.
They swivel on their stems,
shining like the lenses of surveillance cameras.
At this late hour, it is difficult to remember
there are other people breathing through the night—
people I know, friends even, friends
in three dimensions. Eyelashes and knuckles.
Earlier on my run I paused to rest
beneath the shade of those trees.
I was standing under my mind,
able to peer up, finally, at all its holes and leaps
in logic right through to the sky,
which must be the parts inside me without thought.
The pressure released, then.
I often think about things so hard
I kill them. Is there anyone
even watching? Sometimes I can cry
and sometimes I can’t.
Both feel like real sadness.

SOME PEOPLE

I tend, lately, to start off with a question.
I want to make the universe talk back.
Talk back to me, baby. Talk to me
like the trees do. The trees say nothing
but they show me their arms,
ladders hung with moss, dark rungs
of fascinating interruption. Trees are loud
without speech is what I’m trying to say,
which has always been my greatest ambition.
They are performers rustling their huge sleeves,
always promising to reveal some trick of consciousness.
Insight in yellow and green echoes up the bark,
vowel-patterned and inaccessible.
Some people say they don’t like poems about trees.
Some people don’t know why
they’re still breathing. On a hike I stopped
to ask a redwood for advice,
my palm to its flank. Some people,
including myself, would think this embarrassing,
but I know the truth. The truth is I’m just desperate,
and don’t know how to continue.
The redwood was like: [                    ]
and tossed some light over my eyes.
Pulled it away and then flung it back.
I don’t know where I’m going
with this. For once I’m trying not to think
toward a destination. Notice there have been no questions
yet. I could have asked: Why
do I think this experience should be painless?
Outside the window I hold up my many arms.
I conflate myself with the universe.
But when you think you know a place, it gets smaller.
And when you memorize it, it stops existing.
You’re just walking through your mind.
Each strand of grass, an unthinkable thought
breathing through the moss.