A Conversation Between Lena Moses-Schmitt and Sarah Lyn Rogers
Lena Moses-Schmitt is a writer, artist, and the author of the poetry collection True Mistakes, selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Best New Poets, Narrative, the Slowdown podcast, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in New York, where she works as a book publicist.
Sarah Lyn Rogers is an NYC-based writer and editor from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her editing credits include books for Soft Skull Press, short stories and personal essays for Catapult magazine, fiction for The Rumpus, and serving as series co-editor for the annual anthology Best Debut Short Stories: The PEN America Dau Prize. She is the author of the chapbooks Inevitable What (Sad Spell Press, 2016) and Autocorrect Suggests “Tithe” (Ghost City Press, 2021) and the magazine column Internet as Intimacy for Catapult. She was the 2014 winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Virginia de Araujo Prize, as well as a finalist for the 2019 St. Lawrence Book Award. Her debut full-length collection, Cosmic Tantrum, is available now from Northwestern University Press.
Lena Moses-Schmitt: Something I really admire about the poems in Cosmic Tantrum is how angry a lot of them are. I personally have a hard time using anger as fuel in a poem, and in my writing more generally—it’s a difficult tone for me to capture. But anger is a really powerful tool throughout your poems! Rage often seems to be a way for the speaker to assert a different kind of existence than the one she was told to inhabit (sweet, domestic, maternal, compliant). How did you approach channeling anger in these poems? What does it feel like to write anger?
Sarah Lyn Rogers: Thank you! Flattered to be complimented on using anger as a tool. I agree that it’s difficult to strike the right tone with it; something red-hot can easily feel over-the-top. So the anger in these poems is cooler-toned than the word anger might connote—think: rhetorical questions that are not really questions. They’re less outraged, more in the realm of: I understand this dynamic very well now and it’s tiresome. To back up a bit, in one of the poems, “Rage Practice,” there’s “the axe, / the wicker chair, the invitation.” Years ago, while preparing for a move, someone I knew had a broken wicker chair they needed to throw away, and they invited friends to take turns breaking it apart. I approached halfheartedly, feeling silly and awkward about using my body in what seemed to me a macho, showy way, swinging a tool over my head to destroy a piece of furniture—Who did I think I was, Gaston? But after the first couple of swings, this feeling of purpose and rightness came over me. It felt so necessary, actually, to summon strength and power—even ferocity—from somewhere in my body and to have somewhere to put it, something to do with it. I had never had that feeling before. The only place I’d learned to put anger was “away,” or else.
Later, a therapist told me about a yoga asana called Kashtha Takshanasana—wood chopping pose—that can improve energy flow through the body and help with depression and stress by releasing pent-up emotions. I was totally enthralled by the idea that even pretending to chop something could move stuck energy. So much of the making of Cosmic Tantrum was related to this concept: that something like a game or a pantomime can reveal hidden and rejected parts of the psyche, and once you can acknowledge them, you can move or transform them.
As for what it felt like to draft the poems, I didn’t consciously decide when to include anger—it would just let me know when it was making an appearance. Most of my poems start with an image or a line and then I build around it, pulling pieces out of the ether that reveal their logic to me as I draft. Curiosity and bemusement are mostly what I’m writing from, and a kind of melancholy fondness for younger versions of myself who didn’t understand “The Lesson(s)” yet. From this level of remove, writing about anger-inducing situations often feels more like That was absurd, wasn’t it. Someone really thought they were doing something there. It was also important to me that the speaker often be implicated, to some degree, in the unfairness of imbalanced power dynamics, partly to highlight that we sometimes have more choices than we think we do (Do you really have to give someone whatever they want from you, even if they have some power over you? Do they have power over you?) and partly to explore how much of the rage of feeling powerless, deservedly or not, we might direct at ourselves.
In your collection, True Mistakes, the poems feel ethereal to me—all compliments intended. If they are an element, it’s air: poems of and about and for the mind. A mind considering how it thinks. A mind considering what it sees. And what it means that there may not be any way to determine an objective Truth separate from subjective perception, when all that we experience is filtered through our subjective minds and bodies. These poems are interested in consciousness, light, and representations: the actual object vs. a drawing of one, a genuine emotion vs. an actor’s performance. And these poems play tricks. I love the line, from “Not Happiness,” that mentions “the painting, which is actually the window”! I know that you’re a visual artist as well as a poet, and I’m curious: Have your experiences as an artist influenced this fascination with “true” things vs. representations, or was that always an unsolvable question, and it brought you to visual art? And: What is the relationship between your visual work and your poetry?
LMS: First of all, thank you! I’m so glad all that stuff about mind and perception comes across in the poems.
I think my interest in writing poetry and my impulse to draw/paint both have to do with a fascination with description, perception, the experience of looking, and how destabilizing (and exciting) it is to try to see and understand something.
I grew up drawing and painting a lot, though I don’t have a lot of formal training. I only really started taking it “seriously” (by which I just mean: drawing or painting as often as I could) around the time I was preparing to graduate with my MFA in poetry. So it wasn’t those unsolvable questions that brought me to visual art, but I do think those kinds of questions—i.e. what is the nature of reality, is it possible for us to really see the things we look at, what is the relationship between sight and comprehension, how does perception “move”—drew me to writing poetry. But it was only in the process of writing a lot of poems that those questions were made explicit to me, and that was when I began to realize they also had implications when it came to making art; that all of it was bundled up together.
There’s one memory I keep returning to when thinking about all of this. One afternoon, maybe about eight years ago, I tried to make a painting of a corner of my bedroom with afternoon light coming into it; I was for some reason moved by how some of the light fell in rectangles on the wall, and some of it fell in rectangles on the bed. But it ended up being a frustrating, almost frightening, experience. My bedspread was white, but as I stared at it, it also became pink, lavender, green or blue, all of it at once. So: what color was it? I didn’t have the awareness or artistic technique to know how to simplify what I saw in order to transform it into a cohesive painting. But that “perceptual event” (if I can call it that) is the kind of thing that exhilarates me when it comes to writing a poem—looking so hard at something that it defamiliarizes entirely and you realize nothing is stable, everything is in flux. That the more I look, the less I understand; that the things we think are ordinary and fixed are actually very strange and alive.
And then more generally imagery is really important to me—I feel drawn to it in poems probably for the same reason I draw and paint. Images root me in the world and in my mind. I realized recently that if an important moment or transformation occurs in my poems or in my prose, it doesn’t feel “real” or earned unless it’s transmitted via an image—I need that visual feedback of how the psyche exists, manifest, in the world.
SLR: Wait, before we move on, can you say a little more about the question “how does perception ‘move’”? This is not something I can exactly conceptualize. Is it something like: How do our thoughts move further and further away from what we see, first from close associations and then to more remote personal history? I think I see it in your poem “Figure Drawing: Lover,” in the lines: “how consciousness moves / in those moments, and how a person spills / their consciousness, and their lives, all over / what they are looking at or what they’re making.”
LMS: Yeah, I think the way you put it is pretty close to what I mean: how do thoughts move further away from what we see, what kinds of associations do we make automatically or even willfully, and how do we move in between associations? Where do associations come from? I’m interested in how all that happens. And also: what happens in the mind during a flow state (while drawing, or dancing, or thinking but in a zoned-out way)—for me the mind feels kind of wordless during those moments, and while it flickers between language and non-language, whatever is happening in there has its own rhythm and texture outside of words. How can I put language around it?
I love what you said in your last answer about how “pantomime can reveal hidden and rejected parts of the psyche.” Many of the poems in Cosmic Tantrum are really interested in the idea of performance, persona, and costumes. I’m thinking here of poems like “Halloween: ‘What Even Are You, Anyway?’” which implies that every day is dress up when you work in an office (here, the act of wearing a Halloween costume almost frees the speaker from the degradation of some of her everyday tasks), or lines like “Sometimes authenticity is dangerous. Sometimes authenticity is fake” (from “Exhibition: What Is It Like to Make Something That Matters?”). This past spring, when you did book launch events, I also noticed that you even wore a costume, of sorts, to read (perform!) from your book. What do you think the relationship between reality and performance is in your poems? What kind of self does poetry allow you to access that might be hard to access elsewhere?
SLR: I just watched the second season of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal. There’s a lot going on in this season, and I’m not going to get into it, but one of Nathan’s a-ha moments is that he can facilitate better communication between pilots and copilots by requiring them to play specific roles, even providing them an initial scripted interaction referencing these characters, from the moment they introduce themselves before their shared flight. Essentially, the pilot is cast as Ms. “understanding and open-to-feedback,” and the copilot as Mr. “blunt and to the point.” The goal with these fictional roles is to counteract an existing power dynamic of copilots too intimidated to correct pilots, even in unsafe situations. The silliness of the scripted interaction breaks the ice, and later serves as a running joke and “excuse” for copilots to speak up—You know me; I’m Mr. Blunt. The implication is: I am not the one correcting you; I’m just playing a character. Because I have to. And this space between the real person and the fictional role allows copilots to be more honest.
Performance gives us permission to break established patterns and norms—if only temporarily. On the one hand, I’m talking about the dynamic between performer and audience. But I also think the performer can be changed by inhabiting fictional roles, especially one with qualities we hope to embody, or one with qualities that are “not like us at all.” (Is that true? How do you know until you’ve tried them on?) Performance is a safe context for exploring being something other than what we have been allowed to be, and we can build muscle memory there. The writing itself might be or feel like performance—the speaker taking action in an imaginary or alternate-reality space. (And I do write a lot of persona poems.) But, to your point, it was helpful to me to feel like a character while I was reading (performing) the work for an audience. The poems are forceful, big, grandiose, in a way I don’t feel able to (or want to?) be in my day-to-day life. Costumes can be celebratory—and my star crown and embroidered jacket were definitely that. But, with the costume pieces, I also wanted to signal “alternate space, alternate reality” so that I could feel more like a physical manifestation of the work, and less like, I don’t know, your neighbor who’s really bad at small talk.
But it took me a long time to realize performance could be permission-giving. It’s funny because I grew up doing community and high school theatre—I did this for almost ten years!—and I didn’t really understand until a few years ago that it could be fun to play a character very unlike myself. I always wanted to play the Sympathetic Main Character, Who Is “Normal.” Because I was always terrified of being misunderstood and mischaracterized (because I was always being misunderstood and mischaracterized). What if someone thought I was actually like Cruella de Vil? What if I played her too convincingly and people thought I was truly covetous and self-centered, murderous, even? What if people thought I was mean and nasty? No, no, pretty and otherwise nondescript is what good girls should want to be, even for fun, even for two weekends a year.
What are my actual qualities vs. what have I been trained to be like? is a question that has occupied me for a long time. What do I actually like or want vs. what feels possible because it’s safe or frictionless? Is there a “real” person under all the rules and expectations I’ve internalized? I don’t know that the average person doubts the idea of an “essential nature,” but I find it difficult to sort what’s actually mine from what I have been conditioned to be like. Am I an inherently shy person, or have I been—consistently and over a long period of time—punished and degraded for receiving certain kinds of attention? Was I dutiful, or was I afraid?
In college, I watched the filmed version of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman play about the LA riots. Smith portrays dozens of people she interviewed, each of whom was connected to the riots—people of different races, ages, speech patterns, languages, physical mannerisms, etc. This was not the point of the film, but her ability to believably portray all these different people sent me spiraling a bit. I remember wondering: If she can mold herself into anyone, who is she, really, underneath the personas she can inhabit? Who are any of us, if the essence of a regular person can be embodied convincingly by an insightful observer and emulator?
I arrived at it from different directions, but my fascination with the true essence vs. the internalized instruction vs. the appearance feels very much aligned with some of the concerns in True Mistakes! Something I feel strongly in your collection is a sense of deep grief over the fact that to see something is not the same as experiencing it or knowing its true essence. The line “what sight steals” from your poem “The Doorway” suggests that seeing is a kind of finite labeling, fixing one possibility in place. What’s interesting to me is that this grief is occupied with the sense of sight and not so overtly with the corresponding limiting effects of language. The speaker in “The Doorway” sees “a table” because she knows the word for it. But she can also make herself “see” (or, as the poem says, “unsee”!) a golden pat of butter in its place—the way a child, not knowing the word “table,” might. I’m half-remembering a quote from I-wish-I-could-remember-which-author, but it was about the magical experience children have of witnessing an explosion of color, sound, and movement, and how that magic disappears once the ineffable experience is labeled “a bird.”
Your book presents interesting angles to this feedback loop of the limiting effects of sight on language and language on sight. In a Daniel Pink business book I read years ago, about trying to activate his right-brain thinking, he is tasked with drawing his own face. It looks wrong, but he can’t figure out why until someone informs him that he’s drawn the symbols for eye, nose, lips; he hasn’t drawn what he actually sees. He must decouple the concept of “lips” from (essentially) an emoji of lips, to be able to see accurately, so that he can draw them as they are. To go back to your earlier comment about “looking so hard at something it defamiliarizes entirely,” that’s something I really loved in Matthew Zapruder’s Why Poetry, only he calls it “strangeifying,” his translation of the Russian “ostraneniye.” He argues that through making language “deliberately strange,” poetry allows us to “see most clearly and powerfully” and can “jar us awake.”
In True Mistakes, there seems to be a tension between wanting to see (and to record?) things as they truly are and wanting to reawaken a sense of enchantment through not-knowing. But I’m wondering if these are really different aims after all. Your work also invites the question: Is an inherent unknowability, an un-pin-down-able-ness, actually how things truly are? I’m also wondering, if you want to share: Are there any “true things” vs. “symbols” you can remember disentangling from each other? And I’m curious: What strategies do you use for defamiliarization in your life, and in your creative work?
LMS: That Daniel Pink book—I haven’t read it, but that’s one of my favorite fundamental drawing lessons (one that I have to relearn constantly!) and I think also kind of the best strategy for defamiliarization. I feel like I’m subconsciously using that lesson all the time when writing poetry. I’m trying to think if I have any codified “defamiliarization” strategies . . . but I honestly think the main one, the only one, is just to sit still and look at something for like ten to fifteen minutes (a flower! an AC unit! a chair!) and find out what happens. Pay attention to what happens in your mind as you look. I am always shocked to remember that everything is so so strange—that to actually see something is to understand how strange it is. That to see something at its most familiar is to also see it at its most unfamiliar.
To answer your question about whether an inherent unknowability or un-pin-down-able-ness is actually how things truly are . . . I’m not sure! Certainly I believe that things are pin-down-able in some way because I believe we can capture some sort of truth via writing, and that writing can lead us to comprehension and cause powerful moments of recognition. Otherwise, what is the point? But for me, at the heart of everything, is unknowability and mystery. And wanting to engage with that mystery and look at it from all sorts of angles, is probably one of my main motivators for writing poetry. If there was not an inherent unknowability, then I would not be interested.
A lot of what you said about performance and authenticity really resonated with me, especially that you find it difficult to sort what’s actually yours from what you have been conditioned to be like. I think the speaker in True Mistakes is at times tormented—and at other times exhilarated—by the feeling she can’t entirely trust her own perception. (Not to be all neurotic, but: what is real??! This seems to be a concern both our books share.) For her, all experience, all insight and understanding, is highly subjective and therefore highly malleable. So how can she use that unknowability, that malleability, to refresh her experience of the world, to make it enchanting and more real (rather than destabilizing or paralyzing)?
“The Doorway,” which you quote from, is an elegy of sorts; I first drafted it when a friend of mine was passing away. I found it very overwhelming that she was having this huge experience I would never be able to understand. And I wondered what dying was like, and where death was, if I could see that other world somewhere around me. The way that sight and perception operate in that poem is that the speaker is desperately trying to see the invisible inside the visible, the incomprehensible inside the surroundings she (thinks) she knows so well; she wants her sight to be able to rip a hole inside reality, inside life, so she can understand that which runs beneath it. For her, defamiliarization is a way for her to sort of . . . meld into that other world, the world where she thinks maybe her friend is going.
To get a little less cerebral, you and I first met through our day jobs at the same publisher, you as an editor and me as a publicist, and you’re now a freelance editor and continue to work with writers on their book projects. How has editing and working in publishing affected you as a writer? What’s it like to finally have your own full-length book in the world after years of editing them?
SLR: That’s true, and I’m so glad that we did! I really do love editing. Something most people might not know is that editing manuscripts is maybe only 10 percent of the job when you’re an in-house editor; so much of the rest of the time is project management, reading submissions, playing email tag. So I do love that when I’m working now, it’s on the part I like most—kind of what I’m doing with you right now, describing what I’m seeing and whether that matches what the author means for me to see, and all the fascinating things we can discuss about what to do when those don’t match, and whether that’s a solvable problem or whether it’s a fun mystery, and when and why both are appropriate. Working this way can be really stimulating for me as a thinker, especially when I’m working on multiple unrelated projects at once. But it can also be hard for me as a writer because these thought-muscles I’m flexing for other writers are the ones I also need for myself, for my own work. I get only so much juice per day, and then I’m out.
So, I’ll say it: I’m proud of myself for finishing this book, and having something out in the world that’s mine, that shows what I’m capable of making when I do have the juice. When I can focus my intention, will, energy, and time on an outcome of my choosing, creating something from nothing, like a spell.
I’ll flip it back to you because I’m so curious about the publicist angle. Your job is to talk up other people’s projects, finding interesting connections and framings, describing what’s fascinating about them, and how and why readers of X will also enjoy Z (or, this is my best outsider understanding of what publicists do). Do you find that having that background has made it easier to talk about your own work? And: What has it been like for you to have your own book in the world?
LMS: Yes! Yours is a great description of book publicity—these are all things I do in the hopes of garnering media coverage (reviews, interviews, book roundups, podcasts, etc) for authors. At its best and most fun, publicity feels like getting to recommend books to readers (critics, reviewers, interviewers, other writers) who I think would love them.
I don’t think that being a book publicist has influenced my writing process that much, but it has definitely helped me think about framing my own work. (Though as I’ve learned again and again—this is one of those things that’s easier to do for other people, and harder to do for yourself.) Mostly I’ve found that my experience as a writer has also been beneficial when it comes to working in publicity—I’m a poet who thinks very associatively, which helps a ton when teasing out connections and finding new angles to highlight. And I like to think that knowing what it’s like to be a writer allows me to understand what my authors are feeling as they prepare for book publication—and hopefully enables me to be a better and more empathetic guide and resource.
Because having a book come out in the world is lovely and really exciting—this is largely how I feel!—but it’s also surreal and strange and anxiety-inducing. It’s a vulnerable time. A book is the culmination of many years of often solitary effort, years spent oscillating between self-doubt and conviction, and I think for a lot of writers publication can be very fraught, because there are so many feelings wrapped up around publication day. Like you, I feel really proud, and I feel very lucky. And at the same time I also know at the end of the day, the book is just a book—the best reward for writing is writing.