Keri Marinda Smith grew up in Florida where she played in punk bands and never wore socks. In 2015, she moved to NYC to get her MFA in poetry from the New School. Her first book, Dragging Anchor, came out on Hanging Loose Press in 2018. She lives in Ridgewood and works as a bartender, and can usually be found at Rockaway Beach with her chihuahua and a book.
Hanging Loose Press: What are this past year’s accomplishments that you are most proud of?
Keri Smith: I’ve accomplished nothing this year. No major publications, no work on my next book, very little to report professionally in any aspect. It’s actually my biggest fear lately- running into people who I don’t see often who ask me what I’m up to, which basically now is this interview so it’s good that I’m facing it I guess. Lately I’ve tried answering that question instead by talking about what books I’m reading, which unfortunately I think might make me sound crazy because that’s usually when I see the deer in the headlights expression and then they walk away––so it’s a good trick to get people to stop talking to you at bars if that’s something you need up your sleeve.
HLP: The word “accomplished” really is a personal thing and gets to be defined by each person on their own accord. I want more people to know that. With that in mind, perhaps there are things you did that made sense to you?
KS: I think walking and especially, biking, helps set a certain pace for me with writing poetry. I don’t even own a pair of headphones, so when I’m walking I’m just nursing my own internal dialogue that often becomes poems.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that when I was in grad school there was a lot of negativity around the internet and poetry but now I’ve found that the internet can be a great place for poetry, especially at 3am. I follow a lot of small presses and poets and I enjoy reading their posts and seeing their stories on the train on my way home, and it’s become a great lifeline to me when I’m otherwise feeling pretty isolated.
Winter hasn’t really started for me yet, I worked Thanksgiving, my birthday, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and New Years Eve and New Years day but now with the new year things will quiet down and I’ll finally get a chance to sit down and sift through things I’ve written and start to make sense of them, or get them into the right kind of order.
HLP: Any particularly difficult experiences/challenges for you this year? And how did you work through them?
Working in a bar just makes it kind of hard to connect with the Poetry Community at Large. I work all weekend and I work late, so I miss all the cool readings and events. The plus side is my day off (Wednesdays) is a great day to take the train out to the beach and get any reading done. I get a lot of very quiet time to myself which is good for my poet’s brain. I think I began writing poetry as a kid because I was exceptionally lonely and had an overactive inner imagination, and that hasn’t changed. So my lonely moments at least count for something. Taking the train home alone at 2am, walking aimlessly in the afternoon or biking around at night- these are all good moments for writing, although in the summer I find myself doing more wandering and more reading than anything else, and hopefully that is all going to settle in my brain somewhere and I’ll regurgite it in the winter when wandering isn’t an option.
HLP: The lonely moments you’re describing—taking the train at 2am, wandering around various neighborhoods also sound like quintessential NYC moments, and good opportunities for inspiration. Can you describe more of these moments and anything about the work that might have come from these moments?
KS: Despite being incredibly busy with work I’ve been using my day off to go to protests against the war––my poet’s heart demands that I join in solidarity with my neighbors and friends calling for a ceasefire. That’s probably going to feel like my only accomplishment going into the new year- keeping my heart in the right place and using my voice in any way I can with the time that’s allowed to me.
HLP: What are three books you’ve read recently that have made an impression on you?
KS: I’m a voracious reader of non-fiction, which I’ve always felt lives in the same world as poetry, and certainly my style of poetry. Two books about technology I read recently made me think about other ways we can see the world and envision a different future. God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn was very much about AI and the people working in tech, but also about western theology and the philosophy of the Self. That led me to quickly pick up Ways of Being by James Bridle, which also looks at AI and the world through queer theory and reimagines a world where we consider other languages and ways of being other than our human kind. Everything else I’ve read this summer is on the other side of the spectrum and is deep, deep fantasy that I’ve also learned is an unpopular thing to talk about in bars so I won’t get it into here either.
HLP: Any upcoming projects?
KS: I have poems for a book that I want to call “Whole Calendar Years,” but I find myself completely unable to do any editing in the summer. I only get so many days at the beach, and the dog always wants to go for a walk…the dark room cluttered in dirty clothes is less appealing. Hopefully I’m soaking up all the energy I need now to really get to work on it next winter, until then I’ll just keep adding little poems written at 3am to the August section.
