August, the latest album from Karen Schoemer, began with the prompt to write a poem a day for a month. Sounds like a straightforward premise, right? In reality, it was a multi-year process of writing and cutting and pasting before recording the poems, which are backed by music that pals like Mike Watt, Oli Heffernan, Amy Rigby, Wednesday Knudsen and others composed.
“I had the idea to make an album in August of 2022,” Schoemer recalls on a recent video call. That’s when she emailed her collaborators with the idea as well. “Oli Heffernan sent music within an hour. He was like, here are seven pieces of music that I’m not doing anything with.” A few others composed pieces with only the knowledge that the piece needed to be about two minutes long and it was for a project called August.
“I didn’t even listen to the music, I really just wanted to finish the poems and make sure that they were what they were supposed to be without music and then I put everything together,” says Schoemer. Once the writing was complete, she went back and made matches, pairing the 31 poems with everything from ambient to jazz to experimental rock.
August is inspired in part by Bernadette Mayer, the late poet and writer who, in the 1970s, had a conceptual exhibition called Memory based on photographs that she took daily for one month. Later in life, Mayer led what she called “porch workshops” in upstate New York, which Schoemer took for two summers about a decade ago. “I felt really like it radicalized my approach to writing,” says Schoemer.
One of Mayer’s writing prompts was to treat words as material or objects, which was eye-opening for someone like Schoemer, whose writing background is in journalism. “Journalism is often about telling people things and creative writing and poetry is sort of the opposite,” she says. “So, I was always looking for ways to break down the habits that I had gotten into as a writer and for this particular project, I started cutting words up, I printed raw material out and started cutting it up and moving it around and that was definitely from her.”
So the poems that Schoemer wrote every day in August of 2022 were really the source material for the poetry that she would begin to write the following year. “I had this raw material, which I had written by hand into a notebook and then I had transcribed it into my computer and printed out all that raw material and then cut it up,” she explains. “Then I thought, if I rearrange the new poem on top of that raw material, it would give you the sense of time that there were double layers of time going on.”That’s the format Schoemer uses for her August poetry book, which she self-published and, which readers can order directly from her.
“For the most part, when I made the album, that bottom layer, that raw layer, wasn’t meant to be part of the songs,” she adds. “But, there are a few songs on the album where I use some of that other material as a second vocal, or a background vocal, so it’s there. It’s still kind of there.”
An author and musicians as well as a poet, Schoemer, who is a member of the band Sky Furrows, lives in a Hudson Valley village near the Berkshires where, from her front door, she she can see the Catskill Mountains right on the other side of the river that runs less than 15 miles west of her. “It’s a little bucolic,” she says. It also sounds like an ideal place to write. But, when it came time to put together the poems for August, she headed to Arrowhead, the historic home where Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which is about 45 minutes away from Schoemer’s own home in New York.
“That was a book that I read as a high school kid but then re-read it in 2011 or 2012 and was just really blown away,” Schoemer says of Moby Dick. “This is the book that changed my life.” In fact, she has two copies of Melville’s masterpiece on her writing desk, alongside books by Bernadette Mayer and Federico Garcia Lorca.
Schoemer was able to rent one of the Mastheads writing studios, tiny cabins inspired by authors who wrote in the Berkshires, at Arrowhead for several months. Inside a room that was hardly bigger than a writing desk, she cut and pasted new poems. “I brought all this material there and I just sat down with scissors and glue sticks and I started doing this work,” she says. “I was sort of in Melville’s yard and also in this really rockin’ little writing room and it was so cool. I went in August and by the time I left it was October and the leaves had fallen and the flowers had all died. It was just such a beautiful time.”
For her delivery of the poetry, Schoemer heeded some old advice she got from singer Wreckless Eric, with whom she has recorded previous projects. “He said right off the bat, don’t use poetry voice, you’re just talking to me,” Schoemer explains. “That’s what I always try to do in all of my projects is just to be talking as naturally as possible and to keep the feeling intimate that way, so that it’s just like I’m talking to you.”
Schoemer co-produced the album with Eric Hardiman, her Sky Furrows bandmate, and, at the time of this interview, was looking forward to performing the August material live. “I find it really life affirming to go to a live show, even if it’s 15 people there,” she says. “I’m happy that I’m at a time in my life where that’s a part of my life because it’s a great outlet.”
August by Karen Schoemer is available via Dromedary Records on Bandcamp.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Follow on Instagram or sign up for the weekly, Beatique newsletter for updates on new stories and gigs.
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