Mery Noel Smith has begun her third year as Spokane’s poet laureate. She’s the bard of the Spokane poetry scene.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Mery Noel Smith: A lot of poet laureate for me has been just a service position. I'm trying to raise awareness and advocate for the arts in places and for people who don't necessarily have access to equitable access to art and community, especially poetry, because it's been a little bit of like an elitist sort of boutique kind of feeling. It's like a cool little boutique downtown that only certain people were going to and now I think that's been changing for, you know, before my term, but I certainly have been making a dent in it since I got here.
DN: Has being poet laureate changed the way you approach your own poetry since you've been exposed to so many more people in this position?
MS: Absolutely, absolutely. I think every poet would like to go back to any of their older poems and be like, I want to edit that, I want to edit that. I want to edit this interview. There will be things, like, that's not quite what I meant, that wasn't quite the right word.
So it's definitely informed me in the fact of just having some influence from other experiences that I hadn't had prior to this, the amount of people and places that I've gotten to travel to. I did a show in Ketchikan, Alaska on the radio there, which was lovely, about poetry with my niece.
So it's afforded me these awesome experiences and I think just the craft of poetry itself has been probably enhanced because I've been fortunate to be a part of Fishtrap and Lit Fuse and go to some other writing festivals and just be a student there. My two favorite things are, being a teacher and being a student.
DN: Later this year, Noel Smith will take up the role as mentor to Spokane’s first-ever student poet laureate. Spokane Arts is taking applications this month from poets aged 14 to 17. But she’ll also continue to work on her own poems.
DN: Can I ask what form do your poems take? Are they sonnets? Are they long form? Tell me how you like to write poetry.
MS: Vibes. It's all vibes. I'm definitely not a form girly. I'm one of those prosy poets. I can get into long form. Most of my work is kind of like anthems. I write to sort of meet myself where I actually am and most often when I am somewhere, I'm trying to meet that part of me that's sad or afraid or confused. And so it's usually met with, like, come on and hope you got this. It turns into being this sort of anthem for the truth and this anthem for what's to come and what we can hope for.
But I wouldn't say that I use any sort of form particularly. Playing with form can be like, what would serve this poem the best? And I can kind of play around with form after the fact. But usually I just write to write and then we'll pull things like form later.
DN: How do you know when it's done?
MS: Oh, my gosh. Everyone says you don't know when the poem is done. I think that that's probably true. Before I got here, why I was late (to the interview) is because I was editing a poem that I had written a few weeks ago that I was so excited about. I went to Broken Mic, I shared it, I was really happy with it, and thought it was so perfect. And then I opened it up today. And I was looking at it. And I was no, no, no, no, it's all wrong. I could see and hear things today that I couldn't see and hear. Even when I was doing my best to pay attention a few weeks ago.
That's just how art has worked for me and I think it works like that for a lot of people. It's just having an acceptance that maybe that poem is isn't ever going to be done. But do we get it to a place that we want to share it? I'm not mad that I shared it last couple weeks ago. I'm glad that I did. And I think I can make it better today, knowing what I know now, having the experience I've had now.
DN: A few weeks is one thing, but would you go and rewrite a poem you wrote 10 years ago? Or is there a point where you said, ‘Okay, it's finally done?’ Statute of limitations, so to speak.
MS: My chapbook Crumbs came out in 2021. I self published it. I made 300 copies of it and sold them over like the Inland Northwest. And I would love to go back in so many ways and edit because it feels like an amateur collection. And I'm glad I can't because I meant what I meant when I meant it. And I said what I said when I said it and it was true enough and it was enough then. And I think the fact is that it will be enough moving forward like it. I don't need to constantly edit work. Let it go.
DN: If you had to counsel one of those 14 to 17-year-old poets about how to write, what would you do? What would be the top one or two things you would tell them about?
MS: Well, I tell this to every student, whether because I've got students as young as grade school, first grade, second grade. I've got students at Touchmark Senior Living Center that are writing their very first poems at 104 years old.
We all do the same practice, which is write every day, set a timer and set it for something that you can meet and reach, like set yourself up for like a slow pitch that you're just going to knock out of the park. Because momentum is the biggest, I think, challenge around writing or maybe even any art is just the constant creating, creating, creating, and that kind of energy builds. And especially when you set the timer for five minutes and you want to go an extra minute, that feels so good.
When we do those free writes, we start every workshop I ever lead, we start with a 10-minute free write. The whole point is don't read it, because as soon as you start reading it, you're going to start judging it. And once you start judging it, you are in the way of the flow. You're not the channel, you're the obstacle in the channel. So you write just to write and let it free flow out. And you do that every day you show up for that practice every day, no matter how you feel about it, what you think about it. And watch from there as you're writing and your strength grows as a composer, because that's really what poetry is. It's music.
