Mo Schoenfeld – Fevers of the Mind

Q1: When did you start writing and who has influenced you the most?

Mo: I started writing poetry in my teens, in the 1980s, and into the 90s after university, but I stopped in the mid-90s while pursuing an acting career (unsuccessfully). I started writing poetry again following the EU referendum vote here in the UK in June 2016, writing a bit and participating in Hammer and Tongue slams in Oxford. Between Brexit and Trump, I was very angry and scared and I started to become bitter, and the handful of poetry I wrote during that time reflects those feelings. I started writing haiku during the first lockdown after recovering from Covid at the very start of the pandemic, as a coping strategy and because it felt manageable through the brain fog, a short form. Brevity is not my strong suit, and it can take me quite a while of talking to find a way to express difficult emotions. Haiku connected me to the natural world and also helped me process very difficult feelings in a healthy, direct way. Haiku and the right friends coming into (and in some cases, back into) my life at the right time helped me steer away from bitterness.

As far as for who influenced me, there wasn’t one particular poet, I just liked poetry. I loved lyrics, too, when they are so well written they weave within the music. The first poem I remember really getting jazzed about was Shelley’s OZYMANDIAS. I love the haiku masters. As for currently, oh there are so many I’ve come across on Twitter I don’t even know where to start…

Q2: Any pivotal moment when you knew you wanted to be a writer?

Mo: No, I’ve always liked writing, but I’ve struggled with focus through the years, and it was difficult for me to pursue it as a career path. I write now to connect. That keeps me focused, and I feel more a part of a greater whole. Poets seem to me almost like the writing equivalent of jazz musicians.

Q3: Who has helped you the most with writing and career?

Mo: That is hard, as I don’t really feel I have a career. The person who definitely gets the most credit is my friend Dan Holloway (an amazing human all around). He encouraged me to get back into writing and come along to the poetry slams in Oxford in 2016. In my latest phase, in the past two years, I credit Nikki Dudley (MumWrite and Streetcake Magazine) as well as the many poets I have met in the poetry community on Twitter, generously sharing their work, their process and their support. Damien Donnelly and Gaynor Kane recently gave my poetry a boost by including one of my pieces in The Storms inaugural journal in August 2022, which was a BIG boost. The poetry communities on Twitter have been a pure gift.

Q4: Where did you grow up and how did that influence you? Have any travels influenced your work?

Mo: I grew up in Doylestown, PA, Bucks County, outside of Philadelphia. It was a rural area when we first moved there, which became a suburb by the time I was a teenager, a pretty but boring small town filled with mixed memories. I can’t spend more than 4 days there before my skin feels like it starts to crawl. It’s a place I left, and have no desire to return to, even to visit. I remember making my mind up at 10 years old that I was going to move to NYC and then to London – two dreams that did come true. My travels have influenced my work in that they’ve given me a sense of who I am apart from the huge Irish Catholic family I grew up in. And, of course, all the different experiences I’ve had when I’ve travelled, different customs, landscapes, experiences, etc., all got stored in my memory and are there to draw on.

Q5: What do you consider your most meaningful work creatively to you?

Mo: I’ve been writing haiku daily since June 2020, and that is a sort of creative baseline for me now, part of my DNA it seems almost. I walk every day, I haiku every day, this I feel is most meaningful because it has helped my mental and emotional health throughout the lockdowns, and continues to do so. It is like a springboard, which I am just now starting to spring a bit from.

Q6: What is a favorite line/stanza from your writings?

Mo: I don’t have one.

Q7: What kind of music inspires you the most? What is a song or songs that always come back to you as an inspiration?

Mo: I love jazz and could listen to it forever without getting sick of it. I like blues a lot, too, but my soul runs out of patience with blues after a point in a way it doesn’t with jazz. Jazz changed so much through the decades that it’s like many different incarnations of itself that also seem separate. It’s ever-evolving. It’s alive, collaborative, includes improvisation and creative freedom, and it often conjures for me distinct moods that help me write, especially in those magic moments where it seems to evoke an emotional memory that I did not actually ever experience. It gets my imagination going. I have my moods, lately especially, where I just want to listen to McCartney songs. I loved him as a teen, and sometimes I just need to hide in those old songs, Beatles, Wings, his solo stuff. He was my retreat as a teenager, and lately, it’s been helpful to retreat into his music again. I feel safe there.

Q8: Favorite activities to relax?

Mo: I’m terrible at relaxing. I am not good at sitting still. Not in a way that leads to anything productive half the time, just restless. Walking and hiking help, and I love just sitting and staring into the ocean, but don’t get much opportunity to do that, living near a river and not a coast.

Q9: Do you have any recent or upcoming books, events, projects that you’d like to promote?

Mo: Well, again, I was in the inaugural print issue of The Storms, that’s Damien Donnelly who does the Eat the Storms poetry podcasts. That was the most recent one.

Bio: I’m a ‘born-again poet’ living in Oxfordshire, UK. I started participating in writing prompt challenges on Twitter during the summer of 2020, then took some courses with @MumWrite, then participated in various other readings, launches and workshops since then, online. Since August 2020, I’ve been published in Irisi Magazine (http://www.irisi-magazine.org/healing/healing-haikus-and-senryus-by-maureen-schoenfeld), The Best Haiku 2021 Anthology and the upcoming The Best Haiku 2022 Anthology (https://haikucrush.com/), Tiny Wren Lit (https://www.tinywrenlit.com/intentions) and several times on Pure Haiku’s blog (https://purehaiku.wordpress.com/). I’ve appeared in print in ‘Poetry in 13: Volume 3 (2020)’ and ‘From One Line: Volume 2’ (2021). One of my micro-poems appears in Eat The Storms podcast’s inaugural issue of The Storms later this month, published by the creators of the Eat the Storms poetry podcast. Twitter: @MoSchoenfeld

wavelets / chins tipped / hold sun’s embrace squirrel grey in livid rays/ their ranks of open lips mouth sweetness/ at the eye of dusk no swimmers here/ to rip their harlequin silk to shreds/ of light ashore/ sole-prints are shadowed/ by day’s ebbing gold/ to be immersed in crosshatched expanse of tide/ whose basketwork convexities/ suck land’s mauve loom below/ a quilt of cumulus a haiga description from Mo Schoenfeld light slips, struggling, night laps at the mountain top, darker depths settle. I framed a portrait for an absentee by Sam Hickford Here is a cranny for you to seize, my love, among the volcanic strait of smoke-stung cloud.. will you take it, as the wagtail claps this wreath of Autumn, makes this land its vow? As each trilled wavelet furnishes a mountain for a chalk-board dreadnought to a droughtless word, come. I watch the ocean’s opiate break mirrors in the champion of its lens and picture you cradled in these hues of fire and lazuli and scarlet shards. Shores of Safe Distance by Robin McNamara When we divide our words between a stanza with image-filled meanings and one with an abstraction of reality not easily deciphered/ do we need anything more than the acceptance of our verses read by the judgmental or do we find our oars and paddle out a bit further; into deep waters of thoughts, without a compass. With only the stars to navigate a way to your account of my words. What if I drowned, what if the storms of uncertainty was too much, what would wash up upon the shores? A body of work beautifully polished by the waves or a piece of driftwood? Would you tread water to find our existence, or would the stones under your feet compel you to go back and stare at the ocean from a distance and say; maybe another time. That's All Folks by Elizabeth Cusack The sky is burning— It’s not exactly news— It’s been this way since I was born. There was an egg before akasha, If you care about language, And there was the ein sof, If you care to read that tongue, And there was an egg before the chicken— This is very hard to grasp, It has ruined paradise, This inability to understand, The great unknown was once one, And all multiplicities someday will blow apart. A prophet comes along once in a while And says, this is what it’s all about— all is one, Call it love or whatever makes you smile, But the fact is we are killing every one, And as we come and go, And as we kill our mother, And read our revelations, The steel-grey cable under the sea Is recording every absurdity, And as we remember the essential dead poets— Remember what, exactly? That everybody who ever lived is now here! James Joyce got it in the Wake, And they mocked him As they do every damned prophet— All the condemned are on this ride As we read up on Aleister Crowley, As we are on this burning earth, As we read revelations from the dead And martyred who died for clarity— And don’t forget Stalin, Mao, and old Paul— And as we drink the soma and submit when we are called, We remember the ones who saved our lives— Thank you to the poets, that we have a mind at all! That is the final thing they will try to take from us all. STRUGGLING by Spriha Kant Kaleidoscopic dreams float like amorphous clouds and the hopes shine like the sun in her psyche. Stuck amidst the turbulent eddies trying to drown her in the stygian abyss she keeps the waves of her mind, heart, and actions synchronously tranquil for she is as vulnerable as a fire in the water who can’t dare to rebel against her inner voice ordering her to achieve something that will raise the eyebrows and open the mouth wide of the pessimistic commentators. Links to some work of a few of the poets:

Tag: Mo Schoenfeld

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