Locally Writ: ‘Trust yourself, trust your own voice,’ local poet Kathryn Smith says

For local poet Kathryn Smith, poetry and writing, in general, have always been a central force in her life.

“It’s just something I’ve always been drawn to,” she said, explaining how her work often serves as a means of emotive processing.

But, at times, life and the news cycle can be so overwhelming that trying to pay attention to or creatively process any one thing can be too much. Instead, over the course of the pandemic, Smith has dedicated the majority of her time to promoting her completed work.

Smith will celebrate the release of her second full-length poetry collection, “Self-Portrait With Cephalopod,” winner of the 2020 Jake Adam York Prize, with a virtual launch hosted by Auntie’s Bookstore on Tuesday at 7 p.m. To register for the event, visit auntiesbooks.com.

Smith worked at The Spokesman-Review for 12 years, many of those years as a copy editor. The constant reading the job entails provided a great deal of inspiration for her poetry, she said, mentioning specifically a piece in the collection titled “Poem for Trending Tragedy” that seems especially apropos of the past year.

“It goes through the news cycle … all of these different things happening, everything moving too quickly to pay attention or really contemplate,” she said. “I want to just focus on one thing, but there are too many other things, important things, going on around me, and I can’t slow down enough to focus.”

Perhaps no less anxiety-inducing, oceanic imagery and other ever-present unknowns weave their way through the collection.

The title poem reads, “Have you ever wondered / what’s beneath the skin, working? I know / so little, I wouldn’t recognize my own heart if I saw it / outside my body. I wouldn’t know my own bones / arranged in an ocean bed, an octopus coaxing / them to root in the sea floor until their stalks / grew thick with mouthlike blooms.”

Written over the course of several years and edited together to form a more cohesive work, “Self-Portrait With Cephalopod” conveys a dark but hopeful sense of wonder about the world and the people who live in it.

“There’s a lot of anxiety in this book, but I think there are also some glimmers of hope,” she said, explaining the recurring notion of struggling to exist in the world without constantly focusing on whether you’re responsible for its destruction.

Instead, she hopes readers come away with a sense of community.

“I hope that people who are feeling that struggle feel some sort of companionship and a sense of finding ways to move forward,” she said.

Smith offered the following advice for aspiring poets:

“Trust yourself, trust your own voice,” she said. “Don’t let other people tell you what it means to be successful. Find your own way, and decide what success means for you.

“The publishing process can be really discouraging. There are so many kinds of poetry out there, and so many kinds of people reading poetry, but I think that there’s space for all of those voices. So just keep trusting that you have something to say.”

Smith’s “Self-Portrait With Cephalopod” is available at Auntie’s.