Online Video Series: Veronica Schorr with “Killer”

Note: the following post was originally published on April 17, 2018

Thank you to WHUS for letting us use their space, and of course to Veronica for reading!

Filming: Elizabeth Sankey
Editing: Daniela Doncel
Interviewer: Amanda McCarthy

Poem: 

Killer

You’re all smoke and jazz
deep kiss and dark hair
whiskey-burned bright hazel eyes

You’re all sex and sass
rainy street and reckless drive
over-slept Monday mornings

You’re all sugar and sweat
drunk call and dirty joke
bruise-covered bloody knees

You’re all mine and murderous
smoldering hot and slow grin
voice-cracked three a.m. moans

Interview: 

“Hi, my name is Veronica Schorr. I’m a junior, and I’m a Psychology / English double major, and I’ve been writing since I was like nine years old. I remember the first journal I got from my dad for Christmas. It had all these dogs on the cover, and it was really cute.

Oh yeah, I think the one that I read is definitely different than some of the other ones. It honestly just depends on the that mood I’m in. Like this poem is definitely more of a love poem and it was written when I was really missing the person that it was about, whereas some of the other poems I write are something about something that happened in my day, and I’ll have like a really extreme emotional reaction to it, so sometimes that’s why it would sound more angry and less structured. It definitely is very organized compared to other things that I have written and that is because I think it has a very strong direction. Like, I wasn’t confused about how I felt, like it’s pretty straightforward, I don’t know. If you love someone it’s just like, it’s just what happened, I don’t know.

I think if something really impactful happens to you whether it’s positive or negative, I don’t know, I’d like to say I’m a pretty positive person, so I take every experience to be something that I can learn from even if it is something awful. And I think that myself and maybe other artists will also agree that you feel the need to share something that happened to you in a way that maybe other people can relate to. The necessity being for you to create and like get all of this out of you basically and also hope that other people will be like, “Oh wow, like I feel the same way,” or “That really helped me to deal with something that happened,” which may or may not be similar to your experience, but I think that’s what’s great about art. You can interpret it however you want, so like if someone reads my poem and doesn’t take it as a love poem or whatever and interprets it in a completely different way, that’s like fine and beautiful and I don’t care as long as it had a good impact.

I think that a lot of people have a very fixed idea of what poetry is, like they think what they learned about in middle school, Robert Frost or whatever, it has to be this kind of structured boring thing that rhymes, which is not true. I think in school a lot of times it becomes very inaccessible, and people are like, “Oh, I can’t read poetry, like it’s so hard to understand,” or “I could just never do something like that,” but it really can be whatever you want it to be, which is why I love it so much. When kids are younger, maybe making it more interactive, or having more opportunities to be published and see what people can create and kind of just pushing the boundaries of people who think they have of themselves as writers. Making it something that people will want to do rather than a chore. ‘Cause a lot of kids are like, “Oh, I have to write an essay, like this is terrible.” But you know, poetry is not like that. It can be fun. It is fun.”