Poet Karen Schoemer records and performs with several bands, including Sky Furrows, Jaded Azurites, Ivan the Tolerable, Day for Nights, and Karen & Peter. A former music journalist, she came to poetry and performance in midlife, with decades of music immersion in tow. Her first collaboration was with Oli Heffernan and Mike Watt in the band Detective Instinct; she contributed words and vocals to the 7” vinyl EPs Schoemer Songs and Falling in Lilacs in 2013. Sky Furrows has released two albums: Sky Furrows (Tape Drift/Skell/Philthy Rex) in 2020 and Reflect and Oppose(Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube) in 2023, and has performed with Oneida, Garcia Peoples, Savak, and Sweeping Promises. Jaded Azurites, a bass/voice duo with Mike Watt, has released seven digital EPs since 2018. Day for Nights (Sparrows & Wires) was a collaboration with Chicago guitarist Zak Boerger, who passed away from cancer in June 2025.
Schoemer published a nonfiction book, Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with ‘50s Pop Music (Free Press) in 2006. She hosted The Schoemer Show on WGXC 90.7 FM in the Hudson Valley from early 2010’s. In 2019 she earned a master’s degree in creative writing from The Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn.
In 2015-2016, Schoemer attended summer writing workshops with poet Bernadette Mayer, a former director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project known for her language experiments. In 1971, at the age of 26, Mayer took a 36-exposure roll of film every day for a month and kept fastidious notes on everything that happened. That material became Memory, an art exhibit with a 6-hour stream-of-conscious recorded narration, and eventually a book. August is partly an homage to Mayer, with 31 poems constructed collage-style into “a month of August.” Schoemer wrote the raw material in August of 2022, then spent weekends at an artist’s residency at Herman Melville’s Arrowhead in Pittsfield, MA (the house where he wrote Moby-Dick in 1851), cutting up the material and rearranging it into poems that float on top of the original hand-written notes.
She recorded the vocals at home in the winter of 2024-25. Sky Furrows bassist Eric Hardiman, who contributed several tracks to the album, co-produced, mixed, and mastered.