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wBillieupool |
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Hi.
My name is Kate.
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wTuesday, September 24, 2002 |
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Poem a day. Why not? It's not like I utilize my day to its best potential anyway. And I'm always, always complaining about my output, so...
Poem a day.
posted by
Kate at 6:20 PM
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wFriday, September 20, 2002 |
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Warm mandarin orange spice tea, a fortune cookie: share your happiness with others today. I am happy, but the feeling is so unsettled within myself - a flashing light, something almost remembered but not quite - that I'm not sure how I could share it. I suppose it comes off in my smile, in my excess of good humor, jokiness.
Last night I added one more entry to my kiss list, argued over the quality of American chedder cheese, and witnessed (to date) some of the most excessive college party cliches...of Animal House scale (truly horrific, very entertaining). I also got asked out on a date but not by that last addition in my catalogue of kisses.
I've discovered that some things can be entirely fixable by a simple smile. People are suckers for happiness, and even more, for the happiness they feel they can induce in you.
posted by
Kate at 5:07 PM
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wMonday, September 16, 2002 |
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Oh my god. Cherry Garcia ice cream and soft star light lamp and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf like armor glinting viciously in the sun. I'm in my pajamas now, and there's Bolero on my radio and warm socks on my feet and cool air conditioner on my bare arms.
This afternoon I trailed Miranda around campus while she sought out shots for her print photography class. Later I found myself stripped down to my white undershirt, my jacket, my belt, watch and glasses all disposed of in a rumpled heap to the side, while John (shirtless, shoeless) and I posed in various forms of religion and melancholy - both of which are necessary to the other I think. I may not have a very photogenic face, but my hair likes the camera, cascades down, big and tangled, in wild blonde curls over John's face. They were beautiful pictures, marred only by too little light as we later discovered, thumbing through the waxy photographs at the Wal-Mart photo lab.
Tomorrow I'm hoping for fall, coolness, for the unrequited blue of the sky. So much beauty, sometimes I forget where I am.
posted by
Kate at 11:57 PM
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wThursday, September 12, 2002 |
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It's no longer the 11th, and maybe I waited until now to say what I have to say because I resent this almost obligatory pull toward remembrance. Or maybe I was taking care of more important things like eating roast beef sandwiches with John and Sarah and talking for three hours in the dark cool night with Bonnie.
I gave my first performance ever with Collegiate Choir tonight, the dusk of evening enveloping the crowded town square, a rickety podium full of city officials, uniforms peppering the audience, fire trucks lining the streets, shiny red, yellow. We were all crammed in together, sweaty and hot on narrow risers. I was uncomfortable, sad, a little sleepy, a little bored. I've never liked the jaunty even time of patriotic music. I don't like marches. I don't like the perfect key signatures that never stray into minor, eerie sounds. I like my music a little dangerous, a little enchanting and foreboding. Patriotic music is very solid, very square, though very important for what it's worth. We did sing "Be Still My Soul," and I thought - how beautiful - before turning on my listening face and retreating once more into my Katharine-realm of daydream fantasy.
It can't be helped. I'm sorry New York. I'm sorry Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. I'm sorry all you good people. My heart really does hurt, but I don't know how that helps any of you at all.
What I can describe now - the only concrete memory I have to ground myself by, in fact - is just exactly what I was doing on September 11th last year.
I was in my introductory art class. I didn't want to be there. I heard a boy say to my professor, "Did you hear that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center?" I was sleepy. I was cranky. I didn't even really know what the World Trade Center was. I thought, how odd that a plane just crashed into a building. Subconsciously I didn't care very much. I live in Troy Alabama. New York is a long way away. After my class I walked to my dorm room. My roommate met me in the hallway outside our door. "Come look at this," she said. I walked in, looked up at her TV. I saw two twin towers, vaguely familiar icons of New York. Then I saw something small zoom across the screen and into the first tower. The explosion didn't look real. Then I realized I was watching the collapse. Then I realized I was watching people and papers and bricks and cement and lives all implode right there on my TV screen.
I called Josh.
We sat in the semi-dark of his trailer. He hadn't showered yet. He smelled of sweat and day-old boy, sweet and strange. His hair was greasy. CNN was flickering across the room. I would shudder from time to time and he would take his thumb from our interlaced fingers and rub it across the back of my hand or stroke my arm. I was dizzy from watching the videos of people running away, ash gray and terrified of the avalanche of debris and smoke roaring behind. I was dizzy from sitting by Josh because he was very new to me then. Later he would begin to relax against me, and then nod off and jerk back to alertness. I knew I had to leave, so I did. I ate lunch. I waited until it would be a good time to go back to Josh's. I talked to a few friends. I felt sick. I felt confused.
I drove to Thad's apartment. He and Laura were watching Independence Day. Thad was laughing a lot and brandishing the word retaliation like war could be as simple as a movie. Josh came and we sat together, squished and playful on an armchair. Dog allergies soon made me miserable. I made a quick exit, and Josh followed behind. We decided to go to his trailer. We were all alone, and on the couch. I was teasing him about his uncut toenails. We wrote definitions from my Earth and Space Science textbook on the terrifyingly scraggly white parts of them. We ate Mike and Ike's and laughed until we fell off the couch. We kissed for the first time. It was terrible. I wanted to go home.
I wrote in my diary. I fell asleep. I couldn't watch TV for a week. I listened to the radio instead.
posted by
Kate at 1:13 AM
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wTuesday, September 10, 2002 |
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Today I went to work, and, in the middle of sorting letters and sealing envelopes and slipping the vicious little orange rejection slips in all the SASEs, Mr. Hicks told me to go outside and pick a maple leaf. So I did. He pointed to the edges, said,
"See how the edges are yellowing? Each day they'll turn a little more. Fall is coming."
Of course fall is coming.
posted by
Kate at 7:30 PM
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wSaturday, September 07, 2002 |
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So I have doubts. Don't we all? Doubts that come like ghosts in the night, doubts that settle internally, almost invisible, and doubts that I never doubted I had in the first place. I doubt my intelligence in my 9:00 British Literature class. I doubt my talent every time I pick up a pen, or fit my fingers into the smooth groove of the keyboard, or read an excellent poem. I doubt my attractiveness every time I'm in the presence of a beguiling stranger. Even people I've known awhile, I doubt my magnetism. I doubt my ability to charm and hold.
I want a strong center of gravity, but I've come to accept this term (and my life right now) as possessing a strong sense of antigravity, of not knowing how I fit or where I can stand up straight or what I even like. I want that to make me more free - this unknowing. I want to unbase myself, if you will. I want to step out of the preconceived notions that came predisposed with this skin of mine. I don't want to be anything like myself anymore. I just want to make good grades, and write good papers, and spiral into a million poems.
I just want to make something right now. I don't care if it's at the expense of myself.
posted by
Kate at 3:30 AM
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wThursday, September 05, 2002 |
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I hate my intro to creative writing class. We're butchering poetry right now. I hate how I've turned into such an inflated egotist with regard to my own work, and almost overnight...though there was a hint of the self-righteous/self-adamant burgeoning in my head last semester during verse writing. I've always been very careful to pay poetry special homage, to be humble in all my pitiful endeavors. But there's also a machine inside me that knows the secret labyrinths of the craft, that takes to its nuances, its subtle metaphors, its ability to suggest something time-old in a completely fresh way. I have no excuse to not be at least a minor poet of some standing at some point in the future. I have it. I have it. I don't deserve it. But who gets to choose what they receive. Isn't there something divine in all of us that leads us about by the ass? Or is it just me, lost in all the excess of this wasting talent?
In a recent article in Time, Harold Bloom wrote, "poetry has always been to me a sacred threshold guarded by demons." Poetry is indeed a fickle, illusive art. Who knows why it raptures down on some, and remains unattainable to everyone else. I struggle with the ghost of it every day, though sometimes I am lucky enough to be pulled beneath the heady creation of it, and then I am completely, hopelessly lost
All of this just to complain about the quality of writing in my intro class.
posted by
Kate at 12:21 AM
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wWednesday, September 04, 2002 |
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I've been filling out this empty rectangle of a post place for weeks now and then promptly deleting everything as soon as I write it. The beginning of school always leaves me with a stupid, illiterate feeling. I clam up, freeze. I forget how to write. Finally, I rehabilitate in my written diaries, and then somehow the overflow seeps onto here - this electronic scrawl that no one, save myself, reads. Perhaps I like it that way. In the past, this blog has seen too many private moments. I don't know who I've presented as a person through these pages, but she seems altogether too illusive, shifting, and abstract. I am much more ordinary than my romantic travails, than my sporadic boozings, than my trailing digressions into my shifting perceptions of the world. Perhaps, the beauty I see around me every day has been captured here in the past. I am a connoisseur of the mundane, and I find pleasure in it.
Oh dear. All I was really trying to say is that I've created a really cozy home here.
posted by
Kate at 1:24 AM
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