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    The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, and Writing
    The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, and Writing
    The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, and Writing
    Ebook110 pages1 hour

    The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, and Writing

    By Katharine Coles

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    About this ebook

  • Coles has created innovative national educational programs merging science and poetry. This collection of lyric essays continues her work bringing together disciplines and considering current and eternal scientific and natural questions from a poetic perspective.

  • This book is part of Turtle Point Press's series of publications focused on "Women's Voices, Womens' Visions." Her previous book with us, Look Both Ways, is part of the same series.

  • Coles will exploit her many connections with independent bookstores and with media outlets in Utah and the west.

  • Blurbs will be requested from Terry Tempest Williams, Arthur Sze, Diane Ackerman, Elizabeth Kolbert, Rebecca Solnit.
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTurtle Point Press
    Release dateFeb 23, 2021
    ISBN9781885983954
    The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, and Writing
    Author

    Katharine Coles

    Katharine Coles’ seventh collection of poems, Wayward, is due from Red Hen Press in 2019; her memoir, Look Both Ways, will be out in 2018. She is a Poet in Residence at the Natural History Museum of Utah and at the SLC Public Library for the Poets House program FIELD WORK, and was sent to Antarctica in 2010 to write poems under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program (The Earth Is Not Flat, Red Hen 2012). She has received grants from the NEA and NEH and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship.  

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      Book preview

      The Stranger I Become - Katharine Coles

      THE STRANGER I BECOME

      for Jen Webb

      Walking is good for thinking,

      but not vice versa.

      SHARON BRYAN, USE CAPRICIOUS IN A SENTENCE

      I am known to walk a lot by modern standards, on most days for seven or more miles. Fitness isn’t the point, at least not all of it. About goats, Sharon Bryan tells us, They keep their balance/by staying in motion—and balance isn’t all physical, at least for me. Walking spins ideas free; its rhythm puts me in touch with myself, and the distance I travel reminds me I am always loose on the planet. Setting a pace, sallying forth, re-minds me, mind comprising as it does every part of my body, skin, eyes, ears, and, not least, my heart, which tells me I am frightened or in love before I know to ask. My senses, not my brain, create the ongoing sense of change I know as mind. Without my moving body, my brain would be a dull grey blob, inert. Like it or lump it.

      Walking enacts this change and its constancy. Philosophers have Heidelberg’s Philosophenweg, or Philosopher’s Walk, which is open also to physicists and mathematicians, many of whom are great walkers, and even to poets. You can reach it from Heidelberg Station on foot if you’re willing to walk forty minutes or so through the less picturesque suburbs to get there. From it you can contemplate the ruined castle on the other side of the valley, and consider how destruction comes to all bodies, often so slowly we don’t notice.

      Before I thought much about dissolution, when I was still a young poet, I worked toward unity, trying to develop a poetic voice, which I believed would distinguish me. I didn’t realize that I was also working to fit in, to give the community of poets a handle to grab, a way to say, Yes, this is a poet, a creature whose vocalizations we recognize as lyric. I wanted to appear at once new and familiar, wild and domesticated. I wanted to teach myself how to write a poem—how to want to write a poem, an essay, any piece at all—that was, as the fashion demanded, about only one thing.

      Now, on days when I have too much work to do or the world outside is covered, as this morning, in snow, I walk on a treadmill facing a glass wall looking out over treetops into a canyon. I walk, in other words, toward the edge of a cliff, only a few feet in front of me, an edge that never arrives.

      Still, the earth spins. The canyon falls toward the house through Gambel oak at the front and away at the back into wildland. On this shortest day I can hear the frantic predawn singing of coyotes circling their prey. Once, on RadioLab, I heard a biologist claim—adamantly—that reports of people hearing coyotes singing to each other are false. He does not have a plausible explanation for exactly what else we might be hearing (Dogs? The howls of our hungry hearts?) or why we would universally identify these calls as belonging to coyotes if they don’t. Still, our claims remain unverified, as he says, his voice querulous. Perhaps he imagines us plunging into some mass hallucination, all our unscientific minds, made irrational by winter dark, casting us back into a time not so long ago when we still knew we are prey.

      For example, the other day, at dusk, I opened my front door to a slightly crazy-eyed pizza delivery man. He was new, and he had just walked for the first time down our long, steep driveway under deepening winter shadow and native trees interplanted with apples. We leave the fruit for deer who live in the gully running down the hillside next to the house. That evening, the apples long since eaten, they huddled in the clearing on the other side of the carport, holding so still you had to know they were there to see them.

      He asked, Do you have wild dogs in the neighborhood?

      Me? I laughed and cocked an ear. I have never, in this neighborhood, seen a feral dog, much less had one. I see coyotes all the time, I told him, and even more frequently hear their calls. I pointed at the front walk behind him. The first week we lived in our house, I said, I was standing by the window when a lactating female strolled along it as if she owned the place. Like the time I shared a long gaze with a mountain lion not ten feet in front of me, our look measuring out a much greater than physical distance between us, I was riveted in place, my spine alive with its own electricity.

      Coyotes, he said, and relaxed. He didn’t want to think ordinary dogs, the kind he knows and takes into his home, could sound like that. And the truth is, that biologist notwithstanding, they don’t, not that I’ve heard, slide eerie voices up and down a scale tuned to another key, singing out freedom and their hunger. You don’t have to be a scientist to know this. Even calling back to coyotes, as I’ve heard my dogs do, frantic with fear and excitement, they sound like themselves.

      This morning, when I went up to get the paper, I saw in the light snow next to my car a large paw print, canid, enacting absence-in-presence: I was here.

      As the sun rises, finches flutter up from the oaks’ shelter by the score to peck at feeders my husband, Chris, keeps full. He changes out types of seed, blocks of suet and insects, and, in the summer, sugar water and orange halves dabbed with grape jelly to attract birds coming through in waves as the seasons change. The small birds draw hawks, which ride the canyon updrafts into the sky or plummet over the roof, sometimes just a few feet away from where I startle at their swift appearances. Occasionally a weasel or fox wanders through, or a lone, elusive bobcat stalking the raccoons our feeders also draw, and once, years ago, a moose, gigantic in snow-lit dark, who paused to strip the bark from the aspens out front.

      I don’t notice every such event, even when I am awake and facing it squarely. Chris installed a mount for my laptop on the treadmill, and over time I have learned to type at four miles per hour and read at seven, if the reading is easy. I can compose syllabi while walking, or grade papers, or mark up dissertations, or answer the constant stream of anxious emails from students. As you might guess, I don’t get carsick either, thank goodness, or airsick, or seasick. But when I do raise my eyes from the screen and cast my gaze beyond the glass, I move not only out of my room, familiar and disorganized for my sole convenience, but out of myself.

      The canyon, along with its bird population, changes season by season. The screech owls that returned to our nesting box in the fall will fledge chicks by June and scatter into summer darkness. The snow covering everything now in its great blankness will give way to melt and detail,

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