K . Moses

This website is such a serendipitious find for National Poetry Month! It’s a selection of poems read by their everyday appreciators - all captured in portrait videography. And you can submit one, too. Have a favorite poem? Share it with the world in your own unique voice. 

There are few places to me in the world that are as calm-inducing as art museums. Something about the airy quietness and soft lighting, the comfort of history and beauty all entangled and present - it just feels sort of holy to me. 

The San Antonio Museum of Art (affectionally known as the SAMA) is one of my favorite places in the city. I’ve been annually for the past three years, and I’m continually amazed by their collections. 

Want to read more about my trips to San Antonio? Here’s the scoop.

Every so often - which ends up being quite often, for me - it’s nice to mosey off somewhere to get some writing done. My poetry portfolio and thesis proposal are both due soon, so I’m up to my eyeballs in writing assignments. Luckily, Austin Java was able to help me in the form of a Honey Nut Latte.

Hello, everyone! This past week has been a bit scant on posts, but I’ve got a lot in the works that I’m excited to share. 

The week’s worth of content began with a feature for National Poetry Month, a poetry reading featuring Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Brigit Pegeen Kelly. The songs for the week were electronic and introspective, all packaged together in a mixtape called Airplanes. Dooey spent the week posing for the camera, now that I’ve mastered the zoom lens. The poem floating through my mind all week was Uncle Walt’s “I Thought I Was Not Alone.” Throughout the week, I spent my time editing photographs, mostly from my San Antonio trip. We went to the zoo there! And I was equally grateful and smiley for the things I posted Friday. 

I hope everyone has a lovely week! I’ll be posting more content later this morning, so maybe save a cuppa for that read, eh?

On the second day in San Antonio, our group trekked down to the San Antonio Zoo. Here’s the fauna through my eyes. Hope you enjoy! Especially the otters. My spirit animal, obviously.

Simple Joys is a series in which I share a few small, beautiful things I’ve seen throughout the week. 

April showers here in Austin, folks. They’ve got me feeling introspective.

There are very few cities in Texas that I truly love, and one of them is San Antonio.

It’s old and the architecture just looks like it needs to be waxed poetic. If you can ignore the cheesy tourist traps and five dollar water bottles being sold on every corner (which, at times, can be appreciated in their own right), you’ll find a city that’s gone the way of a satisfying cheese: ripened with age, and open to enjoy.

Not that travel to the big SATX merits a true reason, but I was there with my fraternity, who came to visit the zoo and meet the San Antonio chapter from the UT satellite school.

Our first night was spent on a river cruise, which is quite possibly the most gratifying tourist trap of all time. It’s a goofy boat that runs you the course of the river - a river that’s only like four feet deep, mind you - and the guide makes corny jokes while pointing out some of the city’s hidden (and some not-so-hidden) treasures.

I’ve been on two of these tours, and I have to say, they are a great excuse to take pictures. And there’s something so romantic about light on the water at night. It just slays me.

This trip was essentially an excuse for me to learn to use my mother’s D60, which for me is something like a bicyclist upgrading to a Ferrari. I’m still adjusting to shooting in manual, so these aren’t great. But what I did snap I’m awfully proud of!

Pictured above is the Tower Life Building, Oscar Alvarado’s mosaic of Judge Antonio Navarro, and a shot of the downtown River Walk.

The Weekly Walt is a weekly series that includes a poem from Walt Whitman.

I thought I was not alone, walking here by the shore, 
But the one I thought was with me, as now I walk by the shore,
As I lean and look through the glimmering light -  the one has utterly 
disappeared,
And those appear perplex me. 

314. “I Thought I Was Not Alone,” from the 1900 edition of Leaves of Grass.

It’s Doosday Tuesday - er, Wednesday - yet again! Look how small this goofball really is - it blows my mind. She’s like a mouse! 

Mixtape Monday is a series where I share a mix on both Spotify and 8Tracks.

Mixtape Monday - Airplanes

1. The Ark - Dr. Dog

2. Surprise Hotel - Fool’s Gold

3. By Surprise - Gemini Club

4. Rocket - Goldfrapp

5. Polish Girl - Neon Indian

6. Lay Your Cards Out - POLIÇA (feat. Mike Noyce)

7. How Deep Is Your Love? - The Rapture

8. It Doesn’t Move Me - Peter Bjorn and John

Click through to listen on 8Tracks, or listen to Airplanes on Spotify.

Well, like last week, this is a bit late. I’ve been feeling rather crummy with a pending ear infection (and honestly, who gets those over the age of like five?) and the blog just wasn’t happening. Apologies! But I have been doing lots of photo edits from San Antonio, so I think everyone will be excited to see those. 

One would think someone so interested in poetry - like, trying-to-go-to-graduate-school-for-creative-writing interested in poetry - would go to more poetry readings. Somehow that’s not the case for me. It’s not like the University of Texas doesn’t have infinite opportunities. Alas! To rescue my ever-dwindling pseudo-hipster cred, I popped my metaphorical poetry reading cherry last Thursday night at a reading by Brigit Pegeen Kelly and Gabrielle Calvocoressi. 

The reading took place at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, an outdoor venue in far South Austin that’s as beautiful as the lady it’s named after. The actual reading portion of the night took place in a lighted stone auditorium that echoed in all the right ways. Choice! And the grounds were blanketed a variety of native flora that I’d highly recommend visiting for any non-Austinites (or locals, alike!). 

Pictured below (from left to right) are my classmates (and fellow burgeoning poets) Cinny, myself, and Sara. To the right of us is my professor Julia (whom I’d highly recommend, to all you Longhorns) and poet S. E. Smith. 

The two featured poets couldn’t have been any more different: Brigit Pegeen Kelley’s work was flowing and incredibly engaging - sometimes her poems might have been four to five minutes long, and you’d find that you’d been holding your breath at the end.  Her naturalistic images (deer, birds, the human form, landscapes, swans) swirled around the auditorium, placing me at times somewhere high in the mountains, or beside a lake at dawn, or staring at the sky. When she closed her portfolio, I felt incandescent. You can read about Brigit Pegeen Kelley at The Poetry Foundation, or purchase Song (1994) here. 

Gabrielle Calvocoressi was another experience all together. While Kelley’s work was transcendent, Calvocoressi wrote in a very human - physical, raw, Friday-night-in-a-small-town sort of way. Her poems were much shorter, with the lines being deliberate and enunciated to convey horrifying truths about human life. The most stunning part? She writes in form almost exclusively. Calvocoressi also has a very distinctive way of reading; if you’d like to see her, this is a video of a reading at the University of Texas. Her most recent collection The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earheart: Poems (2005) is also for sale.

The reception afterwards was also lovely - and where we took the picture above! One thing I love about the poetic community is that they’re completely receptive to geeky undergrads like myself. I was able to meet Gabrielle Calvocoressi, whom, like her colleagues, was enthusiastic to share advice about entering into the field of creative writing. If you live in the Austin area and are able to come to any of these poetry events, I would highly recommend it; see The Harry Ransom Center and The University of Texas (April and May) for more details.

Hello, again! I hope everyone had a lovely weekend full of excitement. Traveling to San Antonio was a whirlwind - as you might have gathered from the lateness of my weekend review - but I’ve got some great content to share. Please bear with me yet again as I change formats for this type of archival post: I found that previously I was limited to sharing only nine posts from the week prior, and now that I’m blogging more often, it’s simply not enough! So - let’s try this on and see how it fits. Enjoy! 

This past week began with Easter Sunday, in which Cameron and I celebrated the only way we really know how - by engaging in general tomfoolery. The whole week was soundtracked by the Monday Mixtape called Vantage. One of the artists from the mixtape is Kimbra, who’s absolutely adorable in her video for “Cameo Lover.” While I was dancing the mid-week blues away, Dooey was hibernating in a scuffle of blankets. Wednesday was spent meditating on Uncle Walt’s poem, “A Clear Midnight.” If things had gotten too serious by then - and don’t they always this time of the semester? - all my woes were forgotten at the mindblowing Spoon benefit show. As always, I had something nice to say on Friday. And then I left for San Antonio that afternoon humming this gem from The Lumineers! Seriously. Check them out.

That’s all for now, loves. If you completely love (or hate, alas!) this new format, say so in the comments. You know it makes my day to hear from you. Toodles! 

The Lumineers - Ho Hey (Official Music Video)

These guys are quickly becoming one of my new favorite indie bands. Is this song not the cheeriest thing you’ve heard all week? Tell me your thoughts in the comments after you check these folks out.

Simple Joys is a series in which I share a few small, beautiful things I’ve seen throughout the week. 

All highly influenced by the events I’ve experienced this week. How lovely to be in a city that supports the arts as much as I fancy them!

Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer who understands what it means to get away for a holiday.

I’ll be in San Antonio all weekend, so if you have any recommendations for the city, don’t be shy to message me! Drop me a line at mail@kaylamoses.com and you’ll make my day.

Last night, in what might be forever written as the best concert of all time, I saw Spoon. To say that I saw Spoon might even be an understatement. The show was a benefit at Red7, a deliberately shady club on 7th Street that’s intimate in a grungy sort of way - meaning that I was about ten feet away from Britt Daniel. Enter an enormous indie fangirl. I experienced Spoon more than saw them. 

There’s absolutely nothing I can say to communicate the sheer impressiveness of these musicians. Most people love Spoon because they’ve shimmied along to “The Underdog” on the radio, but here in Austin, we’re welcoming home longtime natives. They’re phenomenal musicians. 

After seeing them at Austin City Limits two years ago, I knew that their live performances were impressively equal to their recorded quality. They played for two hours straight, coming out for an encore of not one, or two, but five songs. 

If these guys aren’t in your top ten bands of all time, you might want to bone up on your Spoon lore. Their most recent record, Transference, is actually on sale on Amazon for only five dollars all month. I would recommend snapping up that beauty as soon as humanly possible.  

And then indulge in the awesomeness of these guys. 

Something less fangirl-y, but from the heart nonetheless, is that I felt an immeasurable connection to Austin during the show. Something about my favorite band from Austin, playing in Austin, playing the songs that I was listening to the summer I moved to Austin - it was meta in a deliciously nostalgic and heartwarming way. 

Anyway! Get thee to some headphones and plug in. 

Photography courtesy of the New York Times. 

The Weekly Walt is a weekly series that includes a poem from Walt Whitman.

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.

283. “A Clear Midnight,” from the 1900 edition of Leaves of Grass.

It’s Doosday Tuesday yet again! The pup’s looking extra comfy in her blanket fort. 

Kimbra - Cameo Lover (Official Music Video) 

It’s slowly becoming evident that Gotye’s radio masterpiece has birthed a star other than himself: Kimbra, a grinning songbird New Zealander. Needless to say, I can’t get enough of her. Her Settle Down EP is available for download for a mere four dollars on iTunes, and I’d highly recommend it - at least until her feature-length album Vows drops.