levelheaded: Katie Condons

 

We’ll start broadly: This poem is written in clear sentences and mostly end-stopped lines. The poem’s language is simple and conversational in tone. A few up-to-the-minute pop culture shout outs (Miley Cyrus, Match.com, etc.) give the poem a purposefully contemporary feel. Without the poem’s clarity, it’s easy to imagine being baffled by all these Katie Condons (Katie Condon’s name appears 11 times, including the title). But we think the poem’s simplicity belies its subtlety.

 

There’s an interesting moment halfway through the poem when “the real Katie Condon” describes a six-year-old photo of herself as “bizarre and nostalgic.” A photo can be “nostalgic” in the sense that it can elicit nostalgia, but more often, “nostalgic” better describes the experience of viewing such a photo. One may feel “nostalgic” when seeing Teddy Ruxpin. One less often describes Mr. Ruxpin himself as “nostalgic.” This phrasing very slyly twists from a description of the photo to a description of what the speaker feels when viewing the photo, and it’s characteristic of the moves Condon makes with language. The speaker’s reaction is clarified by the unwilling cringe we hear in the jittery rhythm and hesitant “l” sounds of the phrase “mostly excruciatingly misleading.”

 

The poem derives humor from the speaker’s harmless, multi-layered narcissism. The premise of the poem—Katie Condon googling “Katie Condon”—introduces this narcissism. But it goes further. The speaker feels an urge to correct what she deems a misrepresentation of herself. Her direct address, “Katie Condons, I don’t want you all / To get the wrong impression of me—,” speaks to all those other Katie Condons, but it also speaks to “the real Katie Condon” and to us, the audience. The speaker’s wish to correct a “wrong impression” is essentially a wish to change the past or, at least, to strike it from the record. The seeming permanence of the internet is a perfect stand in for a real past. Once you click post or share or tweet, the deed is done. These days, when everyone and everything seems involved in persona-building and self-creation (@LEVELERpoetry anyone?), this feeling must be common.

 

It’s worth noting the pronoun “I” doesn’t appear until more than halfway down the poem, and then appears only six times to “Katie Condon’s” 11. Just before “I” makes its appearance, the speaker makes a quietly Whitmanic assumption (think “what I assume you shall assume”). With the line “To the other Katie Condons who Google themselves,” she imagines that other Katie Condons feel the same urge to google themselves as “the real Katie Condon.” It’s perhaps heartening to think we’re all in it together. And perhaps it means something that this poem now exists on the very same internet with all the other Katie Condons.

 

 

– The Editors