Brigit Pegeen Kelly, a New Review of Field Guide, Internet Attacks and Poems of the Apocalypse
- At October 21, 2016
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
- 0
First: I was so sorry to hear of the passing of the truly great poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly. I never met her in person (though reports of her kindness and generosity are widespread) but her poetry was an important discovery for me years ago and definitely an influence on my own work. Her combination of darkness, morality, and surrealism – especially in Song – are unsurpassed. If you have never read her work, see the title poem from that book, Song, here.
I meant to post this morning but the internet had been shut down by a hacker attack. It reminds me of the limits and vulnerability of online communities, our writing, and our communication. Security on the web – especially in web services – is still mostly pretty easy to hack, and it’s difficult to defend against all types of hacks (DDoS attacks are simple to perform, hard to stop.)
Kathleen Kirk compares and contrasts a poem of mine from Field Guide to the End of the World with a poem from Donna Vorreyer’s Every Love Story is an Apocalypse here, “The Bounce and the Chaos” . An interesting and thoughtful discussion of two poems whose subjects – human relationships and electromagnetism – are very similar.
As I’m also currently working on a review of Dana Levin’s Banana Palace, another apocalyptic collection, and recently read Render: An Apocalypse by Nick Flynn and Rebecca Gayle Howell, I was thinking of our current obsession with apocalypse in the news, in pop culture, in weather reporting. The last time I saw so much apocalypse in the poetry zeitgeist was back in the 1920’s, what with Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Yeats’ “The Second Coming.” I even noticed the theme in children’s movies – not the teen dystopias like Maze Runner/The Giver/Hunger Games/Divergent stuff, but the children’s stuff, like, every “Ice Age” movie is another version of the characters facing an apocalypse, the latest caused by asteroids. Think of what people were about to face in the twenties – a huge stock market crash, the second World War, arguably more horrifying than the first, the Great Depression. A decimation. They could not have known what was coming, but perhaps they sensed this. What do you think accounts for our current obsession – the movies, the television shows (the latest – “No Tomorrow” – has another asteroid destroys the earth plot), the novels and poems of imagining beyond the end of the world. I know that my own personal medical crises – first of the brain, in the discovery of brain lesions a few years ago and their effects, like memory and motor skill problems, and this year, being diagnosed – not once, but twice, in six months, with metastasized cancer in my liver – definitely spurs thoughts of afterlife, survival, luck, the spirit versus the body. With Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s death, my thoughts drift to how a poet survives beyond reach of her physical person, her short lifespan. Her three books continue to be taught and loved, and that is a kind of immortality and grace.
Thank you to Melanie at the Teabird book blog for this kind review of Field Guide to the End of the World. http://teabird17.blogspot.com/2016/10/field-guide-to-end-of-world-by-jeannine.html
I’m also hoping for a friendly crowd at tomorrow night’s Hugo House event at the Pine Box, where I’m participating in a crazy-scary contest-reading sort of thing – you can read more about it here.
And please put October 29th on your calendar for my updated reading/reception at Open Books for Field Guide to the End of the World. Apocalypse-related costumes welcomes. Cupcakes and sparkling drinks provided! Put on your poetry-apocalypse shoes and come party!