Launch for PR for Poets, Open Books Talk on PR for Poets on April 8, and Sylvia Plath Quotes

Launch for PR for Poets in Seattle and Online!

Well, the day is here! PR for Poets is officially available now on Amazon and Two Sylvias Press, and I’ll be hand-bringing the very first copies to Open Books on April 8!

Here it is on Amazon: PR For Poets: A Guidebook To Publicity And Marketing and for slightly less as a pre-order from Two Sylvias Press: PR For Poets: A Guidebook To Publicity And Marketing.

I’m really hoping this book will be of use to people and help poets who feel uncomfortable with book promotion or feel totally at a loss when launching their books. That’s really the goal of the book. I’m so thankful to the many experts who allowed me to put their advice and wisdom inside this book, including Sandra Beasley, Robert Lee Brewer, Marie Gauthier, Kelly Davio, and many others!

Open Books, April 8 at 4:30 PM – Jeannine Hall Gailey talks PR for Poets!

I’ve been a bit of a recluse lately, but the spring will be bringing me out into the open again! On April 8 at 4:30 PM (it’s a Sunday,) I’ll be giving a talk on the basics of PR for Poets, on topics from social media to web sites to readings and reviews! Come out, say hi, and get your copy – Open Books will be the very first brick-and-mortar bookstore to carry copies of the book! Plus, they’re always fun to visit.

Obligatory flower pictures here! Cherry Trees and One Apple Tree!

Glenn and I took a trip to UW’s famed quad full of cherry trees on a Tuesday (and it was still crowded,) and then I took some more pictures of Woodinville’s apple and cherry blossoms. Definitely feeling more like spring! I’m sooo ready for it!

Sylvia Plath quotes, Writers – Ego and Expectation

You know I’ve recently finished The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1: 1940-1956 – all of over 1300 pages of it! I only do this kind of background reading on women writers I’m very interested in – Flannery and Sylvia were both on the list. And I talked a little about in my last post, but I wanted to give you some quotes I made notes on while I was reading it – either the quotes are ironic, funny, or display something about her expectations as a writer. These are mostly from her time living and studying in Cambridge, England. She loves her cookbooks, has definite opinions about her own writing compared to other women writers of her time and expected, like most of us, to get her first book of poetry published much sooner than it actually got published.

1956 in a letter to her brother, Warren: “Am hoping to get scattered poems published this spring & get together a book for a contest in June at which Richard Wilbur and 4 other poets whose style is congenial to mine will judge; won’t know till October, but am determined to publish a book of 33 poems within next year.” (Her first book of poems, Colossus and Other Poems, wasn’t published until 1960, three years before her death. Her Pulitzer-winning Collected Poems (1956-1963) wasn’t published until almost twenty years after her death, in the 1981! I bet she wouldn’t be surprised, but she would be irritated they waited that long!)

1956 in a letter to her mother: “When and if you have the chance, could you send over my Joy of Cooking? It’s the one book I really miss!” (Hilarious, right?)

1956, in a letter to her mother: “I know that within a year I shall publish a book of 33 poems which will hit the critics violently in some way or another; my voice is taking shape, coming strong; Ted says he’s never read poems by a woman like mine: they are strong and full and rich, not quailing and whining like Teasdale, or simple lyrics like Millay; they are working sweating heaving poems born out of the way words should be said.”

1956, in a letter to her mother: “I shall be one of the few women poets in the world who is fully a rejoicing woman, not a bitter or frustrated or warped man-imitator, which ruins most of them in the end. I am a woman, and glad of it, and any songs will be of fertility of the earth and the people in it through waste, sorrow and death. I shall be a woman singer, and Ted and I shall make a fine life together.” (None of this turned out to be true, unfortunately – she turned out to be the patron saint of frustrated women writers, and not remembered as a particular celebrator of female fertility. And her life with Ted, while described by many in different ways, was not quite as happy and starry as she anticipated at 25.)

Also, some personal notes: She liked Elizabeth Bishop but not Auden (she described his poems as “grinding metal”), thought the New Yorker published a lot of trite poems about birds, took classes from CS Lewis, liked Tolkein, and thought Ted Hughes would make a great children’s book author whose work would be acquired by Disney. She studied a lot about Chaucer (obv. liked the Wife of Bath) and Paul’s letters (problematic in terms of his attitudes towards women and sex, she thought – and I agree!) Lots to think about. Still an inspiration. Though she disparages Edna Millay all over the place in these letters she had a lot in common with her – did you know Edna got famous for an early poem about suicide? And was notoriously egotistical and famously sexual? Kind of a mean person, sort of like Sylvia. I like both poets, although I’m pretty sure I would have been afraid to be friends with either.
It does make you think about the job of ego in the work of women writers. I was thinking about this is terms of Emily Dickinson too – even with lots of rejection, she kept at it. Without a pretty sizable ego, women writers in the twenties – or fifties – wouldn’t even have attempted to make a splash. Sylvia expected to be more successful than she was, which may have led to being disappointed at a more crushing level than if she’d tempered her expectations. On the other hand, who succeeds without having the expectation of succeeding? We must all retain some hope of this, even if we say we don’t. Otherwise…