The Winter Witch Arrives in Seattle, New Poem up at Gingerbread House Lit, Queen Anne and More Sylvia Plath, and Looking Towards Spring

Hummingbird closeup (immature Anna’s?)

The Winter Witch Arrives in Seattle

Sure, it’s been a polar vortex in half of the country for a week, but today is the first day we’re actually getting cold temperatures and a chance of snow – and the cold weather’s hanging around for a whole week! I’m still struggling to get over my cough, which has been hanging around since January 1. So keep warm out there!

Gingerbread House  – “The White Witch Retreats”

A big thank you to Gingerbread House literary Magazine for publishing my weather-appropriate poem, “The White Witch Retreats,” complete with a beautiful piece of art work. It’s sort of a mashup of Narnia’s White Witch, the Snow Queen, and Game of Thrones mythology, with a dose of environmental concerns…Fun, right? I can’t get away entirely, it seems, from fairy tale poetry!

An Outing Across Town…Traffic, Open Books, and Trying to Track Down Medicine

One of my prescription medicines has been discontinued, and we tracked down a last dose at a pharmacy in Queen Anne. No problem, it’ll be a thirty minute trip across town. No, it was a four-hour round trip! The new “tunnel” – replacing the Alaska Way Viaduct – opened and traffic was the worst I’ve seen it in a while, compounded with so much construction and destruction it looked like an apocalypse had occurred in certain stretches of downtown. And 30,000 people running through the tunnel, along with a protest of people in wheelchairs protesting for more accessible design traversing downtown (which is sorely needed!)

We ducked out of the traffic for a moment to stop at Kerry Park at sunset (hadn’t been there in a while, but definitely one of the best views of the Seattle skyline around) and after we had the prescription safely in hand, we stopped in right before closing to Open Books, and picked up Dorianne Laux‘s beautiful new and selected book of poetry Only As the Day is Long, and also picked up Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight by Terrance Hayes. And Glenn snapped a photo of Field Guide to the End of the World on display! Glenn also snapped a pic of me in my somewhat sad and barren looking February garden. It’ll be much prettier in a month, I promise – already the hyacinth and daffodil bulbs are poking up. I look tired (not sleeping well as a result of this dang cough) but hey, this is probably what I’ll look like at AWP too – I rarely sleep during the three-day poetry-extravaganza – although I might have another pink hair mood by then!

Sylvia Plath Road Trips, Poetry Publishing World Quotes, and Looking Towards Spring

A few days with cold rain and a cold have given me time to catch up on my reading, specifically Virginia Woolf’s letters and now I’m dead in the middle of Sylvia Plath’s letters, Volume II. I thought this quote might have about today’s poetry publishing world, instead of 1959’s:

Here’s a quote regarding not getting the Yale Younger Prize in Summer, 1959:
“I am currently quite gloomy about this poetry book of about 46 poems, 37 of them published (and all written since college, which means leaving out lots of published juvenalia.) I just got word from the annual Yale Contest that I “missed by a whisper” and it so happened that a louse of a guy I know I know personally, who writes very glib light verse with no stomach to them, won, and he lives around the corner & is an editor at a good publishing house here, and I have that very annoying feeling which is tempting to write off as sour grapes that my book was deeper, if more grim, and all those other feelings of thwart. I don’t want to try a novel until I feel I am writing good salable short stories for the simple reason that the time, sweat and tears involved in a 300-page book which is rejection all round is too large to cope with while I have the book of Poems kicking about. Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don’t have pure motives (O-it’s-such-fun-I-just-can’t-stop-who-cares-if-it’s-published-or-read) about writing. It is more fun to me, than it was when I used to solely as a love-and-admiration-getting mechanism (bless my psychiatrist.) But I still want to see it ritualized in print.”
(She’s referring to George Starbuck, a neo-formalist who went on to run the Iowa Writers Workshop and may have had CIA connections…please read Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers to learn more about the CIA’s deep connections to the literary world and all we hold dear…Oh Sylvia, if you had only known how deep the cronyism and favoritism went back then for male writers…you might have been less bitter, but maybe not.)

The other fascinating section was a part describing an All-American road trip Ted and Sylvia took in 1959, where they went camping and fishing in State Parks all across America, from the east coast to Montana (where they enjoyed $2 steaks!) and Yellowstone (where their car was attacked by a bear while they were in it) with Sylvia fishing like a champ all the way to California. It was such an extraordinarily interesting portrayal of Sylvia Plath’s life as outdoorsy camper girl that it made me wonder if she would have been happier staying in America (almost certainly) and such a vital presence – not the moody glum portrait most Plath readers have in their mind. Her travel writing is descriptive and gripping, which makes me wish someone would make a book and movie out of this episode in Sylvia and Ted’s life.

From Woolf’s letters, I was entertained at letters from Virginia and Leonard’s “courtship” in which she admits she isn’t physically attracted to Leonard and after his proposal, pleads to “let her remain free.” The least romantic love letters ever, perhaps! Of course she did get married, and apparently even wanted children before doctors advised Leonard it wouldn’t be good for her health (and since there was no contraception available in 1914, this means…well, draw your own conclusions.) And yet they stayed married until her death many years later. Virginia and Leonard provide an interesting portrait of a working literary marriage – very different from Sylvia who you wish could have adopted a little of Virginia’s frostiness towards Ted!

Well, off to get ready for a birthday celebration for my little brother/Superbowl party, which means Glenn has made enough food for an army and we hope the windstorm and snow don’t start up til after! Have a happy February week, and remember, spring is around the corner now!