A little happy piece of poetry news…
Garrison Keillor will be reading a poem, “Spy Girls,” from Becoming the Villainess on the Writer’s Almanac on June 16th! So listen in and let me know what you think! I remember my Dad playing Garrison Keillor on the living room stereo when I was in high school. So this will be fun! Of course, I’ll be at school that week, so I’m not sure if I’ll sneak out of class to listen to it or what. Tune in to listen for Garrison Keillor to utter the words “shot with acid spray” and “blue wigs” in the same two minutes….possibly for the first time ever.
OK, back to my regularly scheduled pre-residency stressing-out-trying-to-get-everything done mode. Only one semester to go now!

PS I have a new enthusiasm for New Michigan Press – they’ve decided to publish chapbooks by a couple of my favorite poetry-bloggers, Paul Guest and Kristy Bowen. Congrats to them and to NMP for picking great poets!

Hey, this is what G and I discovered on our walking trail yesterday:
http://www.fs.fed.us/r6/centraloregon/wildlife/species/mammals/weasels.shtml#ermine
A short-tailed weasel, otherwise known as an ermine! I mean, yes, coyotes, heron, eagles, deer, sure, but ermine? This little guy was attacking a bird’s nest trying to get the eggs.
Lots of poetry news in the mail…Harvard’s Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion accepted two poems, describing one as a “midrash,” which I had to look up. I guess I was writing midrashes without knowing it! They took a year and a half to respond, but they included notes on every poem and a nice handwritten note. And 2 River View took a couple of poems as well. And a rejection with a nice note from Calyx after eight months. Also, G has been experimenting with podcasting software, trying to put up audiofiles from my various Becoming the Villainess readings. They’re not very good, right now, but at least it’s a start.
Last night I dreamed about rewriting the plot of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. I don’t know what that means.
OK, quiz for you X-Men fans: How many times did I reference the Dark Phoenix (who finally appears in this latest X-Men film) in my book? The winner gets a prize – the most recent issue of The Seattle Review!

No rest for the villainess, Part II: The Festival

So, back from the Skagit River Poetry Festival, which was a lot of fun…but now I’m completely exhausted. I loved talking with the 150 or so high school kids (I heard 500 were there, but that’s as many as I talked to) about superhero poetry and, for “Poetry on the Edge,” edgy feminist poets like Denise Duhamel and Dana Levin, and they seemed to respond pretty well to the poems I read them from my book. One girl told me she had been writing since the 6th grade and asked how to find her “style.” I told her to read as many contemporary women poets as possible, and wrote up a list of books for her. I felt useful! So yay for that. The reading with Tim McNulty, Gerald Stern and Lorraine Ferra I thought went well too – they were all wonderful performers, I thought, not a touch of poetry voice in the group. There must have been over a hundred people there, but I was less nervous than I had been for the Open Books reading. I had a weird sense after my fifteen minutes, that feeling of being wholly connected to other people, to yourself. OK, enough weird mystic talk. On the downside, I was so busy doing panels and stuff (which were simultaneous with my friends’ – including the lovely and talented Kelli Agodon, Peter Pereira, Kathleen Flenniken, Elizabeth Austen, etc – panels and workshops) that I didn’t get a lot of down time or time to see other writers – I saw a panel with Anne Marie Macari, Tess Gallagher, and Allen Braden on how to make a poem memorable, and a lot of good readings at night – Linda Hogan, who was fantastic, Tess Gallagher and Billy Collins, Gerald Stern (a lovable curmudgeonly Jewish-grandfather type? Although I think he shocked our PC Northwestern crowd with a few utterances) and a really beautifully-voiced slam poet named Sekou Sundiata. I did get to talk a little bit with Canadian poet Rachel Rose, who was great, and meet Nance van Winkel and her husband, and hear funny stories about Billy Collins. (Just don’t get between him and a case of wine! I’m just kidding…or am I?) Also, I stayed in a B&B that was really dusty and kept running out of hot water whenever I wanted a shower, and since I have a hot water fetish and asthma, I was pretty miserable there. Also I don’t think I slept at all last week, hence the two days of sleeping recovery before this blog entry. I have got to get less keyed up about these performances. The festival’s organizers were pretty great, keeping us fed and watered all weekend, which was really nice. There was always yogurt and fruit in a basket in the “Poets Lounge,” and they gave husband G. a volunteer badge so he could see my reading and panels and carry the 1000 pounds of books I kept needing. Sweet!
The last comment – one of the panels was in the Museum for Northwest Art, which had a really striking exhibit by poet Jeff Crandall, including one piece that looked like glass shards of an egg resting on pieces of slate, with bits of poems about breaking inscribed on them. Jeff, I couldn’t get over the high-school kids’ enthusiasm about this piece, about which they kept saying “How cool is that?” Poet-glass art. Cool.
Pop Culture Commentaries:
Notes on the Da Vinci Code: The movie was a dumbed-down version of the book, which wasn’t all that smart in the first place. They took out most of the art-history and math-cryptography parts, which were my favorite parts of the book anyway, which left the two main characters with very little to do. Here’s some interesting links on why Dan Brown, by making Mary Magdalene Jesus’ wife, may be downplaying her importance as an apostle: From Newsweek: An Inconvenient Woman. Also, a Slate article complaining about the historical information in the movie, especially re: the Gnostics (and, FYI, if you want a good Gnostic movie, just watch the Matrix trilogy.)
Notes on the Alias Series Finale: But they didn’t explain WHY Sydney’s mom suddenly wanted to destroy two cities and had become all power mad? What exactly was the Horizon? So many unanswered questions…Although Sloane’s beyond-the-grave punishment by Jack was very cool. Jack was always my favorite character, along with Irina. Best line of the night went to Sark: “Michael, it’s not exactly my dream to be participating in global destruction.” Does this mean the end for female superhero types on television? No Buffy, No Alias. Hrmph. I may just turn off my set for a while.

No rest for the wicked…

The reading at Open Books, Seattle’s poetry-only bookstore, was wonderful. The owners, John and Christine, provide the most gracious atmosphere one could wish for and John did outstanding introductions – truly moving – for Martha Silano and I. We were both a little nervous about being recorded for a possible local NPR show, but I think we did okay. The place was packed and the audience was terrific. Anyway, I can only say positive things about this experience, and if you get a chance to read at Open Books, you should. And now they have some signed copies of our books, if you stop in. Thanks to everyone who came out – I loved seeing your faces!
Husband G. and I are picking up the lovely and talented Kelli Russell Agodon on the way to the Skagit River Poetry Festival today, which starts Friday morning (I’ll be talking with high school kids all morning) and then readings that night and the full-on, everyone invited festival all Saturday, from sunup to sundown. I’m a little nervous about reading with Gerald Stern & co. on Saturday afternoon (4:15) but excited about meeting a poetry hero of mine, Anne Marie Macari, who reads right before that. Tess Gallagher, Billy Collins, Nance Van Winkel, Elizabeth Austin, and the aforementioned John W. Marshall from Open Books, along with a bunch of other famous poets, including friends like Peter Pereira and Kathleen Flenniken, will be there. After this I’m declaring a one-week poetry sabbatical. Did I mention that Silk Road is going to print next week and all of my MFA end-of-semester materials just came due? Oh, the fun, the madness!
Someone mentioned on Tuesday night how much healthier I am than just a year ago. What a difference a year makes! I’m hoping for the health thing to hold up a little longer…come on, immune system – and I’m grateful for all these fun opportunities. I just need a week of sleep to catch up. Then to school on the 10th on June!

Tuesday, May 16th, 7:30 PM
Jeannine Hall Gailey and Martha Silano read from their new books, Becoming the Villainess and Blue Positive!
Location: Open Books in Wallingford
I hope to see you there! And for margaritas afterwards!

In the everything happens at once newsbin:
Stanley Kunitz, who was 101, passed away.
I had a lovely late birthday party/workshop over on Bainbridge Island with my poet friends there. The cake had rasperry filling and pink roses, we wore leis, the weather was perfect – the yard was full of palm-sized squirrels and chipmunks.
One of my very favorite poets, Annette Spaulding-Convy, just won Floating Bridge Press’s Chapbook Contest. Her chapbook is going to be fantastic.
The lilacs are blooming everywhere.
I interviewed retiring Seattle Review editor Colleen McElroy for a feature Seattle Woman Magazine is going to do on her. Always a fun conversation.
I just got contributor copies of the new 2006 Evansville Review, with my poem “Becoming the Villainess” and poems by poets like XJ Kennedy and my former professor Andrew Hudgins, and the Spring/Summer 2006 Seattle Review, which had two poems from my book and a poem by blogger-and-friend Peter Pereira.
Of course, just to make life exciting, my dear husband G. had some bad clam chowder while I was with the poet friends so I was up most of the night last night bringing him ice chips and gingerale while he was pretty miserably getting read of said toxins. Yawnn…hope I get some sleep tonight…must be alert for the reading…after that, it’s on the Skagit River Poetry Festival – a busy week ahead…

It’s one of those poetry days…
I woke up from a series of disturbing dreams about hundreds of dead swans floating under water with a poem line in my head that I immediately wrote down:
“I could give my cocoon up to the grass”
which is one of those things that seem like genius when you first wake up and then, later, you’re left scratching your head.
I found out from my publisher that my book, Becoming the Villainess, has been adopted for an Intro to Creative Writing class at a University in Florida. I’m so excited! Although, sorry to those of you who will be forced to read my book for homework 😉 Still, it’s more exciting than reading Leaves of Grass for the twentieth time.
And I heard that the reading Martha Silano and I are doing at Open Books this upcoming Tuesday the 16th will be recorded for possible future radio airing on the local NPR station KUOW’s The Beat…exciting!
My little brother sent me an article from Wired talking about the reason young men are captivated by sexy powerful female role models in video games: How Lara Croft Steals Hearts. This article discusses the “Final Girl” theory that Jordan talked about a few days ago. None of this is a surprise – it’s been going on since Wonder Woman was created by a Jungian-obsessed Harvard professor who wanted a positive “anima” role model for boys and also, um, a lot of hot bondage action. Wikipedia has a pretty decent discussion of Wonder Woman’s origins, although they leave out any Jungian references.
Yesterday I wrote a poem that does not belong with any other new poems – instead, it’s a throwback to my old Grimms obsessions. I’m trying purposefully not to keep writing about the same things – hence my new penchant for writing about Japanese fairy tales and animé and trying to teach myself Kanji etc. Hmph. But I guess you should write the poems that want to be written and worry about sorting them later.

Report from a Billionaire’s living room exposed:
The art show that I went to last weekend, DoubleTake: From Monet to Lichtenstein, at the Experience Music Project in Seattle (the Gehry building beneath the Space Needle, which houses all of Paul Allen’s projects, including the Science Fiction museum and the EMP music museum – and now part of his personal art collection) was a little unsettling for me. First, they take you into a small, roped-off room, and make you watch a film defining things like “composition” and “color” narrated by David Hyde Pierce. After two minutes I ducked under the rope, frantic to escape, trying to find my way to the actual art. I hate anything that feels like a lecture about art – I went to my year of Art History, dammit! – I want to experience the art myself. Then you are given a talking handpiece which explains in “hip” language exactly what you are supposed to notice about the juxtaposed works. We, appropriately armed, are led into a single room, divided into three sections, which houses sometimes clever juxtapositions of one piece of art next to another, to highlight their differences and similarities, I assume. Sometimes this felt brilliant, other times condescending. On one wall where the juxtapositions worked, there were several paintings of the canals of Venice, one by Monet, one by Manet, one by Turner, and one by Caneletto. The Manet and Turner were both stunningly beautiful, and I’m not always a big Manet fan, but something about those intense blues, especially next to Turner’s gold light…of course what they wanted you to notice was that the images grew less defined as your eye went from painting to painting. The first wall you encounter was the huge promised Lichtenstein (of course, just having been to the incredible Lichtenstein exhibit at the Henry a month or so, I was less excited than I might have been) of “The Kiss,” a woman embracing a pilot with an airplane outline in the background – this was set next to Renoir’s “The Reader,” inviting comments about the positioning of the woman’s head, the background, etc. A wonderful Jasper Johns called “Numbers” – which was a brushed, beaten metal piece embedded with, you guessed it, random numbers, looked strangely appropriate next to a Monet of the Rouen cathedral. And one of the most amazing pieces of the collection was Jan Brueghel the Younger’s painting, “The Five Senses: Sight,” self-referential and delightfully detailed, a work I could have looked at for hours, next to Seurat’s “The Models” which has three women in varying states of undress seemingly in front of his masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, visible as a background corner – again, winkingly self-referential, and amazing work. A Max Ernst painting of an alien landscape was set next to Van Gogh’s “Orchard with Flowering Peach Trees.”
The framing of all the works was odd to say the least (trying not to give the masterworks’ pieces more importance than modern pieces, some frames looked like ten dollar throwaways, others fancifully elaborate) and the lighting was downright bad, and the juxtapositions of contemporaty versus modernist versus classical work didn’t always serve their purposes. However, since the Seattle Art Museum is closed down right now for renovation and Seattleites don’t have chances to see this many Impressionists together anywhere else, even when the SAM is open, I’d say it’s worth the $8 visit.
On to more poetry-oriented news –
I was delighted to receive a contributor’s copy of Grimm Magazine, my very first appearance in a Canadian journal. This perfect-bound journal has an offbeat, artsy feel, and is named after editor Ed Grimm, in case you were wondering. Check out www.grimmagazine.com.
Also, I don’t know if it’s just me, but I haven’t been sending out much because I’ve got so much work that still hasn’t come back from last year. No rejections, no acceptances, no news whatsoever! What’s up with that?
I’m nervous about my May 16th reading at Open Books, my first ever official “Becoming the Villainess” reading in Seattle. Nervous nervous nervous!