Things have been happening – even though I haven’t been blogging – a new baby, for instance, in the family (a girl niece for me, after all my nephews!) Happy congrats to my brother-in-law Jason and his wife Jen for his new little baby girl, Elena! So cute! And so glad to have another girl in our male-heavy family tree…
Speaking of family trees, my father, doing genealogy research of his family, found out we are related to a member of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, Virginia, where the legend of Virginia Dare originated (the first English girl born in the colonies, who mysteriously disappeared and was rumoured to have transformed into a white deer – and there are a group of white deer who run the Southeast coast all the way up to New York State – as well as rumoured to have joined the local Croatoan Indians and had children with grey eyes, with people from the Virginia area claiming even now to be descended from her. There’s even a blog, called something like the Lost Colony DNA project.) And we found some of our descendents in the local Croatoan tribe (connected to the Cherokee and maybe the Hatteras? We think?) if the government records are to be believed, who fought in the Revolutionary War on the American side, even though the American government wasn’t all that friendly to them. I’m not usually genealogy girl, but this story was pretty interesting. The internet is full of conspiracy theories about the lost colony, kind of an early 1600’s American X-File. Did they leave? Did they form a new colony with the Croatoans? Were they wiped out by disease, or hostile neighbors? Not only were no bodies found, the houses themselves (everything except the fences) disappeared, with only the word “Croatoa” carved into a fence post. They think this colony was the one referred to in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, by the way.
The tulips are finally blooming, although it’s not warm yet. The little “Eisbar” Flocke has finally gone public (http://www.nuernberg.de/internet/eisbaer/videos.html for video footage.) I’m planning a short trip out to California, trying to update my notes for the high school class at Centrum, and I’m getting ready for my first ever residency at Centrum starting next week (a place of my own for the first time since I was 21! Can I write without cats and husband around? Let’s find out!) My neck went out again (is this one of those writing-related injuries like carpal tunnel?) so I haven’t been at the computer much. Darn occupational hazards!
Quick poem in honor of the Virginia Dare/White Doe legend (there’s also a classic French fairy tale called “The White Doe” about a girl, allergic to the sun, who is turned by an evil fairy curse into a white doe by day…)
The White Doe
Poof!
NaPoWriMo Day 7
Yay, got an acceptance from Willow Springs of a longer (and somewhat darker) poem from my third MS, so that was good news.
And going to see Lucille Clifton in Seattle tonight! It’s totally worth the five hour round trip…I love her persona poems especially.
Update: My poem “Love Story with Fire Demon and Tengu” is up on the Haibun Today site today, Monday the 7th!
http://haibuntoday.blogspot.com/2008/04/jeannine-hall-gailey-love-story-with.html
She Justifies Running Away
Poof!
Mini-Review of Red Jess, by Judith H. Montgomery (Cherry Grove Collections)
Blood runs through the pages of Red Jess; the blood of a heart pounding out of control in “Gallop,” the blood of secrets in “Gretel’s Spell,” the blood of birth (and a red pen) in “A Cultural History of Fences,” and the blood of passion in “Ophelia, in Winter.” Nature plays a central role in many of these poems – flowers, trees and birds (especially the hawk) lovingly described – as well as the heat and burn of relationships. From “Gallop: “The day before she turns five, Amy hears/ doctors speak of her galloping heart…When she is alone, she listens for the horse/…for hoofbeats in her blood.”
- At April 04, 2008
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Ahsahta Press, Dog Girl, NaPoWriMo
- 0
NaPoWriMo Day 4
Don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep this up, especially as I’ll be away from home tomorrow, but…
She Should Have Been in Politics
Poof!
Mini-review of the day: Dog Girl, by Heidi Lynn Staples from Ahsahta Press
Ahsahta’s books are always beautiful objects…I haven’t, in the past, I admit, been a big fan of Heidi Lynn Staples work – I saw it as being poetry so insistent on “interrogating the language” that it was on the edge of not giving anything to the reader, resolutely nonsensical and overly in love with its own puns. So, I was pleasantly surprised by this collection – perhaps I like wordplay more than I used to, perhaps the poems about marriage tempted me, the interest she has in Japanese forms that I share, that epigraph from Grimm’s obscure (but loved by me) fairy tale, Jorinde and Joringel – but something drew me in. Here are some playful and passionate lines from one of a series called “Prosaic:” “His hands touched me with a whole science…His eyes shined with hackers. I opened my codes.” There are some surprisingly touching poems here about the loss of a baby (“Not, You No” and “Arson” among them) that transcend wordplay and ring with emotional impact.
Day 3 of NaPoWriMo, and yet another poem…and also a mini-review!
I Forgot to Tell You the Most Important Part
Poof!
Mini-Review of Laurel Snyder’s The Myth of the Simple Machines, from No-Tell Books
It didn’t surprise me that Laurel has become a successful children’s book author, because this delightful book of poems is full of fanciful stories, narrating the life of “the girl.” Some poems describe eerie dreams, others comment on mundane life and mundane desires (from “I Covet Everything I Own:” “I covet every/ gone year, every wet summer, every early supper/ on a citronella porch…I covet drunk and tired and quietly,/ you. I covet my own thighs last year.”) All of the poems have a delicate melancholy, building up an imagistic daisy chain that collects fragments of memories, prophecy, faith and foreboding.
All righty, I said I was gonna do this poem-a-day thing, even though I’ve just been slammed with ten million assignments at once, right?
So I wrote a poem and debated whether or not to post it, because it’s fairly personal, and I don’t write a ton of this kind of poem. But in the spirit, here it is. It will self-destruct tomorrow…
Other People’s Children
Poof!
And because I don’t want you to get bored with all these poems, as a bonus, I’m providing mini-reviews of books from my review stack as well!
First up, Rebecca Livingston’s Your Ten Favorite Words!
(I usually dislike it when male critics use words like “saucy” to describe a woman’s book of poetry, but nonetheless:)
Rebecca Livingston’s collection (from Coconut Books) of flirtatious, saucy, edgy-with-a-LangPo-twist poems provides portraits of an American woman coming to terms with her country, her lovers, her culture, and yes, her words and herself. Read to entertain yourself, to take a look inside Livingston’s fun-house mirror, reflections of the tawdry and tender.
An excerpt from one of my favorite poems in the book, “Wifely Attempt at a Poem:”
“His poems only poemified my thighs and didn’t
mention I was trying to be a choice wife
while fists floundered, tongues clamped…
There was a poetry reading held in a boneyard that
onlookers mistook for a peep show
It should have been obvious
The aggrieved circled, fingered
my thoughtful frocks of fraught…”
I’m going to try to poem-a-day thing (otherwise known as NaPoWriMo) this April, but don’t quote me on that.
Here’s my first effort (note: this poem will self-destruct – I’m taking it down shortly.)
The Foxfire Books: In Case of Emergency, Learn to Make Glass
Poof!
In other Poetry-related news…
Amazon is acting very antitrusty, very monopoly-like, telling small publishers they’d better use their in-house (and lousy/expensive by reputation) POD printing service, Booksurge, or else loose their books’ “Buy” buttons. Holy crap, right? And, putting small publishers in a worse bind – Lightning Source’s (BookSurge’s main competitor) POD services include distribution through Ingram – Booksurge’s doesn’t. Looks like Amazon will lose a lot of good customers, and create a lot of ill-will among customers and authors, and for what – a few more pennies? More about this here, here, here, and here. Read this, and complain to Amazon about these lousy, non-small-publisher-friendly practices.
And, my April reading at Northgate has been cancelled. Sorry to all of you who planned on attending!