When the Going Gets Tough, What Good is Poetry?

This is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. I’ve been going through  what some people call “heavy stuff”, with some scary things that just keep being scary. I’ve not been able to pretend to be light-hearted, not in person, and not in my writing. I’ve been writing mostly prose, mostly first-person stuff that feels too much like confession and not enough like art. Trying to promote a book, trying to promote poetry in Redmond, all that stuff has felt extra hard lately when I wonder “What is the point of poetry?” It doesn’t pay the bills, it doesn’t cure cancer, it doesn’t do anything practical.

This is where I will propose that poetry can be more useful in dark times than prose. Poetry makes you focus on the art part of the language a lot harder. You can’t get away with sloppy language or unfettered messy emotion and trying to cram your own whole wild self into it is hard work. When my husband G was out running errands yesterday, he ran by Half-Price Books and found a copy of a Margaret Atwood microfiction chapbook called “Murder in the Dark,” published by a small Canadian press back in 1983. These microfictions are a bit like prose poems, a bit like very well-managed short-short stories, and Atwood manages to keep them hilarious, dark, and brilliant in the way that only she can. Reading her pieces allowed me to try a bit of her style of microfiction/prose poetry – which was an wonderful escape from my own mind. And the result was the first poem in a long time that I have written that I felt happy with. It felt like I had found me again, when I read Atwood’s pieces about, yes, murder, death, mostly not subjects normal people might feel cheerful about, I was just able to see things from a different enough perspective, to kind of see the humor, the light, again.

And it occurred to me that poetry can be not only an escape, but that ability to transform a moment of grief, or sorrow, or fear, into something more – something dark and dangerous, or light and airy, depending on the artist – is what makes poetry magic. It’s not the publishing, or the payment (God knows,) or the fame (ha ha) that makes being a writer of poetry worthwhile. It is this moment – a moment of enlightenment, a spark of laughter, maybe a rueful acknowledgement – that lets our minds and bodies and hearts heal.

This is why I’ve participated in anthologies that mean something to me – including the recently released Like One Anthology, an anthology for “The One Fund”  for the Boston Bombing victims, an anthology focused on positive, lighter poems rather than poems about the bombing event, an anthology meant to lift the spirit, edited by Deborah Finkelstein. It really is a delightful book, so run out and get a copy and know it will be money going to a good cause and money well spent on an entertaining and enlightening collection of poems. There have been other anthologies that I felt honored to be part of, like the Japanese anthology of nuclear protest after the Fukushima disaster, “Farewell to Nuclear, Welcome to Renewable Energy: A Collection of Poems” which was printed in both Japanese and English.

I don’t know if poetry can change the world, but I know it can change my outlook, and if it can do that for me, it can do that for others. It is beautiful, it is art, yes, it can be healing for the author, yes, it can have a message that might help someone somewhere, but there is enough magic in the act of writing (and reading) that makes it worth it, all by itself. I don’t know if Margaret Atwood was thinking, “there’s someone out there who is going to be feeling a little blue and writers-blocky in 2013 who needs this laugh and thought and sharpness” – when she wrote Murder in the Dark in 1983, but it was like a little dose of sorcery, enough to jolt my writing nerves back to writing like myself again. And who cares that I write? Maybe no one cares about what I write now, but maybe there is someone in 30 years who will need it. Who knows?

Radio Interview with Jim McKeown on KWBU this morning, and Fevers

I’m excited that I’ll be doing a radio interview with Jim McKeown on KWBU this morning. Here’s a link to Jim’s blog, and his kind review of Unexplained Fevers.

And here’s a link to where the interview will be, along with a link to a previous feature Jim did:

http://www.kwbu.org/index.php?id=66532

I just hope I don’t sound too stuffy – I’ve had a summer flu for days! We had to cancel yesterday’s Redmond Poet Laureate teen event for lack of RSVPs so trying to fix the logistics of that and trying to schedule a makeup date and venue took a few hours. But it was just as well because by the evening I was feeling so sick I couldn’t even get out of bed, couldn’t eat anything, etc. It’s so weird to get sick in the middle of summer! I guess today after the interview I won’t try to, you know, jetski or climb any mountains.

This reminds me to share with you one of the most interesting tidbits from the Sylvia Plath bio I recently finished, Mad Girl’s Love Song, that illustrates some of the differences between American and British health care, at least in the 1950s; when Sylvia got a sinus infection at Smith, she was put up in the fancy sick bay, given cocaine nasal packs, Penicillin shots, and other such extreme treatments, but when she got to England on her Fullbright and came down with the flu, she was shocked that when she checked herself into Cambridge’s sick services for students that all they gave her was an aspirin. No wonder she got sick so often during her undergrad days! It’s said that in America we overtreat symptoms, and in Europe they undertreat. I guess that was the case back then, anyway. A bonus: here’s Plath reading “Fever 103:”

Verse Wrights features “The Conversation” and Teen Poetry Workshop Tomorrow

Many thanks to Verse Wrights for featuring my poem, “The Conversation,” on their web site today.

My tenure as Poet Laureate of Redmond is coming to an end soon, but I couldn’t be more excited about my last sponsored “geeks for poetry” workshop for teens tomorrow evening at the Old Redmond Schoolhouse, which will be run by YA author and poet Karen Finneyfrock. Read more about it here: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/4568648-free-teen-poetry-workshop-in-redmond or here. 

This July has been oppressively hot and surprisingly muggy for the Seattle area. I miss our old-fashioned summers of 70-degree-low-humidity weather. Not that many places in the northwest, by the way, have air conditioning – including a lot of restaurants and my favorite garden store which was 110 degrees yesterday, yikes for its employees! Yesterday as we were driving over the Sammamish river we had a huge bald eagle swoop towards us, right over the car. My mother says the eagle is one of our totem animals, that it is a sign we are on the right path, that we must have courage or that spiritual help for difficult times is coming. Of course, I told her it is a sign we live in the Northwest – there are a lot of eagles out here. It was a nice thought nonetheless. We walked by a winery’s lake covered with yellow water lilies and populated with sleepy ducks. I have a hard time eating, writing, or thinking when it gets this hot and can’t wait for fall to come. This summer has been oppressive in other ways too, with worry, with sadness, with the whole “what does the next part of my life look like.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the path ahead. I guess that’s when we need our eagle totems!

 

Anne Petty – You Will Be Missed

Just heard that writer, editor and publisher Anne Petty of now-closed Kitsune Books, has passed away peacefully after a long fight with cancer. Anne epitomized everything I would like to be when I grow up – she was smart, spunky, funny and fierce. Not only was she an author, she was an enthusiastic critical writer and someone who worked tirelessly to promote others, especially her authors. I feel honored to have been one of them; Anne was the original editor and publisher of She Returns to the Floating World, through Kitsune Books. She was caring and forthright. She loved anime and fox-wife folk tales, Tolkien and Neil Gaiman, and she was excellent and perceptive reader.

Here is an interview with Anne I did back in 2011. Her spirit and humor will be clear to anyone who knew her:

https://webbish6.com/interview-with-publisher-and-author-anne-petty-2/

I think the world is poorer without her, and I know I will miss her.

My Rumpus Review of “Search for a Velvet-Lined Cape and Synthesizing Bad News at Summertime

Thanks to The Rumpus who just published my review of Marjorie Manwaring’s first book, Search for a Velvet-Lined Cape (isn’t that a great title?) You should go read the review and then the book. I get really excited by probably one out of every twenty books of poetry that I read, and this is one of them.

Summer summer summer with its relentless SUNSHINE these days and HEAT and we’re not used to that in Seattle we usually drift through summer in the seventies with no humidity and only the occasional sparkling blue clear day where everyone crowds together by the water, but now we’ve had over twenty days without rain and many days in the eighties and without air conditioning that can be pretty miserable. I walked around a beautiful field of flowers yesterday but the smog hung oppressively over Mount Rainier, so much so you could barely see the white snow on the mountain. I’m so not a sunbunny, as I learned living in San Diego and Napa, I’m quite literally allergic to the sun, so I’m looking forward to Fall, to September, the overcast and the cool rain again.

I’m also figuring out how to synthesize some bad news at a doctor’s appointment, you know how you go and have tests and they let you go again? Well this week, one of my last doctors was all “look at this” and “this shows positively this” (Yes, I’m being cagey as I wait for further testing the next couple of weeks) and I came home and felt scared and blue and made a playlist of songs like “Dark Days” by the Punch Brothers and “Will She Just Fall Down” by Til Tuesday, Fiona Apple, The Cure’s “To Wish Impossible Things” and “Young and Beautiful” by Lana Del Rey, a long playlist and listened to it all and let myself feel a little sad, which I don’t usually indulge in. I’m not terribly addicted to robust physicality but I don’t like the feeling of losing things little by little the feeling of normalcy the expectations I guess of things that lie ahead sort of sinister. I’m a poet after all, I don’t need everything to be perfect, I don’t need all of my body to be functioning correctly at the same time, I know already that I am a little mutant and monster and I guess it’s good to get some answers. See? I’m trying to look at the bright side even now. I wish medicine and tests weren’t so expensive these days. I wish I could just let go of expectations and worry and watch the grebe in the pond outside my house and the little families of hummingbirds in my back yard, the egg-sized baby bunnies in the clover of the house down the street, enjoy the jasmine that has come back to life in all this sun and heat.

I will try to be back to my upbeat usual self by the next post. I will hope for unexpected beautiful things. That is the world, it’s beautiful and terrible and we’re rarely prepared.

Mad Girl’s Love Song, Happier at Home, the Cultural Cold War and a new review of Unexplained Fevers

Ironic reading pairings? Try the bio of Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted, and self-helpish happiness study book by an upper-East side millionaire, Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life . I’m really enjoying this particular bio of Plath, and trying to kind of tease out the subtext, something about how to capture Plath’s infectious ambition without going up in flames. Happier at Home is kind of a weird, how-to-be-a-millionaire-happy-housewife throwback guide for women who have enough money and time that “how to arrange my photos” becomes their biggest problem (I have to admit I was hoping for something different, some sort of modern women’s guide to balancing housework and marriage and money and a creative career, perhaps). Thinking about the repressive atmosphere for women in the 1950s and how there’s sort of a throw-back repression thing going to today in American culture. But I think there’s something interesting in both books about how women can put so much energy and effort into a perfect, happiness-filled home, this idea that women are responsible for the hearth, this primitive urge to divert creative energy into that. I’ve been noticing myself latey that my writing energy can easily be distracted by decorating and tidying up and researching recipes…

The other odd pair of books I’m reading is on the CIA’s involvement in literary and visual art culture during the Cold War era – The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters and Cold War Culture. Last night, to further a theme, I was reading about a 1950’s era book, written by a woman, about a suburban housewife outside NYC who learns to survive a nuclear apocalypse, called “Shadow on the Hearth,” a fictional call-to-arms for American women. Fascinating! I also found out that many “great” artists, literary magazines, and critics were propped up by government funding in an attempt to somehow fight Communism through artistic means. Tim Green posted this link on my Facebook discussion of the subject if you’re interested in further reading: http://web.archive.org/web/20060616213245/http://cia.gov/csi/studies/95unclass/Warner.html. I’ve lately been interested in Cold War culture, what with growing up in America’s Secret City (Oak Ridge, Tennessee) in the seventies with “men in black” hanging around the house, that I’m fairly interested to see the way that the government has tried (and for all I know, is trying now) to control things like art and poetry. (And PS, that big literary or art star might be a government construct! Now everything makes sense!)

Thanks to Collin Kelley for this mini-review of Unexplained Fevers at his blog, here: http://collinkelley.blogspot.com/2013/07/read-this-poetry-by-erica-wright.html

A nice review can make the sting of rejections a little better. I’ll try to remember that when I’m complaining about writing my next review!

What are you looking for in a poetry publisher?

I get lots of mail from poets asking about how to get a book published. But a question poets often don’t think about is, what are you looking for in a poetry publisher? I think it is something we should give more thought to before we even start sending out our books. Sandy Longhorn has a great post here about the state of poetry publishing today, and voices some of the frustration at a system that requires writers to pay for the privilege of having an editor or publisher even glance at their work. I piped up a bit because in my own career, I’ve mostly worked with small poetry publishers who either have open submissions or…wait, that’s all I’ve worked with. I like supporting small publishers, but there are pluses and minuses to every decision we make about our books. We actually have a lot more control than we think.

Putting together your first book of poetry, you’ll look at the list of first book contests, which are the most numerous and often the most prestigious, and wonder…You’ll ask….should I part with the $25 contest fee for a lottery ticket to a very expensive, very low-paying lottery? Or should I do research around my city at literary fairs or conferences, find micro-or-small publishers who might be friendly to my aesthetic? Should I wait til AWP’s bookfair and take a look some of the books on offer, find one that offers the kind of design and content I like?

But after your first book, there are fewer contest options, so you’ll have to look around at other resources, like http://www.dacushome.com/Poetry%20Book%20Publishers.htm and http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/presses-with-open-readings-for-full-length-poetry-manuscripts/#comment-1345. You’ll probably want to take a look at the books a press produces BEFORE signing up to publish with them, so you’ll want to either check them out in person (easy at AWP, harder the rest of the year unless you’ve got a terrific all-poetry bookstore like Open Books around the corner) or order a copy of one of their books online.

What are the most important things do you think for your publisher to do? Is it great distribution? Is SPD or Ingram okay, or do I want Consortium?  What about a dedicated marketing department or PR service? Or is my priority that I want to work closely with a friendly editor who loves and is enthusiastic about my work? Do I want to help promote a new publisher and do extra work to get the word out about both them and my new book? Do I care about the royalty statement, prize money, or profits? Have their books won prestigious prizes? Do I even care about prestige? Can they afford to buy any ads or do any promotion? What about review copies? Do I get input on my book’s cover art? Do they have a decent web site, use social media, are their books available on Amazon, who seems to be on the way to being the monolith of book publishing? Or do I want to try to do everything myself and self-publish?

I have a friend who will remain nameless, who sent out his book manuscript, which I got a chance to read and knew was excellent, for a long time. Lots of years. It was really good and I was anxious for him to get it out into the world, so I advised him to go look for a smaller publisher, and not to concentrate just on the big poetry book contests. Still, he persevered. Then he won the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize. So ha ha, joke’s on me. Remember not to take my advice if you’re about to win the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize.

I’m thinking hard myself about these questions for manuscripts #4 and #5. Please leave your own advice, questions or thoughts in the comments! If you ask questions, I promise I’ll try to come up with an answer, but it may not be the answer. That will be up to you.

Black Magic Woman, Derby Days Reading, Teen Workshop with Karen Finneyfrock, Mad Girl’s Love Song, and a 19th anniversary

An interview about black magic influences up for Spoila Magazine here, where you can find about my favorite black magic women, among other things…

http://www.spoliamag.com/talking-black-magic-with-jeannine-hall-gailey/

If you’re going to Redmond’s Derby Days this weekend, I’ll be opening for the band Recess Monkeys on the main stage on Saturday July 13th, reading some lighthearted geek-themed poems at 3 PM. It’s supposed to be a beautiful day, and if you’re an Eastsider, you’re trapped here anyway! Because they’re closing BOTH floating bridges to Seattle this weekend.

I’m particularly happy to be working with Hugo House and Karen Finneyfrock at my last teen workshop on July 24, which Redmond Reporter wrote up here – you should RSVP if you’re a teen or have a teen who enjoys geeky subject matter and creative writing!

http://www.redmond-reporter.com/community/214797091.html

In the middle of reading the Sylvia-before-Ted bio Mad Girl’s Love Song, which I am really preferring to the previous Sylvia bio on my reading list this summer, Pain, Parties, Work – I think because the author seems less enamored of Sylvia and more down-to-earth, I can enjoy it much more and not feel the strain of a biographer trying to gloss over some rather unpleasant Sylvia aspects. I’m definitely not reading either biography to get, you know, tips on how to be a happy poet or how to balance writing and marriage from Sylvia, so what I’m getting from “Mad Girl’s Love Song” that I like is a sense of Sylvia’s fierce competitive side and equally fierce intelligence. Her ambition is daunting to me. I think of myself as pretty ambitious, but compared to Sylvia, I’m sort of lazy. In a fit of serendipity, I also found an article in this month’s Town and Country about artist’s colonies, which told the story of how Sylvia got into…either Yaddo or Macdowell, but basically it was word of mouth, and the whole article made artist residencies seem glamorous and insider-y and unattainable.

Speaking of happy poet marriages…today was Glenn and my 19th wedding anniversary today, but we had so many meetings, appointments, and errands (including a wasted hour at the Courthouse trying to renew our passports (giant fail! and grrr to the unfailingly rude ladies working the booths there, who were not only unhelpful to us after we stood in line endlessly in their grimy un-air-conditioned-on-a-ninety-degree-day holding chambers, but to a single mother holding a squirming toddler trying to get a restraining order for a man who had been threatening her outside her house, whom they also turned away for the improper paperwork that the cops had given her – for shame!) I’d also had an anaphylaxis attack late the night before after getting my b12 shot – it’s happened a couple of times now even pre-medicating with Benadryl, so I may have to stop getting them – and so I wasn’t feeling my best, sort of worn-out and achy, which often happens after those allergic attacks. (PS If you’ve had an allergic reaction to b12 shot, let me know! I hope I’m not the only one, and I’m not sure exactly what in them I’m allergic to yet.)
So we hopefully will celebrate tomorrow, it’s supposed to be lovely and back to my beloved 70’s temperatures, maybe making some osso bucco with polenta, a chocolate souffle, maybe a visit to the Seattle Zoo or the Seattle Art Museum before they shut down our bridges…It’s important to celebrate when and where we can. For every terrible bureaucracy experience, there is a gracious and beautiful experience waiting to happen, right? I’m hoping so.
weddingdance firstdatej9glenn

 

Mini-Reviews of Render and The Wishing Tomb, Blessing of Long Weekends, and AWP Planning…already?

The four-day weekend of seventy-degree days, a blessed lack of traffic, walks with the wind off the cool water watching eagles feed their eaglets…time to read a couple of books, including two poetry books I’ve been meaning to review here and a book of Isak Dinesen’s, Winter’s Tales, a melancholy collection of short stories that were combinations of Hans Christian Andersen-toned fairy tale and morality tale with a twist.

Someone mentioned AWP 2014 to me today, and I thought, do I need to start planning things like readings and off-sites and parties already?? Yikes! I was thinking of trying to throw a party at my little townhouse, but we’re twenty minutes’ drive away from the conference site, so that might not be feasible. Maybe a collection of readings at a cupcake shop?

Mini-reviews!

I won a copy of Amanda Auchter’s The Wishing Tomb during the Great Poetry Giveaway, and I was delighted, because I really enjoyed Amanda’s first book and her previous chapbook, and was excited to read her follow-up effort. This was a wonderful sensual exploration of the history and personalities of New Orleans, from the 1600’s to Katrina, and conjures the sights, sounds and smells of the French Quarter, the mysterious charms and dangers, the crimes, the social injustices and heartbreaks. Dead prostitutes and magic charms, Jazz funerals and tombstone offerings. From the title poem, “The Wishing Tomb:” “Give me what you wish:/ bread crumbs, earrings, your high-heeled shoe/ and I will show you what you’ve earned:/ a rain-smeared kiss, a letter, or nothing/ but nights of teacups, an empty bed.”

Collin Kelly’s poetry has been on my radar for a while, because of our mutual love of pop culture figures, particularly superheroes. I think this book might be my favorite of Collin’s, at once more personal and more universal – memories of Knoxville’s 1982 World’s Fair, first boyfriends and early sexual experiences, family vacations juxtaposed with dreams of Charlie’s Angels, Pam Grier, and Lois Lane.  Especially touching moments include, in “Parallel Lines,” the speaker describing his grandmother dancing with him to “Heart of Glass,” and the speaker’s empathy during Margot Kidder’s breakdown, remembering her wonder in the arms of Superman in flight.  From “to Margot Kidder, with love:” “Margot Kidder was Lois Lane./ Fiesty, brave, in perpetual need of rescue./ Her dark hair, un-PC cigarette dangling,/ whiskey voice, in love with the one man/ she could never truly have.”

 

Happy Holiday Weekend, Shock Treatment, Intro to Time Travel, and Not Having All the Answers

I am wishing everyone a wonderful holiday weekend. We here in the NW are having record-breaking heat, which means I have to avoid being outside because I am easily scorched. In the last three days, I’ve been repeatedly shocked (nerve tests at a neurologist, this time for numbness in my arm and hands – it’s a standard carpal tunnel test, but it was miserable) and had three episodes of anaphylaxis at 2 AM  (maybe related to the sun? Even my allergist is stumped.) Yes, so I am looking forward to a few days with less trauma and maybe less sun and way more antihistamines. And let me tell you, I do not think that the old-fashioned shock-therapy was a good cure for anything, after my experience yesterday! It left me with little “echo-zaps” in my arms and legs for hours – super disconcerting – and I can’t imagine someone thinking this might be good for state of mind! No thank you! Poor Zelda and Sylvia!

Thanks for all the positive feedback from my last post, but I wanted to say, I don’t really even want to pretend to have all the answers. I’m definitely still stumped by the same problems everyone else has – how do you find a good teaching job/job for a writer that pays the rent/student loans? How do you find a good publisher? Which journals do you send your work to? I still ask myself all these questions, plus more! All I can do here is entertain our thoughts and arguments about obstacles, problems, and tricky riddles – basically you’re watching my own struggles to figure out, yes, what to do next. So, you’ve published three books. What do you do with your next book? So, you’ve been Poet Laureate of a city. What do you do next? In the last few days, I’ve made some next steps – hopefully forward – and will see how they turn out. I’ve tried to make positive movements, and not only that, but tried to work with some friends to also help them make positive steps forward, because, I guess, I feel best not just when I succeed, but when I can help someone else succeed at the same time. I consider myself a fighter for sure, but I also have that weird female trait, which is, not just to conquer, but to nurture and conquer (kind of like Daenerys, the only character you can really root for in Game of Thrones. Plus, dragons! Except, so far, for me, very few dragons. I’m still hoping though! At least for some fire lizards!  Oh, addendum, my friend Felicity reminds me that we also root for Arya. Of course. My apologies.)

Speaking of sci-fi references , you’re interested in my new poems, or in time travel theory, then check out this new poem, “Introduction to Time Travel Theory,” in Apex and Abyss. The poem is supposed to be in couplets, but I think it didn’t come through in the online version. Just mentally read it in couplets, then. And nerd alert: if you can catch all the pop culture references in the poem and name them, I’ll send you a mystery prize! http://www.abyssapexzine.com/2013/06/introduction-to-time-travel-theory/

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Jeannine Hall GaileyJeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World.  Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.

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