- At December 11, 2006
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
4
Sprained my shoulder, so have spent last two days in bed. Amazingly, all this down time – mostly spent flat on my back with no computer – has made me super productive in the time I can do computer stuff – I sent out two packets of poems, wrote a chapbook review, finished a writeup for Expedia, and read a bunch of magazines and books that had been sitting around. Oh, and finished up my Christmas shopping online. G’s parents bought me this cool book on Japanese consumerism, women, and culture. I read a fascinating chapter on the culture of cute and the backlash against it – which may be a backlash against working, independent women, and therefore, kawaii (or cute/vulnerable/childish)=feminist? No, I don’t think that’s right. But something.
First, check out Oliver’s interview with Kate. Good reading!
And check out this quote from a piece on Helen Vendler:
“Today Vendler seldom reviews poets under 50, since their “frames of reference,” she says, are alien to her. “They’re writing about the television cartoons they saw when they were growing up. And that’s fine. It’s as good a resource of imagery as orchards. Only I’ve seen orchards and I didn’t watch these cartoons,” she said. “So I don’t feel I’m the best reader for most of the young ones.”” (Full story at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/books/review/Donadio.t.html?pagewanted=3&_r=2&ref=books)
Cartoons replacing orchards in poetry. Yup. That’s what I’m all about, baby!
Shanna Compton’s Down Spooky
is what I’d call “approachable experimental.” In some ways, you feel as if you have sitting down having a conversation with Shanna – a folksy, Southern vernacular type of poetry, but a little weirder, a little heightened language thrown in. Kickboxers, oreos, lip gloss, stripmalls all make appearances. Check out this stanza from “Guided Tour of the South:”
“No adquate map exists. Everybody
has always arrived wearing blindfolds.
See the foxshined faces in the kudzu?
Most of the vegetation has been bitten off by winter.”
Anyway, head on out and check out this book, which recently was made available again from Winnow Press.
Ooh, and in other exciting news, Brandi from Switchback Books sent out the info for our AWP reading – and it’s full of cool chicks – Mary Biddinger and Kristy Bowen are both in the lineup too!
Jeannine 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.
Penultimatina
Hope you feel better, Jeannine!
I am stoked re: our reading. Woohooooo!
Tom
Jeannine,
I too hope you feel better. Seems like the cold wet north does some people in, when they she really be out, out in the nice warm t-shirt weather of Texas. Of course, some say intelligent culture is lacking here, and I guess I am no help.
To add to the cartoons and culture bit, Vendler is 98% vacuous, but there are possibly three parts to a poem as I see it; subject, props, form. Young writers tend to depend on ‘props,’ such as characters, events, weather, politics, death of a relative, family problems, and a million others, and then ignore subject. Young writers also ignore form, voice, nuance, point of view, etc, and rely on shock or hype. This goes for novelists as well. It doesn’t really make any difference if a poem has a cartoon element or a redwood forest instead of an orchard, and this may be what Vendler is mentioning in a highly diplomatic manner.
I may be one of the first people around with Expression Web delivered to my door. Do you know anything about it? I looked over the manual and discovered I have no idea what they are talking about.
I may be needing some more help soon, if that is all right with you. January.
jeannine
Dear Mary – thanks! Me too!
Hey Tom! I agree with you re: Vendler. My last poetry advisor at school, Pattiann Rogers, who is primarily a nature poet, was so excited to help me with my anime poems – she even volunteered to watch anime at home! So a good reader/critic can read poems whether they are about sunsets or cartoons. Vendler’s just blowing off a bunch of poets, like me, who choose not to write about orchards. Although I do have nightingales reappearing with some regularity. Poems do transcend their subjects. One hopes.
As far as Expression – I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. From the buzz I’ve heard, it’s less user-friendly than FrontPage and more buggy (not news for most MS fans – their new products are notoriously buggy the first year.)
And – I’d love to help out 🙂 I’ll be gone the second week of January for my last residency (I’ll even get a fake diploma handed to me, like a real student!
Tom
Jeannine,
I haven’t even loaded EW. I looked at the requirements and saw I needed 1GB RAM, and then realized that I would have EW open, along with Word, several tabs on the IE7, and several hundred photos at once, so I had to run out and buy 2(two)1GB RAMs, since I only had 256MB. There went another $280. The EW Microsoft forum so far is positive, I think. It is the CSS that really matters, for me, since each page had to be set in FP, except for borders–I am not a real geek, but I could see for what I want to do that FP wasn’t going to work for me, and DW was going to be a bog learning curve. Any, under a $100 bucks upgrade couldn’t hurt. What a difference 2GB RAM makes!
Take a look at my “virtual read” on my website. It was really fun to do. No need to buy the poetry book–read it “virtually” on line.
I still haven’t read your book. In the spring I will.
Take care of yourself. I will let you know about EW. You wouldn’t happen to know if when I load it up–will it wipe out the webs I have now?