Interview with the Husky Herald in which I reveal secrets about poetry and give advice about putting together a manuscript! Thanks to Patricia El Koury – who was an amazing student I got to meet a few years ago – for doing a great job with the interview.
I love the name of the newspaper, because I keep picturing a basket of husky puppies. Is that wrong?
Books (and a movie) to recommend
I just finished Allison Benis White’s Self-Portrait with Crayon, a wonderful book (my mini-review of it will appear in the next Crab Creek Review) of crystalline prose poems that present a puzzle and a glimpse of how loss and art work together. The thing I’ll say here that I didn’t get to say in my review: this is a great book for people who are looking at 1. how to build and organize a manuscript, because her organization is meticulous and very clever and 2. how to write about personal tragedies through the lens of art (kind of ekphrasis of the soul.)
The other book I’m recommending is a Young Adult book called When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. It’s a book the author said was inspired by L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which was all I needed to hear to read it, and it involves a young girl coming of age in 1970’s New York City and time travel. It’s not as good as A Wrinkle in Time, but it’s the kind of smart, emotionally engaging book I wish had been around when I was a kid. Issues of class and race are addressed, as well as the confusing transition between childhood and adulthood. The best time travel book L’Engle wrote, in my opinion, was not A Wrinkle in Time, but A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the third in her trilogy.
The movie I saw was an independent film called Haiku Tunnel, about an aspiring, depressed novelist working as a temp in a law firm. The writer/actor/director is charming and funny, and a lot of the scenes reminded me of the Kafka-esque cheer of showing up to work as a temp and how work can actually help writers stay connected to the world. At least, that’s what I think it was about. It was a fun movie of the genre “movies about writers.” I wish more of these movies were about women writers, but there you go. Maybe I’ll become a famous screenwriter writing the exciting life of a poet. Probably not.
This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education combines the usual “too many poets, too many journals, too many MFA programs are ruining poetry” argument with Foetry–esque accusations of too much corruption and cronyism in the poetry world.
Sometimes these kinds of articles depress me. Besides the fact that I’m a fan of people outside a tiny circle on the East Coast writing and publishing poetry, I’m an optimist who wants to believe that the poetry world is a meritocracy, even when on the inside, I know it’s probably pretty corrupt – as easily corrupted, for instance, as environmental science (which recently experienced an embarrassing uproar about top scientists faking or mis-stating data about global warming in order to make their theories stand up) or politics. When I studied biology, and I actually researched papers – on genetic engineering, on carbon dating, and on tissue culturing, to name three topics where I went back to original sources – I was surprised to see that many papers that were used as references were later withdrawn or discredited because the data was corrupt and the scientists who wrote it exposed as cheats. Which depressed me then, maybe enough to keep me from going into research after graduation. Because, really, if you can’t trust your scientists and your poets, who can you trust?
It reminds me the orca who killed a Sea World worker today (and had previously killed two other people. This is one mad whale!) I used to think whales were sweet, because there are documents of whales saving people, and I personally love seeing them in the ocean, but then I found out sometimes they beat up other whales and dolphins too. I actually watched a bunch of orcas beating up a smaller whale of a different species. And dolphins themselves act like gang members, beating up smaller, lonlier dolphins. And I love seals, but a little while back a seal attacked and drowned a girl, a marine biologist who was my age at the time. Animal nature, human nature, both a little darker than we’d like to admit? I guess, once again, it’s up to the individual. Not all poets, scientists, or seals can be trusted.
Even if the poetry world is fairly corrupt, you’ve got to keep writing, keep sending out, keep believing that someone, somewhere will stand up for you even if they don’t owe you a favor. Am I too naive? I just read for a chapbook contest and didn’t think about anything beyond: “Which one is the most interesting and the best written?” Is it possible there are lots of judges out there doing the same thing?
Do you know why I like blogs more than Facebook? I can’t lose myself in someone else’s perspective on Facebook, but on the right blog, you get to lose yourself. You get inside someone else’s head. That is what I like about writing in general. Facebook is like seeing a bunch of people at a party; a blog is like going for coffee with someone you’re really interested in.
I think I was going to say something interesting here about judging the chapbook contest for Concrete Wolf, something about how there are so many good writers out there, all the finalists this year were wonderful, and how the decisions come down to – “These are equally well-written but I’m more interested in this subject matter” or “this type of writing is more interesting to me than that kind” which makes you think about how relative judgement about poetry really is. It could be all about the mood of the writer at that moment, about how much they like prose poems or narrative poems, about how they feel like they haven’t seen enough of blank and blank should be celebrated this year.
I’m also thinking about chapbooks, about how I might want to do another one.
I think I like Lost because Lost is about the struggle to understand suffering in life, to understand justice, to understand mystery. Lost is a lot like the Bible that way. You’re interested in the characters, but you’re more interested in the mystery.
I’d also like to know about any good superhero poems by female poets, if you’ve written one or have a favorite one by another poet. I’m always excited to find out about these kinds of things, but I’m trying to put together a good diverse sample of poems for my WonderCon paper.
I was so sorry to hear about Lucille Clifton passing away. She was one of my favorite poets, and her use of persona has always been terrific – she uses the voices of everyone from Leda to Satan. I like almost everything in the Book of Light, but here are two great persona poems:
adam thinking
she
stolen from my bone
is it any wonder
i hunger to tunnel back
inside desperate
to reconnect the rib and clay
and to be whole again
some need is in me
struggling to roar through my
mouth into a name
this creation is so fierce
i would rather have been born
eve thinking
it is wild country here
brothers and sisters coupling
claw and wing
groping one another
i wait
while the clay two-foot
rumbles in his chest
searching for language to
call me
but he is slow
tonight as he sleeps
i will whisper into his mouth
our names
won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
I’ve always thought of Barbie as a sort of totem for girls. This new one, computer engineer Barbie, just made me so happy for some reason:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35372184/ns/business-retail/
She has a pink laptop and she wears glasses. That’s my kind of doll. She is still very blonde, but she makes up for it by having binary code on her t-shirt.
(PS, if you haven’t read Kinky, Denise Duhamel’s book of poems on Barbie, go and do it.)
Yes, it’s been a week of doctor appointments, phone calls from doctors, and sometimes uncomfortable tests that doctors have ordered, but I’m back to thinking about poetry – and back to the blog (no, I haven’t figured out how to migrate the blog yet, though time is ticking down on how much longer they’re going to support this blog…stay tuned for the new link.)
I was thinking about the things that get us through difficult times. The belief in something larger than oneself. Our spiritual yearnings/faiths, for example, our loved ones, and the things that just keep sticking to us, giving us hope when times are hard. The big bunch of daffodils that Glenn just brought home for me that are blooming brightly in their vase by the window. So hard to be depressed, looking at daffodils. And it doesn’t hurt that the weather report, after weeks and weeks of gloomy, blow-y cold and rain, is saying we’re going to have some sunshine and sixty-degree days coming up.
It’s really hard to write poems about hope without sounding cheesy, much as it’s difficult to write about love without sounding sentimental or sappy, isn’t it? (See this article for more on the difficulty of the happy love poem.) But they are neccessary. And I find my poetry tends to be on the hard, colder edges rather than the comforting side most of the time. After all, many of my favorite poets tend to be on that bitter edge – I prefer Gluck and Atwood to Oliver. I usually prefer humour to sweetness. What about you? Do you have any favorite “hopeful” poems?
Once in a while, you get to be on top of the world; other times, it feels like life is kicking your ass. This last week was one of those second ones.
I have never had food allergies, but Sunday I had an anaphylaxis allergic reaction to a cup of tea and half a cookie. I wound up in the hospital, on an IV, and then for four days had purple hives and couldn’t eat anything, even chicken broth or ginger ale, without my mouth and throat swelling up. Good times. It was very scary and not something I’d like to repeat. I now have an epipen and a big old bunch of allergy tests to take. It might have been the bergamot in the tea, but I’m also getting tested for everything else: vanilla, tea, milk, eggs, wheat, citrus.
Anyway, I’ve had so many health setbacks lately, I just thought – wow, I had better get going with this poetry thing. No more wasting time!
On top of the 1001 doctor appointments, I’m going to try to read some chapbooks for a contest and be an excellent thesis advisor. And try to remind people that I love them more often. And send out more poetry. Do the stuff that I need to do. Because in the end, it’s poetry and people that matter to me.
It looks like I’m going to have to port my blog as well, as blogger is no longer supporting people like me who use the FTP option, Dang! Just what I needed to mess with, along with my taxes and surprisingly complicated and expensive physical therapy bills. (California has the worst system for billing, it’s way worse than Washington where insurance billing was fairly simple, and my insurance doesn’t cover all the PT here I’ve needed like it would in Washington. Yes, one more reason I’m considering relocating to the wild wet Northwest.) See, that’s all the junk I don’t want to worry about, but the stuff that keeps getting in my face and taking up my time.
Wow – in the mail today, a cornucopia of poetry! Three books from the Mississippi Review Poetry Series, Issue 7 of Sentence, and Poetry Magazine with a long winded but amusing German essay in it, which I read out loud to Glenn while we were waiting for my orthopedist. It’s about the three questions poets get asked at readings, and also Proust.
And, good news from the orthopedist – no surgery required for the left ankle, and the right ankle is right on track to be healed in a week or two. That means there’s still probably another month or so of physical therapy to go before I’m walking – but walking by spring sounds awfully good! I love my new PT office, too, and the new PT guy I’m working with. Now, if we can get my mystery stomach illness solved, I’ll be ready to party! I think I will like Napa so much better walking than non-walking.
I also found out I have double the thesis students this quarter than I thought – there goes my free time for poetry submissions (not to mention writing…) Oh well. At least thesis work is fairly fun. I want to get some time to put up mini-reviews, too, of January’s Underlife, Reb’s God Damsel, and Allison’s Self-Portrait with Crayon. Maybe I’ll get a lull while the students are working on their reading lists…
Oh yes, and go read Jessica Smith’s post here on gender and blogging…which includes a quote by Reb that I also found edifying…
http://looktouch.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/gender-and-blogging-redux/
Got my wonderful-looking contributor copy of MARGIE 2009 today, with so many names…just a few include Alicia Ostriker, Tony Hoagland, Annie Finch, my publisher Tom Hunley, and a multitude of others. I’ve always enjoyed MARGIE and this issue is no exception. Plus, it has my poem “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter [morbid]” from the new collection I’m working on. I’m getting happier with the collection every day as I work on it, and even submitted work from the manuscript to the NEA.
I also got my MRI results for my left ankle: a torn ligament. Don’t know if it will need surgery. The right ankle is healing up normally for a sprain, right on schedule. Still running a high fever for the third week in a row, but at least the sun was out today. Still very wintry outside, still too far from spring.
And, on the urging of several of my doctors, had a meeting with the local hematologist, a very nice and enthusiastic gentleman who was surprised and excited to get a patient with PAI-1 deficiency, as it’s fairly rare. He even went back and called a hematology guy from UC Davis who has worked with a PAI-1 deficiency patient before, (who reiterated that my Seattle Hem-Onc is one of the best in the country with this particular kind of disorder – go Dr. Gernsheimer!) and called me at home with his advice. And when he talked to me, I was so thankful for those pre-med classes, so the scary stuff he said was all understandable. Sometimes having my rare disorders can make me feel lonely and scared; I mean, really, who can I talk about my fears and worries about? I took inspiration from Jilly and started a PAI-1 deficiency blog, just in case the other, like, 17 people in the world who have it are looking for a place congregate online. Treatments are all still basically experimental, since there’s not many of us to test, but they do exist. Anyway, weird mutants unite! Or something.
With my two bad ankles and the long illness of feverish weirdness, I’ve been watching a lot of movies as I’m not much good for anything else lately. Tonight I watched “Bright Star” about John Keats, and I remembered how his poem “When I have fears that I may ceased to be” echoed in my brain when I was in the hospital with pneumonia last year. The fear of all poets, that they will die before they write everything they are supposed to write? And his fear was warranted; he was unthinkably young, only 25, when he died.
Ha! This post is too morbid. Just like my poem warned in MARGIE!
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.
