I was filing through some rejections yesterday (always a fun way to spend your time) and noticed that in the letter from the Crab Orchard Open Competition it mentioned that my manuscript (the one based on Japanese folk tales and anime) was a semifinalist. I hadn’t seen that on the first cursory glance through the letter. So that just teaches me to read my rejections more closely.
I sent a batch of poems out electronically. I tinkered with my newest MS too. Then I tried to comment on my student’s work a little. My cat is very needy when I’m sick for some reason, and constantly jumps on my computer and reading material.
I was thinking about life trajectories after reading Victoria Chang’s blog post this morning. If I didn’t have any health problems, I would never have gone to get a low-res MFA, would probably never have finished writing my first book, never tried seriously to publish it. It doesn’t mean I love and embrace my health problems with zen-like patience, but they have affected what I’ve done and what I haven’t done – no kids, for instance, no corporate 80-hour-a-week job with accompanying paycheck, but lots and lots of time for things like writing and reading poetry and blogging. It threw a bit of a wrench into my life plan, and still does, I’m not thankful for having been in the hospital for several days, for not being able to breathe in a very scary way last week. But sometimes the things we don’t plan for, the things we can’t control, are the things that have the biggest impact on our lives.
Slowly getting better. And I found out yesterday why I felt so sick when I got admitted to the hospital – pneumonia in both sides of the lungs, a little fluid in there, and pleurisy – and that it will take me about a month to feel all the way better. What’s weird is that only a day or so before the hospitalization I wasn’t even that sick – just the usual sinus and throat stuff. I was just getting excited about walking again after the foot breaking, and now this! It feels like I’ll never get back in shape. And I am definitely getting that pneumonia vaccine (I had one about ten years ago, but apparently asthmatics need one every five-to-ten) when I’m better.
But, I did have two acceptances to cheer me up a little – The Cincinnati Review and The L.A. Review, both really beautiful magazines I’ve admired quite a bit. Both poems from the newest manuscript, too. I’m hoping it finds a home soon. I’m polishing it up on every submission, just a bit.
The teaching has been a bit rough, what with being sick on top of the other usual stresses of teaching. I’m thankful the class is online, at least, so I don’t have to cough on anyone. We’re talking now about Seth Ambramson’s post about The Third Way, Stephen Burt’s essay on The New Thing in Poetry, The New Narrative, and I threw in Tony Hoagland’s essay on the “slippery poem of our time” – you know the one – on top of that. It’s challenging reading for graduate students, I think, but hopefully helpful to students who don’t quite know the lay of the land in the contemporary poetry world yet. I’d like to prepare them, realistically, for the world of editors and critics who have diverse likes and dislikes, to the fact that there are schools of poetry even if no one agrees what they are, exactly, right now, to the fact that there are poets trying to stretch the boundaries of poetry in every direction. I wish I had known about that stuff when I first started writing! It would have expanded my idea of what a poem can do and can be.
- At June 15, 2009
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In drafts
2
It’s drafty in here…(this poem will self-destruct)
[poof!]
Well, recovering from pneumonia at home, I figured it was a good time to peruse the new Pebble Lake Review, which has a new issue on Health and Illness. You’ll find a couple of poems by me there, and great poems by Michelle Bitting, Hsiao-Shih (Raechel) Lee, D.A. Powell and Franz Wright, among others.
I was also thinking how this poem seems so very timely. How many times can a girl be told she’d make a great experimental subject by doctors in hospitals before it begins to affect her psyche?
(This part of post deleted)
On the plus side, the doctor told me I have a lovely singing voice. She said she’d never had a patient sing at the hospital before. I guess I sing when I’m sick and stressed.
Home from the hospital. Thanks for all your good wishes. I was only sort of sick for a couple of weeks, then after the eardrum problem the pneumonia went from zero to sixty in about four hours. I couldn’t breathe, my heart was racing, blood pressure going crazy, my fever was way up – I couldn’t even walk. Crazy! Also, the clue (that I should remember from my previous, less serious pneumonia cases) – coughing up blood. If you are coughing up anything striped with blood, go to the doctor immediately. Do not pass go. That seems like a no-brainer, but when it first happened to me as a college student, I didn’t think anything about it. Also, if you are asthmatic, um, don’t catch pneumonia.
PS – People with autoimmune problems often have reactions to their IVs. I did! Yeah, you don’t want that.
In an attempt to be educational about my health excitements, here is a bit about the class of antibiotics they gave me via IV at the hospital for the last couple of days. Mine was called Rocephin, which sounds like “rose-fin.” Anyway, a little about the mysterious origins of today’s antibiotic-of-the-week, courtesty of Wikipedia:
“Cephalosporin compounds were first isolated from cultures of Cephalosporium acremonium from a sewer in Sardinia in 1948 by Italian scientist Giuseppe Brotzu [2]. He noticed that these cultures produced substances that were effective against Salmonella typhi, the cause of typhoid fever…”
Thank you, sewage! Another strong antibiotic, called Vancomycin, was discovered, I believe, in a kind of rainforest mud.
Interestingly, the doctors told me they were almost sure I had viral pneumonia; but gave me IV antibiotics anyway, and, again interestingly, they did seem to help.
Thanks again ya’ll for your encouraging words…Too sick to talk on the phone, still – I just start coughing when I walk across the room or have a fine-minute conversation. Not sure how long this phase lasts, but I hope not long. I want to try to get back to teaching work and regular life asap. Meanwhile, looking forward to catching up on sleep and trying to avoid hurting myself coughing – ow, my ribs, ow, my lower back, ow, ow ow! (Please leave any helpful tips for painful coughs in the comments 🙂 – I’m allergic to the ingredients in most cough syrups, including guafinisin and codeine, so all advice about how to control a cough without them welcome!)
I hope to soon be blogging about poetry (and more healthy circumstances) soon.
- At June 09, 2009
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Pneumonia
- 14
This is Glenn. Think good thoughts for Jeannine; she was admitted to the hospital tonight with pneumonia. She is stabile now and resting.
Update: Hey guys! It’s Jeannine, finally healthy enough to be sending an update from the patchy hospital wireless, but wanted to say thank you for all the well-wishes and let you know I’m still in the hospital, waiting to hear from doctors on exactly what’s up with the pneumonia and hoping I can go home soon! I really appreciate your good thoughts and prayers. I finally got a few hours of sleep last night, the first I’ve had since I caught pneumonia, so I am very grateful. On the poetry side, I’m trying to write a poem involving the words sleep deprivation, supersoldier, and infiltrants. (They did a chest CTscan looking for “infiltrants.” I was delighted to learn a new interesting medical term…though I guess I hope I don’t have any of them, since they are cells or body fluids that have passed into a tissue or body cavity.)
Back from a very hot and dry Seattle (92 high!) where I was very happy to get to see some of my poetry friends (Hi Joannie, Kelli, Annette, and Lana!) My friends are definitely the thing I miss most about Seattle.
My upper respiratory thing of course came back with a vengeance the morning I had to fly home. The last time I flew with this kind of sinus infection I burst an ear drum, so this time I loaded up on Sudafed, ear planes, nasal spray, and brought hot tea on the plane. It still hurt so bad I wanted to cry like the chorus of three babies that were wailing around us the whole flight. Boo on bad health, I say! Isn’t it time for me to get better? I now have the choice of moving to some very strong (read: bad side effect) antibiotics or some very strong (with side effects) steroids. Of course, you can’t take these particular antiobiotics with the steroids because they interact (there’s interesting interference between floroquinolones and steroids and NSAIDS, by the way, if you ever want to look it up…)Too bad that homeopathic stuff never really works with me. If I could buy stock in green tea and elderberry syrup…
Anyway, had a pleasant surprise waiting for me in the form of a contributor copy of “What We Eat When We Eat Alone: Stories and 100 Recipes)” by Deborah Madison and Patrick McFarlin. It’s a gorgeous, witty book full of delicious recipes, but it also has, incongruously perhaps, my poem “Spy Girls” in it, complete with a lovely illustration of a futuristic spy girl eating ice cream all alone. Really, I love illustrations – I wish publishers would illustrate all my poems 🙂
In other news, I’m eating soup and frozen sorbet, trying to work through my mental fog (over a 100 degree fever, etc.) to try to finish grading final papers. Isn’t it reassuring to students when you say stuff like – yah, I’m grading your papers through a haze of illness! LOL.
And I’m getting to know my new group of students in the Advanced class as well.
In geekier news, I was sad that ComicCon was already sold out, but bought tickets to go see Hayao Miyazaki, one of my top poetry muses, at Berkeley when he comes to give a live lecture, and booked a screening of his new movie, Ponyo by the Sea. If you haven’t seen Miyazaki’s masterpieces – my favorites are My Neighbor Totoro and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind – you really are doing yourself a disservice. The best animated movies that have been made in the last thirty years, by far.
Well, I’m off to my chicken soup and popsicle. You guys be good! The sun is out in San Diego, and cross your fingers that this darn episode of evil upper-respiratory stuff will leave me soon for good!
Two hour delay yesterday on the Alaska flight to Seattle, a shaky flight, then we checked into our hotel only to find that the restaurant was closed for “maintenance” and then when we turned on the shower there was no water. Apparently a water main for the whole building broke last night and they promised to have in on by 6 AM the next morning…which of course is just what you want when all you want is to shower and brush your teeth. (Hope they comp us for that.) Still fighting off an upper respiratory infection, so it’s extra liquids and antibiotics for me.
However, this morning the sun is shining and we saw a family of tiny ducklings and a heron flying over the water. It is much warmer here than it has been in SoCal, and Mount Rainier looks beautiful. I’m hoping to score some local cherries at the market. Seattle is so beautiful in the light. It’s still spring here, the rhododendrons and water iris (even some yellow roses) are blooming. Spring here is much more of an event than in San Diego. No spring rivals Knoxville’s or even Richmond’s, but Seattle’s is soft and the birds are singing outside my window (eating spiders off the balcony, I noted.)
Meanwhile, today I am working on grading my class’ final paper and their last workshop and starting a new class this week while I’m on the road for Glenn’s work. I’m also hoping to print out and send out my newest book MS a couple of times (I packed envelopes and SASPs…there’s dedication, right?)
Sorry I haven’t been blogging more – not really any exciting news, been evil sick for two weeks, and you know how fun that is to blog about 🙂 I’ve missed a couple of readings I wanted to go to, too. Whatever evil upper respiratory thing is going around, it takes you down and out for more than a couple of weeks, and antibiotics haven’t even made a dent. I was really thankful my teaching gig has been online, especially with the broken foot earlier and now with the virus-from-hell. I can still grade through the haze of cold medicine and tylenol.
I’m getting ready to start my new class, so I’m trying to make preparations for that as the students in my current class turn in their final poems and papers. Cross your fingers – I built the new class from scratch so I hope the students like it!
Still haven’t been submitting much, but I have some ideas for submitting…and I revised my third book manuscript a little for the next round of contests coming up in June.
I’m leaving for Seattle in a couple of days for Glenn’s work trip, so hopefully I will be slightly more well by then. Slow going. I heard it’s been sunnier there than here in San Diego anyway, so maybe the change in locale will actually help! It’s misting outside right now and in the low sixties. Practically regulation NW weather…
Looking forward to seeing a few friends and checking out the bookstores (especially Open Books) as usual. If any of you Seattle-type friends want to get together for lunch next week, give me a buzz…
Dreaming of Joss Whedon-brand Soda!
Last night I had a series of recurring dreams in the form of a commercial, where Joss Whedon dressed up as a soda bottle or a soda-delivery truck, and people gave him a thumbs-up. Then, the tagline was “Joss Whedon soda, as refreshing as…” and then different things. The one I remember was ‘as refreshing as a Sally Fields acceptance speech.” (Featuring a current Sally Field joking about how there’s botox now, so she has fewer wrinkles than she did when she made her first speech.)
Should I go get a job as an advertising exec now?
Vague Discouragement in Poetryville
I’ve been sick for two weeks, so that may be coloring my disposition about this, but I’ve been writing a lot and not sending out much – no book contest entries, no poetry packets. I have all these poems sitting about but I can’t seem to get the “right poem to the right magazine within the right sub dates” equation to work. I mean, right now I’ve got a lot of, say, Japanese-themed persona-poem haibun, for instance, and who really publishes stuff like that?
I like my books, but I don’t feel confident others will like them, and don’t have the extra money for fees (California is very expensive.) So they’re languishing.
Rescuing sick sea lions
Yesterday, we were driving by the beach and saw what looked like a very sick sea lion (with all these people coming up really close to it and like, poking it and stuff, which always makes me angry) and we called it into, not the park rangers (which we might have done in Port Townsend) but to the only people who rescue distressed animals out here: Sea World. They picked up the sea lion within hours.
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.
