Yes, the inauguration was beautiful (especially Aretha’s singing.) I was happy that Obama chose to have a poet read at his inauguration. It was sad to see so many people streaming away as fast as possible as poor Elizabeth Alexander read her poem, and sadder still to hear Jon Stewart poke fun at her last night on the Daily Show saying “I’m no laureate, but shouldn’t poetry rhyme?” Really, Jon? Honestly! Colbert had Pinksy on his show, and you don’t even know what “free verse” is??
But the poem itself lacked…the things that I usually tell new poets make up a good poem. Imagery. Specifics. Sound effects – not just rhyme, but onomatopoeia, alliteration, rhythm – seemed totally lacking in the poem. There wasn’t enough sensory data to stir anything in me, really…it just seemed vague and dull. Is it hard to write an “occasional” poem? Undoubtedly. But I wonder what Rita Dove might have done with the opportunity…or Yusef Komunyakaa…or any number of other poets. (I’ve never seen Rita D. read, but I know Yusef can rock an oral recitation of poetry like nobody else…)A little flair, a little drama, a little verbal gymnastics – might have helped lift the poem a bit, to help people recognize the poem as a poem (without resorting to rhyme.) A little risk might have helped the poem too – it seemed safe to the point of boredom. But what do I know? My husband and mother point out that she probably had to have the poem approved by Obama’s people as well, so that may have influenced the poem as well. I’d hate to have politicos reading my work over my shoulder!
What did you think?
Two little pieces of news:
Robert Brewer interviews me at Poetic Asides here.
Karen Weyant kindly gives me a shout out in her discussion of nuclear anxiety at the Chautauqua Literary Arts blog here.
Thanks for all your well-wishes after the previous post. It turns out I broke two bones in my foot, so I am in a big Robocop-esque leg cast, and then I sprained my wrist using crutches. Soon, at this rate, like Darth Vader, I’ll be more machine than woman 🙂 Still got to visit the San Diego zoo when my parents came to town – thank goodness for ramps and rented wheelchairs!
Happy Martin Luther King Day!
So sorry to be absent, caught a nasty case of bronchitis and on top of that, it turns out I thought I sprained my foot but they think now it’s actually broken! So I’m going to a foot orthopedist to see if I need a cast. I’ve been getting around on a combo of crutches and a rented wheelchair for a week. The ironic part of this? The weather has been nicer than it’s been since I moved here. Yesterday it was in the eighties. That’s right. Eighty frickin degrees! And you know what doesn’t work well on sand? Crutches or wheelchair wheels. Dang! On the plus side, crutches are a heck of a bicep work out. I miss going out to see my seals. There’s a difficult slippery stone wall on the ocean I like to climb, and the day before I hurt my foot I saw a tiny newborn seal perched precariously on one of the rocks by the water. It’s seal pupping season!
Also, in ironic timing, my parents are coming in town. We’re still planning to take them to the San Deigo Zoo, La Jolla, all the tourist stuff, just, you know, I can’t walk and can only stand on one foot. Did I mention my apartment is up two flights of rickety stairs and there’s no elevator? Good times.
Anyway, onto poetry related news, I am anxiously waiting for any New-Year-rejections or acceptances. The poetry world has been mysteriously quiet. I feel like I can’t send anything out until I get some responses back, even though I have some new poems.
I did get two beautiful contributor’s copies of Ninth Letter; Neil Aitken is in there with me, along with Tim Green’s new wife, Megan Green, I think! It’s an edgier journal than I’m used to, style-wise, oversized and full of innovative graphic design. I’m looking forward to sitting down with it, and its inviting artistic elements.
I was also invited to the release party of a San Diego anthology called A Year in Ink sponsored by the San Diego Writers Inc at an arts center downtown. Looking forward to socializing…awkwardly, on crutches, but still…I feel like I hardly know anyone in town, so I need to work a little harder on being outgoing and getting out of the apartment, not just to the beaches but to poetry readings. Despite broken feet and a cough!
My poem “Advice Given to Me Before My Wedding” is featured today on Rattle’s blog.
In other news, I have a chest cold. Cough cough.
Update: think good thoughts for my friends in Seattle. After ten days of snow and ice, now flooding: see this and this.
- At January 04, 2009
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Haiku, impatience, new year
7
Hello all! Hope you have all had a good 2009, so far. Seattle, I understand, is still battling snow. Here in SoCal it’s been a tad colder than usual, but nothing to complain about.
I had a little bit of news that I wanted to share. A few years ago I started studying Japanese and Japanese culture, and this led me to reading quite a bit of Japanese poetry. I started experimenting with haiku and haibun. I sent in a haiku to the Mainichi Haiku Contest last year, and just found out I was an “Honorable Mention.”
Here’s a link to the pdf of the winners:
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/features/haiku/etc/pdf/MainichiHaikuContest2008.pdf
It’s worth reading all of it, especially the translations into French and Japanese (but if you’re looking for me, I’m on page 13.)
For some reason this made me quite happy. (And thanks to Michael Dylan Welch who told me about the news!)
I was talking yesterday about impatience. Impatience is not a great character trait for a poet – all that waiting, and waiting, and waiting…but alas, I’ve always been a kind of jumpy, impatient, nervous type. I was thinking about how I don’t want to send out any poems in the new year until I start hearing back from magazines. How I worry and fret when a magazine takes longer than six months to get back to me (which is often.) How every time I send a manuscript out, I’m counting the hours til I hear the result.
I think about poor Sylvia Plath – if she’d just been a little more patient, she might not have been overwhelmed by all the other circumstances in her life, the snow and the health problems and the Ted stuff, might have seen that her poetry career was just about to take off, that she was writing the best poetry she’d ever written. She really wanted that Yale Younger Poets Prize before she was thirty. If she’d only known losing that prize wouldn’t be important long term. If only she’d known how the feminist movement was about to explode, and her poetry would be adored by all nineteen-year-old college girls for decades to come, and if only she’d known, if only she had waited a little longer…and I think about Emily D, sending out poems only to have them rejected or gently made fun of by older editors who just didn’t understand the revolution in poetry Emily was undertaking. If only she’d known while she was still alive how important her writing was, how treasured it would be down the road.
And I was thinking, the lesson here is that the real work is the writing, keep writing, keep sending out, but don’t be so nervous about the outcomes.
- At December 31, 2008
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In 2009, hopeful
- 8
So long, 2008! Here’s wishing you (and myself) a happier, brighter, healthier, and generally more magical New Year in 2009, despite the news reports, the economics experts, the naysayers.
We’re going to go watch some fireworks, eat some appetizers in La Jolla, and visit the seal beach before we ring in 2009. Hooray for warmer climates, for palm trees instead of evergreens, for dolphins off the coast, for scrub and cacti and hummingbirds sitting on bird-of-paradise leaves next to the highway. This is the first time in, I think, five years that I haven’t been seriously sick on New Year’s Eve, and I am going to go enjoy it!
Blessings and happiness and wishes granted…
Too many movies?
This is not the inspirational blog post about 2009 because I don’t have the mental energy for that yet. It is a list of movies I have watched in the last seven days, mostly on those “old movies” channels like AMC or TCM:
–Casablanca
–The Big Sleep
–The Maltese Falcon
–Annie Hall
–Teacher’s Pet
–Christmas in Connecticut
–Remember the Night
–A Christmas Story
–House Bunny
That’s an overdose of movies, because we had a lot of rain around Christmas and San Diego isn’t exactly thriving with indoor activity options. A lot of them were very good (sadly, not House Bunny. I was expecting better from the Legally Blonde screenwriters, but alas, I’m afraid all the good stuff in that script was from the book it was based on.) I had never seen Annie Hall before, or Christmas in Connecticut, both of which I liked very much. I never really liked anything of Woody Allen’s before except Bullets Over Broadway. The Big Sleep has great scenes in it, especially towards the beginning, some of them written by William Faulkner, I think, which makes me like him better. I read something about how the screenwriters had to write to Raymond Chandler (the book’s author) to find out who had killed the chauffer, but even he didn’t know.
- At December 24, 2008
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In happy holidays
- 5
Merry Christmas Eve!
Well, the shortest day of the year is behind us. I’ll remember 2008 mostly for the weirdness, the combination of dramatically good with dramatically (and sometimes comically) bad.
For instance, the day in the middle of a Northwest cold snap I found out Kelli and I had won the Dorothy Prize (a hugely helpful poetry phenomenon in a financially tight year) I was also hospitalized for breathing trouble (a combo of asthma and bronchitis) and the propane tank of the cabin we were renting in PT (our source of heat and hot water) was repossessed because our landlord had some complicated problem with his bills.
It was really hard to celebrate that day, but that is something I’m coming to learn – you have to celebrate the good things when they come along, even if it’s hard to appreciate all that wonderful. To be happy despite. To count blessings instead of curses, even while you’re cursing.
In the last year, I’ve seen white deer in the woods, watched orcas and sea otters, taught marvelously talented high school kids about poetry and comic book heroines, finished writing a new manuscript, read hundreds of wonderful books, learned new poems by heart. In my new town, yesterday, in between rainy spells during which I was thinking about how I missed my Seattle friends and my family back in the Midwest, I saw whales from the shore, jumping around in the blue ocean. I watched egrets and phoebes and hummingbirds. My sweet husband baked cupcakes. I am breathing. These things make me thankful.
Here’s wishing you all a happy, healthy, bright 2009! Don’t forget to celebrate!
Tis the Season…
For interviews? Here’s an interview with me (where we talk about fairy tale influences, Cinderella, and other various and sundry details) posted at the online fairy tale lit site, Les Bonnes Fees:
Interview with Jeannine at Les Bonnes Fees
In the Christmas Spirit…
Well, you know, living in Seattle for so long made me realize the grave importance of celebrating around the solstice, whatever religion you might follow, because the short short days, the absence of sunlight, absolutely demands that you throw yourself into a frenzy of sugar and caffeine and general merrymaking of some kind. I never went to one of those naked-dancing solstice party things, I’m more of a church-on-Christmas Eve-with candles-and-carols kind of girl, but you know, I’m happy I was invited to some. Yesterday there was snow in Seattle and I felt sad I missed it.
Yesterday was huge winds and driving rain for 24 hours here in SoCal; weirdly, it was warmer in Boston than San Diego. We could barely drive our little Honda CRV over the flooded highways. So we mostly stayed in and decorated our little three-foot tree (perfect size for a little apartment, by the way) and Glenn made homemade tamales with masa and pork slow-cooked in orange juice and apple cider. They took forever to make but were really good. Here tamales are a Christmas food; they show up at the fast-food Mexican restaurants around Thanksgiving. I’m down with this tradition.
So, I’m writing Christmas cards and putting together presents to ship out. I should also maybe put together some poetry subs to send out, but who is really reading this time of year? We’re also thinking of going out to see some of those holiday lights. It’s been too cloudy for several days in a row. I can even wear my coat!
I’m feeling very blessed and content this year. Thanks to all my friends and family and everyone for their encouragement, their love, and the little (and big) things.
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.
