So, what with the broken foot, the sprained right hand, and various bumps and bruises from another (!!) fall this weekend, we decided it would be best to cancel our journey northwest-ward for now and my reading up in Pasco for Columbia Basin College, which I really regret. What timing to have an accident or three!
I blame gremlins. Sneaking around, tripping me up…just in time for my trip! Boo! I will miss you Gwen, Felicity, and Seattle-friends! But I do plan on rescheduling a trip up to Seattle soon…
Trying to think of places to send a review-essay, and gearing up to write a conference proposal, another review, and some course-work for my upcoming class in April. Lots of work to do, and without the distracting use of my right hand and foot, well, I should be able to squeeze it in. Another week or two til I can do weight-bearing exercises on my foot! I’ve never been in such a hurry to progress to the next step of physical therapy before! I’ve been getting lots of good advice from my little brother, who broke his foot a number of times (among other things) in his quest for Shaolindo-black-belt-hood. His advice? It takes four weeks for a bone to set. Until then, rent lots of engrossing tv shows on DVD, and maybe play some video games. You can only read so many hours of the day – I go cross-eyed after about four hours these days. Also? There are a lot of nerves in the foot. Which is not such a good thing when you break a couple of bones. Like the opposite of reflexology. LOL.
Got my contributor’s copy of Redactions in the mail yesterday and looking forward to seeing Sentence’s new issue soon too (if they got my new address…it’s hard for lit mags to keep up with my many, many moves…)
Of interest…
Alicia Ostriker discusses the psalms on the Poetry Foundation site…
Tim Green wonders about gender bias… (and I make a comment there.)
Update: John Stewart had a robot scientist on his show tonight – who name-checked Astro Boy! I’m geeking out! Catch it on repeats tomorrow!
A little more than a week until our trip up to Seattle and Pasco, Washington, where I’ll be reading and teaching at Columbia Basin College (and making a brief appearance at RadCon) and Glenn will be putting in his time at the Redmond campus. Despite the fact that I’ve finally graduated to foot exercises (toe curls and ankle spins, exciting stuff!) I’m still not able to put much weight on my right foot (the doc said some tendon damage where the break happened is slowing me down – tendons take longer to heal than bones, apparently) and the right hand is still really painful (tendon damage there too, they said) but the rest of me is healthy so as long as I can get around, wheelchair or crutches or whatever, I’m planning to go do regular poet stuff as much as possible – including, hopefully, visiting a few friends, Open Books, and other fun Washington stuff. Of course, it probably won’t be seventy and sunny up there the way it is here, although I can always keep up hope for unseasonably warm, dry weather up there…
I’ve been trying not to be too discouraged about my situation, but it’s pretty tedious being stuck in the wheelie-chair with a cast on my arm – I want to run and jump around!…I’ve been keeping a steady stream of library books coming and going by the bed. Yesterday I read my review copy of Denise Duhamel’s new book, Ka-Ching! I just love her work. I’ve been reading Seven Days in the Art World, which I also loved, an exploration of MFA programs and art auctions and studios with a great chapter on the studio of Takashi Murakami. Also I read two books from the Gossip Girl series. That’s not improving my brain, I know it. And I have two Haruki Murakami novels on hold. I should be getting my online class materials ready for my “Advanced Poetry Workshop” in April, but the class development software doesn’t work with Vista, which is what my laptop runs, unfortunately. I’m sooo looking forward to Windows 7! I want to install the beta pretty soon. Of course, I’m looking even more forward to walking and having a regular working right hand again! Two to three more weeks for the bone, they’re saying…and another month or two for the tendons. Until then, feel free to send me lengthy comments, e-mails, letters, poetry news, etc…I can’t type a ton, but I can read all day long!
Well, today there was good news and bad news. The good news was, I got a couple of leetle checks in the mail – one a check from Ninth Letter for my poem (thanks Ninth Letter!) and the other a royalty check from Steel Toe Books (Thanks Tom!) Considering this is the third year of the book’s being out, I’m happy the book is still selling! Considering the economy (and other expenses, described below) every little bit helps.
The bad news is, I can no longer get up and down to my apartment (for the first couple of days I did crutches, but then I hurt my hand and now can’t do crutches at all. (Poof!)
A necessary addendum to yesterday’s post, in which I may have been a bit cranky (because, I don’t know, I have a broken foot and a sprained hand and live in a multiple-story walkup, perhaps…? And my husband’s company is announcing layoffs and oh, yeah, no pay raises this year at all…)
Because I was disappointed in Jon Stewart’s response to our inaugural poem, I knew Colbert would come through for poets, and now I have even more of a crush on him than ever. And Elizabeth does pretty well too:
Elizabeth Alexander on the Colbert Report
(Thanks to Kelli A. for the link)
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.
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.
