Well, after living here for exactly two weeks, and spending most of that time hunched over a computer working or unpacking, Glenn and I decided to take advantage of a cloudless, cooler day (around 70) to finally visit the San Diego Zoo. The hummingbird house was closed, sadly, but the meerkat exhibit was terrific, like Meerkat Manor without the annoying melodramatic narrator, and the baby koala bears were so cute I thought maybe I’d just move in to the zoo right then and there. I did take a whole year of training at the Cincinnati Zoo while I was a biology-major undergrad, after all. I could be a koala handler!
Here are the pics. Cuteness overload, indeed!
PS I forget. Do poets benefit from an economic downturn? People do seem to return to higher education in greater numbers during recessions…how about showing up at poetry readings? What do you think?
Friend and fellow Pacific MFA alum Michelle Bitting has a poem from her new book, Good Friday Kiss, up on Verse Daily today. Go take a look!
Aimee Nezhukumatathil has an essay on scary Halloween-appropriate poems up at Poetry Foundation.com!
And I received Suzanne Frischkorn’s lovely Lit Windowpane and my publisher Tom Hunley’s Octopus in the mail this week. Octopus is full of funny and thoughtful meditations on culture, poetry and fatherhood.
Of course my favorite poem in Lit Windowpane, a group of poems about a disintegrating relationship and nature poems that echo that mood, is the first one, “The Mermaid Takes Issue with the Fable.” You can see that poem here.
As a young teenager, one of the only things I liked about living in Ohio were the beautiful November sunsets. The baleful orange glow on the horizon…
Yesterday there was a beautiful sunset, but the baleful orange glow on the horizon wasn’t from a big ball of flame in the sky, but a wildfire on Camp Pendleton, a Marine base a few miles from our house. It put out a plume of smoke that could be seen from fifty miles away at least. Welcome to California! It is a land of natural disasters.
On the plus side, the watermelons are $1.50 a piece at the local market and avocadoes $2 for a sack full. With the economy the way it is, well, at least we’ll be able to afford to eat!
I’ve been a little discouraged about my two book manuscripts lately. I feel like the checks just keep going out and nothing comes back in. Not good economics. I’ve also has a string of rejections lately, then a punctuation mark of two acceptances in two days. Sometimes I feel like the poetry world takes so much (volunteer work, subscribing, writing reviews, checks to contests and open submissions, rejection slips) and gives back…well, not so much.
The Santa Ana winds are approaching.
In actual poetry-related news…
Got a chance to sneak into downtown San Diego (for the first time since we moved here) to go to City College’s San Diego book festival. Li Young Lee was there, though I didn’t see him read, and I got to catch up briefly with Ilya Kaminsky, a terrific poet who now works as a professor at SDSU instead of as a lawyer. I met Lorna Dee Cervantes, from the blog world, which was pretty neat (I have a couple of her books on my shelf.) And I got to hear Carolyn Forche read. She’s a pretty accomplished reader. She read, to my delight, a lot of her older poems, including “The Colonel” and some new poems, including two about Ilya! I guess it’s not just my former workshop group on Bainbridge Island that he charmed…Carolyn Forche too! LOL. She talked about how her first teaching job was here in San Deigo (!!) and that she learned poetry from her mother’s college poetry textbook (me too!) So that was pretty cool. She looked great and was wearing patent strappy sandals. Glenn and I also made a side trip to a wonderful bakery in Hillcrest called Bread et Cie, which I recommend.
So, we have not yet gone to the zoo, any of the missions, Coronado…but we managed to drag our partially brain-dead selves to a poetry event! Who says our priorities are out of order?
PS Still many boxes downstairs. Also – a bunch of grading tomorrow. Grading gives me hives.
Thought I’d throw out a quick post in the middle of learning a byzantine grading system, similarly byzantine teaching software, unloading boxes, futilely trying to find the most ordinary household items…
Last night we went out and walked on the beach right at dusk. We saw three snowy egrets fly overhead, while the thin moon shone down through clouds. It’s been achingly hot here – who would have thunk southern Cali in October would be running in the high eighties every day? Meanwhile, I have no clothing for a warm climate, and I had to order a pair of reading glasses, because, ahem, at my 35 years, it turns out I, um, need bifocals, which I refuse to wear, so the reading glasses (which are regular reading glasses + my mighty astigmatic prescription, so of course they are expensive) are my concession. So I’ve had to put a kibbosh on reading anything closer than arms length, which leaves out books and magazines. Good thing I have all those student poems and discussions to grade! LOL.
Teaching online is a bit of a challenge for me, because it reveals that I rely on personal interaction more than I thought, especially in workshop. Workshops just flow much more smoothly in person where you can bounce ideas around more easily and just communicate much faster than you can online. Plus, I joke around a lot, which it turns out, you can’t do that much online. I have to learn a new set of skills to get points across kindly but firmly (every word is open to misinterpretation by sensitive souls!) And I still have to finish up that essay on Rachel Zucker and Beth Ann Fennelly which has become difficult because of the aforementioned trouble reading books. I can’t wait for my new glasses to get here.
Meanwhile, the American financial system is in collapse, the election is drawing near, leaving the new president to deal with a war and a 700 billion dollar bill for a very expensive bailout. Good luck with that, poor guy! I’m trying not to watch too much news, but I did sneak in some of the debate last night, gosh darn it! (That’s a little Palin humor there. She must have said “gosh darn” about sixteen times in the transcript I read.)
Anyway, not quite settled yet, but getting there, slowly…
Well, after one blown tire on the moving truck, one missed flight to Cali, a bunch of (possibly) valuable boxes, shelves, lamps, etc., left behind at our rental because our truck was too small, and various other minor emergencies, including many hours of listening to crying kitties, we are in California. Thanks for all your good wishes and thoughts.
I was feeling a little stressed and weepy yesterday after our walk-through seeing how very small our little one-bed-one-bath apartment that we’ve committed a year to was, although I still love San Diego and love the neighborhood we’ll be living in. I wondered if I was going to die of claustrophobia. Then I went to dinner and had “tiny plate” food and they played that OC theme song about California. It made me laugh.
On the plane I sat next to a woman who works for the Navy and on the side volunteers with homeless and troubled teens. She works with hovercrafts, which I thought sounded very futuristic. My father was stationed at Camp Pendleton in Oceanside when he was a young marine, and he took his very first college class (he ended up getting a Phd in Engineering) a couple of miles from our new apartment. It’s like I have nostalgia for my Dad’s early adulthood out here. I think I know what he loved out here – the people walking around in bathing suits at the end of September, the flowers everywhere (even had a little hummingbird come up to my window yesterday) and the interesting landscapes. On the downside, my hair looks terrible in the high, high humidity. Hope the high humidity goes away soon or I’ll need a pixie cut or a lot of hats.
Tomorrow is the first day of my new class at National University. I’m still a little apprehensive since this is my first time teaching an online graduate poetry class. My brain is absolute mush from the stress of the move. Hope I’ll be able to string a couple of coherent sentences together!
- At September 25, 2008
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In California, moving pains
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Note to self: Moving sucks. Especially all by yourself. Quit moving so much. Also, why oh why don’t you ever learn your lesson and start packing earlier?
Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
California, here we come…
PS Thanks for your kind words on the previous post. I’m nervous!
Well, I guess it’s official, so I can finally tell you:
I’m going to be teaching a poetry seminar for National University’s no-residency, all-online MFA program starting in a week! I’m really excited and have been trying to teach myself the software and update my class content for the last two weeks. Incidentally, my mother, who is a PhD in Education with a specialty in educational technology, told me about National University’s cutting-edge program and educational software, and how they’re the ones being held up as an example of how online universities should work. They’re very strict about grading and their MFA program is criticism-heavy, although it only lasts a year and a half.
(A little bit of a stress factor: I thought the start date was October 6th, but it turns out it’s September 29th, the day we move in to the new apartment – eek!)
So wish me luck! I’m very excited about this foray into teaching, but nervous.
Also, Seattle-ites, tune in to KUOW today – I believe the show I’ll be on is called “Sound Focus” at 2 PM. I’ll be listening, as I missed the live show last time because I was out of town.
UPDATE: Here’s the link to the show!
http://kuow.org/program.php?id=15860
I’m definitely in a melancholy space. I’ve been running around like mad doing last minute things before the move – a physical, a haircut, getting prescriptions filled, then getting the stomach flu – not fun! Of course, we’re taking loads of things – books to the used bookstores, clothes to Goodwill – out of the garage since we won’t have a garage in our next place. After a dazzling set of sunny September days (during which some of my Ohio family and friends were without water, electricity, or internet because of hurricane-wind-storms!) the rain and grey skies have returned to Seattle. And all the goodbyes to friends are a little hard. I hate goodbyes.
Oh yes, a shameless plea: my dear Seattle-area friends, if you’re free on the 25th, we’d love some help loading up our truck! Pizza and love to all who apply 🙂
And a little good news – on September 22nd, the autumnal equinox, Seattle NPR affiliate KUOW will re-broadcast the show “The Beat” that features me reading Becoming the Villainess at Open Books. So tune in if you missed it the first time!
I’m also re-reading Rachel Zucker’s Bad Wife Handbook and Beth Ann Fennelly’s Unmentionables for an upcoming essay. And, I’m still trying to figure out the ins and outs of the software used by the college where I’ll start teaching in two weeks.
I’ve had so little poetry news, either electronic or snail mail, lately…although the stack of “to review” poetry books on my office shelf – now to be packed up until goodness knows when – makes me a little depressed. I can’t review the books as fast as they’re coming in! It’s madness, I tell you! Seriously, there are a lot of good books on the shelf. But they’ll just have to wait til after the move.
I can’t believe in a week we’ll be on our way to San Diego! We’re renting a little one-bedroom in a northern suburb, about two miles in from the ocean. Hope there won’t be any wildfires this year. Crazy sunshine, here we come?
Yes, on top of finding a new place to live in a new city in a new state, plus starting a new job, I’ve been re-designing the web site. I’m going for a kind of whimsical-yet-subversive-feminist thing with the wonderful art of Yumiko Kayukawa, who kindly gave me permission to use “Zen Cracker” which we altered to make a banner (it’s actually more rectangular – here’s an online version –http://www.sweetyumiko.com/files/zencracker.gif) Her other art work is great too – I encourage you to browse her art work.
I used to have a technical site and a poetry site, and now I just have one, more writing-centered, site. (You might want to update any links you have to my poetry site, by the way…)
Yesterday was a mournful day, with the passing of Reginald Shepherd, and the eerie memories of another sunny September 11th. I spent most of the day getting rid of things. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. It turns out I’m not as attached to most of my stuff as I thought – except my books – and maybe my shoes. At night I played hooky for an hour from packing and sorting to see Peter Pereira and Rebecca Loudon read at Port Townsend’s Northwind series. They both read new work that I really loved. Peter has so much good energy it just radiates when he reads, and Rebecca is always electrifying (plus she had really great hair last night – I was all, how does she get her curls to lay like that? I know, a really serious poet shouldn’t have been thinking about hairstyles.) So that was a nice poetry break in my insane-moving-world of right now.
And I have to learn new educational software for my job and read two textbooks before the class starts! OK breathe, breathe, breathe…
So, let me know what you think of the new site, and if you find any problems or missing links, tell me!
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.
