Day 3 of NaPoWriMo, and yet another poem…and also a mini-review!
I Forgot to Tell You the Most Important Part
Poof!
Mini-Review of Laurel Snyder’s The Myth of the Simple Machines, from No-Tell Books
It didn’t surprise me that Laurel has become a successful children’s book author, because this delightful book of poems is full of fanciful stories, narrating the life of “the girl.” Some poems describe eerie dreams, others comment on mundane life and mundane desires (from “I Covet Everything I Own:” “I covet every/ gone year, every wet summer, every early supper/ on a citronella porch…I covet drunk and tired and quietly,/ you. I covet my own thighs last year.”) All of the poems have a delicate melancholy, building up an imagistic daisy chain that collects fragments of memories, prophecy, faith and foreboding.
All righty, I said I was gonna do this poem-a-day thing, even though I’ve just been slammed with ten million assignments at once, right?
So I wrote a poem and debated whether or not to post it, because it’s fairly personal, and I don’t write a ton of this kind of poem. But in the spirit, here it is. It will self-destruct tomorrow…
Other People’s Children
Poof!
And because I don’t want you to get bored with all these poems, as a bonus, I’m providing mini-reviews of books from my review stack as well!
First up, Rebecca Livingston’s Your Ten Favorite Words!
(I usually dislike it when male critics use words like “saucy” to describe a woman’s book of poetry, but nonetheless:)
Rebecca Livingston’s collection (from Coconut Books) of flirtatious, saucy, edgy-with-a-LangPo-twist poems provides portraits of an American woman coming to terms with her country, her lovers, her culture, and yes, her words and herself. Read to entertain yourself, to take a look inside Livingston’s fun-house mirror, reflections of the tawdry and tender.
An excerpt from one of my favorite poems in the book, “Wifely Attempt at a Poem:”
“His poems only poemified my thighs and didn’t
mention I was trying to be a choice wife
while fists floundered, tongues clamped…
There was a poetry reading held in a boneyard that
onlookers mistook for a peep show
It should have been obvious
The aggrieved circled, fingered
my thoughtful frocks of fraught…”
I’m going to try to poem-a-day thing (otherwise known as NaPoWriMo) this April, but don’t quote me on that.
Here’s my first effort (note: this poem will self-destruct – I’m taking it down shortly.)
The Foxfire Books: In Case of Emergency, Learn to Make Glass
Poof!
In other Poetry-related news…
Amazon is acting very antitrusty, very monopoly-like, telling small publishers they’d better use their in-house (and lousy/expensive by reputation) POD printing service, Booksurge, or else loose their books’ “Buy” buttons. Holy crap, right? And, putting small publishers in a worse bind – Lightning Source’s (BookSurge’s main competitor) POD services include distribution through Ingram – Booksurge’s doesn’t. Looks like Amazon will lose a lot of good customers, and create a lot of ill-will among customers and authors, and for what – a few more pennies? More about this here, here, here, and here. Read this, and complain to Amazon about these lousy, non-small-publisher-friendly practices.
And, my April reading at Northgate has been cancelled. Sorry to all of you who planned on attending!
So, my dear readers, today is an interactive blog post! Any help is most appreciated!
Are there any journals you know of that pay for poetry book reviews? I have a stack of good books on my review stand…including Pattiann Rogers newest!
And, I’m working on a piece for non-writers explaining prose poetry. Do you have any suggestions about what they need to know? I’ve got all the usual background (French surrealism, Charles Simic, Frank O’Hara quote…) but am looking for more!
Also, I’m pleased that one of my friends (can’t say who or what contest) just got the phone call that told her she won a big poetry contest. I was so excited for her. Hopefully these things happen in constellations. I would love to have a phone call like that…
Speaking of good things happening to friends, what is Paul Guest talking about? That boy is such a big tease!
Have I mentioned already that we have to move again no later than September? Last night I dreamed Glenn and I were driving trying to escape hundreds of very dark tornadoes. Stress much?
Several good things happened today.
1. Hummingbirds at my feeder, after three months of having it up there!
2. An acceptance from Ninth Letter, which I’m very excited about, because I love them.
3. Two of my previously-published (in print mags) haibun poems are going to appear on this cool new haibun site:
http://www.haibuntoday.com/
Don’t know when yet, but this site is unique in that it showcases all different kinds of haibun, and has critical reviews and essays on the form as well.
4. The cutest set of words in the German language? “Eisbar Babys” and “Eisbar mama”
Isn’t “eisbar” (sounds like “ice-bear”) a much better name for this little animal than polar bear?
http://www.nuernberg.de/internet/eisbaer/videos.html
A very busy week with lots of social and work stuff going on, feeling overwhelmed, and still a little sick (darn these temps – ten degrees below normal for us – and all the accursed rain!) but these four things, along with a welcome visit from a poet friend, cheered me up immensely.
You know, I never thought I was one of those lazy bloggers who just posts links to The Onion, but…
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/novelists_strike_fails_to_affect
One of my favorite parts?
“No high-profile, red-carpet, star-studded telecasts of the PEN/Faulkner Awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Awards, or the Man Booker Prize Awards were affected by the strike, since no such telecasts have ever existed. “
Of course, it would have been funnier, I think, if it had been a poet’s strike. Maybe I’ll go write for television.
Well, Hoppy Easter!
In honor of our favorite stale marshmallow seasonal treats, please check out the “Peep Show” in case you haven’t already seen it on the Washington Post – some demented dioramas!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/20/AR2008032002753.html?nav%3Dhcmodule&sub=AR
(may have to register to view – and PS – don’t naively google “peep show” and hope this will show up, like I did!)
I’ve been doing some thinking about big changes in life – whether to move out of our new small town (our landlords decided they’d like to come back earlier than they thought), where to move, what kind of job I should be looking for…
I’ve begun to think that although I like freelance writing, something more regular, and more engaged with people, might be nice. I’m actually thinking of applying for (gulp) teaching jobs. It’s pretty intimidating stuff. Low-residency program work would be ideal, since it’s flexible, I could work from home most of the time, but still interact with people at residencies and through e-mail. And other kinds of work – editorial, publishing, working with magazines, or kids – also seem feasible. I’m starting to feel healthier as the weather gets warmer and drier (cue 40 degree weather and rain for a week…) and also more energetic. Which makes me antsy to start doing more with my life.
And if you had a chance to live anywhere, you have a known asthma problem and allergies to mold, where would you move? Here are some of the places that come to mind – the San Jose area, Boulder, Arizona, New Mexico…I’m looking for suggestions, so please throw them out!
(Some of the places I’ve had lots of respiratory problems – the Southeast, especially Florida, Cincinnati, LA, and, now that the relative years of draught have ended, the Northwest. So it seems like wet, moldy, and pollution-y places are on the outs.)
Some quick notes:
I’ll be reading poems (along with Neil Aiken and fellow Pacific alum Michelle Bitting) on the radio show the Moe Green Poetry Hour (I believe the podcast should be available here:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onword)
at 6 PM Pacific time on March 16.
I’ve got a featured poem up (“Aware for the Woman Who Disappears in Silence”) at the Mythic Delirium web site, and you can hear me read the poem out loud there, plus there’s a cool piece of art illustrating the Bush-Warbler Japanese folk tale that the poem talks about!
http://www.mythicdelirium.com/
And I just received my copies of Many Mountains Moving, which features a bunch of really good poetry, and two reviews I wrote (of Dorianne Laux’s Facts About the Moon and Margaret Atwood’s The Door.)
A big thank you to everyone for their kind comments about the Poetry Foundation interview with Matthea Harvey.
It’s up! My interview with the awesome Matthea Harvey is up at the Poetry Foundation web site! Yay!
Go to the Poetry Foundation web site’s front page, or click here to go straight to the interview:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=181239
And please, give Matthea Harvey (and me) some comment-field love at the PF site!
First of all, check out Aimee Nez’s interview (in which she may do a bit of blog namedropping…) about being a poet who blogs here!
Second of all, a pleasant reading surprise – I picked up a copy of Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the practice and the art (a bunch of essays by people who’ve taught at the Warren Wilson program) and just loved Elinor Wilner’s piece called “The Closeness of Distance, or Narcissus as Seen by the Lake.” It’s practically a love song to persona poetry, or, as she describes it, “aesthetic distance” – poems in which the speaker cannot be assumed to be the poet, and poems in which the writer is explicitly not “writing what she knows.” She uses Daisy Fried as one example. She champions – what a novel idea – imagination as a real asset to poets.
There’s also a very decent essay by Larry Levis on elegies, and that Tony Hoagland piece about non-narrative/experimental poetry that appeared in – what? APR or Writer’s Chronicle a little while back? So, to those of you who like to read essays about poetry, it’s a good buy.
I leave the blog on Sunday to teach two weeks of a junior high creative arts camp – sponsored by Centrum – and boy, is it ever intensive: starting at 8:30 AM every day and ending at 9 PM at night. I usually don’t even wake up before 9:30! I will be teaching the kids about the connections between comic books, mythology, and poetry; I will bring in illustrated guides to mythology, and comic books, and hopefully inspire them to write in a new way. If I get ambitious, I may even talk about Carl Jung. I mean, junior high kids can grok archetypes, right? But I may not have much time or energy to blog during that time. So, I’ll miss you, and think good thoughts for me staying phsyically healthy and mentally un-crazy during those two weeks.
Thanks to The Magazine of Speculative Poetry for nominating my poem “Chaos Theory” for a Rhysling Award. It’s a poem about my Dad’s work investigating how to cleanup the Fernald Superfund site – wow, doesn’t that sound riveting 😉 The Magazine of Speculative Poetry is a really fun read, by the way, for those of you who didn’t know there was such a thing as “speculative poetry.”
One note: you may want to check out the Poetry Foundation’s features section in the next few days. In case, you know, a certain poetry supervillainess gets to interview a certain poetry superheroine therein. About comic books and anime and robots and other cool subject matter. I’m just saying.
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.
