So, Kate Gale at Elliot Bay Bookstore – Amazing reader, if you get a chance to see her read (she’s touring around with her new Tupelo Press book) go, go go. Esp. the poems addressed to her son and daughter, just killer. She’s one of those readers that avoids the dreaded poetry voice, doesn’t linger lovingly over her own syllables, just bangs the poems out with energy and really draws you in. A lot of very funny stuff her in her poems too. I bought her first book and am waiting til I finish it to buy her second. She also spent a lot of time answering questions about poetry community and how to built one (she’s active as a PEN president, I think, runs her own press called Red Hen, as well as the new L.A. Review, and runs a couple of reading series in LA. Wow!) I have been thinking a lot about poetry community, how I can be more involved while I am still “convalescing,” how to support local groups and magazines, etc etc. I have volunteered with several magazines over the last few years, including Seattle Review and Raven Chronicles, but have had to cut back lately, and I miss it.
At the Seattle Poetry Festival at Hugo House I got to hang out with the lovely and talented Martha Silano, who I hadn’t seen in a while, as well as man other poetry-friends and acquaintances. Went to panels on starting a literary magazine and on publishing poetry. One of the local mags I am really impressed with is Cranky, run by Amber Curtis; she talked about her print run, profit margins, the process of starting it up – to me it’s a real success story, and when she talked about it I thought Yes, that’s do-able, I could try that too. My favorite part of the festival was the fact that, along with a “grilled cheese poetry” booth, they were selling actual grilled cheese sandwiches all day, which made the whole place smell delicious.

So today I turn 32, officially entering the dreaded zone of “the mid-thirties.” On the last day of Poetry Month, which I think is very appropriate. “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs,” etc etc. I got my contributor copy of The Iowa Review yesterday (along with a record four(!!) rejections) that I saw also had poems from fellow blogger Laurel Snyder. And as an unexpected gift, the girl from the reading sent me her paper – on me! Thanks! How many times does that happen in life?
Glenn is taking me out for a nice dinner at Earth & Ocean tonight, for which I might actually get dressed up and everything.
Anyway, enjoy the last day of poetry month! Tomorrow I’ll attend the Seattle Poetry Festival, and Kate Gale’s reading at Elliot Bay, but today is an all-relaxation day.

Had to blog briefly about the poetry mail today –
New 32 Poems (has poems by me, Jeffery Bahr, and new poetry blogger Steven D. Schroeder)
New Poetry Magazine (no poems by me, sadly, but still enjoyable)
Steve Mueske’s chapbook (have to blog about that soon!)
Birthday present box from older brother consisting of: New Camille Paglia, Break Burn Blow, The DVD of Rikki Tikki Tavi (don’t ask, I just love those old animated shows), the Radio Sunnydale Buffy Soundtrack, British version, and Thisbe Neissen (who is a very cool person in real life)’s novel, Osprey Island (which I had checked out from the library but wanted to own.)
How can I complain about my little Alaska rejection (Please try again, they say!) on top of all that goodness?
Also, today wrote to my MFA program director and said I would like to take this upcoming semester off. My mentor/advisors have both been terrific, but until my health gets better, I can’t focus enough on all the school work enough to make it worthwhile. It may take a little longer to get my degree, but hey, six months off to just relax and get some health answers/treatments that work will also help ward off that poetry-burnout feeling I’ve been having. The only sad part is, this means I won’t see my friends from the program in June. Hey, I love you guys! Enjoy sunny Forest Grove without me! Hopefully I’ll see you all in January.

Another perfect warm sunny spring day in Seattle. Took a walk around a local river and saw a pair of canadian geese with goslings, a kingfisher, some goldfinches, a hummingbird, and had a close encounter with a bald eagle. Definitely a good place for birdwatching. And this is just in the suburbs, not a remote park of any sort.
I have a poetry reading tonight at the Hugo House in downtown Seattle, with another writer and an artist, under the title, “Mad, Bad, Super Women.” With a title like that I feel like I should dress up in a costume. Maybe a tiara and a sword. Too bad I don’t have any of those props lying around. I’m looking forward to doing a reading in conjunction with a visual artist – I like readings that have visual art or music aspects. I’ll update this post after the reading…
…The best parts of the reading…well, the other poet was Belle Randall, a really interesting poet who just won an NEA grant, and I just have to say, I hope I’m that good looking and funny at her age. I have one of her chapbooks now, and I’ll blog about that later. The artist, Molly Norris Curtis, was kind of a walking example of pop-culture obsession morphing into art, which was cool. The other best part was this really smart high school girl who was writing a paper for her English class and had actually looked me up on the internet pre-reading and asked intelligent questions and tape-recorded my answers. It was much more fun than if NPR had been interviewing me. I actually had to articulate something meaningful about my poetry – why am I obsessed with good girls turning evil, comic books, women action figures, etc. Hey, if you read this blog, send me your paper, and I’ll send you a free copy of my chapbook! Another good thing – afterwards, Glenn and I went out to hang at this new restaurant called Frites, where all they serve is belgian fries with a wide variety of sauces. Excellent stuff, though I still prefer thin-cut frites. Chipotle ketchup mixed with roasted red pepper mayo is my recommendation for sauces. It ain’t health food, but lately I’ve been having so much fun checking out new restaurants after readings. I don’t know about you, but I can’t really eat before a reading, so by 9 PM or so I’m just starving, and then you find the new trendy place everyone’s been talking about, order whatever (lately there was a cool barbeque joint in Columbia city, a chic bar in Kirkland, and of course Frites) and enjoy the post-reading glow.

A beautiful sunny day today in Seattle. I took a walk and stole lilacs from a parking lot hedge. I just decided to decline the opportunity to be editor-in-chief of my MFA program’s new journal. It was a really hard decision because if you know me that is exactly the kind of work I like to be doing and I already told the school I would do it back in January. But my health problems since the surgery have slowed me down way more than I expected. I am still going to the doctor twice a week into the foreseeable future, taking lots of medicine and supplements and letting people take blood over and over again (we thought you had this, but no – now we think you have this other thing, which requires a different specialist and a different lab. and et cetera). It’s been a discouraging process, and I like to be busy, like the kind of “normal” life – you know, where long car rides and stairs aren’t things that make you cancel an outing. Sorry to be so grumpy. I keep checking in with my doctor, angry I’m not better, angry that I had to have surgery at all, angry the surgery didn’t go right, angry angry angry. Fix it! I want to yell at her. Fix me!
So, thusly, I figured I am not in the best place to nurture, organize, bring to life a new magazine right now. I do want still want to start my own down the road. Right now I barely have the energy to write and send out work. Doing my homework is a huge effort right now. The one thing I am good at is reading. I’m reading everything – lit mags, books (just finished David Lehman’s newest, which I’m reviewing for Small Spiral Notebook, my friends poems (which always cheer me up.) I’m also surpringly adequate at the kind of writing I do for $$ – marketing and techie stuff, which apparently I could write now in my sleep. Thank goodness for that work, at least it makes me feel useful during this phase. I’m hoping by summer to have recovered enough to be able to do most of the things I was taking for granted back in January. Then grumpy Jeannine will make space for regular, sort-of-cheerful-and-upbeat Jeannine – ie more superhero, less supervillain.

You’re Watership Down!

by Richard Adams

Though many think of you as a bit young, even childish, you’re
actually incredibly deep and complex. You show people the need to rethink their
assumptions, and confront them on everything from how they think to where they
build their houses. You might be one of the greatest people of all time. You’d
be recognized as such if you weren’t always talking about talking rabbits.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

It’s a poetry banner day – got my contributor copies of Rhino in the mail today, (which, by the way, looks great – nice job Rhino editors!) – I’m reading tonight with Kelli Agodon at Parkplace Books, and I just finished a new poem, sort of based on Lucie Brock-Broido’s “Domestic Mysticism.” So, pretty ideal. I am also considering rejoining – at least partially – the corporate world. Tomorrow I have an interview for a part-time position as an editor with an ad agency, which is the first permanent-y position I have been interested in since I quit Microsoft a few years back due to health problems (yup, the same problems I just had surgery for. Still working on the health thing. Apparently I’m not a one-shot, fix-it-up-and-get-on-with-it kind of girl.) So, I went out and bought a white interview jacket, and put together a portfolio notebook, updated my resume, and practiced shaking hands. It’s kind of a sweet position because it’s only twenty hours a week (perfect while I am in school) and most of the work can be done from home. It would be nice to feel I was contributing more, um, fully and consistently to our family finances. Freelance writing is good but doesn’t pay quite as regularly as one might want, and poetry, as you may have noticed, is really not so financially fulfilling unless you’re winning Genius Grants, which, sadly, I haven’t, so this would be a good thing. I think. Until those 10K a pop reading opportunities start rolling in, anyway. Any takers?

After a recent discussion on one of the poetry-related mailing lists about how long to wait for a response on a poem, I thought I should talk about a submission from August 1 of 2004, about which I had queried the journal multiple times with no response. This submission story just had a happy ending – the journal contacted me to say they wanted to publish one of the poems, and apologized for having multiple e-mail problems that prevented them from answering sooner. So, don’t necessarily write off those older submissions, especially if it’s a journal you like. And, two, don’t rely on e-mail to work – follow up once with snail mail and once with e-mail, if you like, that way you’ve got all the bases covered.

More AWP and Ilya…

I just have to say this first – Ilya’s workshop is the first time that any workshop leader has ever invited me to dance during a break. Real Waltz-type dancing. Dancing in Odessa…he wasn’t kidding! But seriously, Ilya was totally sweet and very very intense. We had a two hour workshop (some very very impressive poets among my workshop group whose names I can’t find right now) and then these individual conferences where he did a great job with line edits and suggestions and pep talking etc. I mean, twenty minutes and I forgot about the sixteen million hours of driving in the past 24 hours and four hours of sleep the night before. He made a point of telling us to be more ambitious, to write about bigger subjects, to try a series of poems, to write about “America” and I even made some notes towards future poems while he was talking, he was very inspiring that way. I don’t usually think about the difference between “big” and “small” subjects but he talked about that at length, and also about “cold” poetry like Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop and “warm” poetry. He did suggest I put an exclamation point in my poem, but I forgive him for that, because his other suggestions were spot on. Imagine me putting exclamation points in a poem around anything not having to do with lipstick. Or possibly, boots. Hey, I was raised in the Midwest – we don’t put exclamation points in our poems even if we’ve just been stabbed. Blogs, maybe, but never poems.
Speaking of that, everyone’s talking about how polite and friendly Vancouver was, but I have to say I encountered quite a few of the rudest people ever (not at the conference, more generally) and my friend (coincidentally, Midwestern) from my MFA program, who was staying a few blocks away from the conference, encountered a glass-shard stabbing in progress on her walk home one night. So, I don’t know, I still vote for Seattle over Vancouver – I’ve seen drug deals galore here, but never a glass-shard stabbing. Plus, as we drove home, I noticed how the rain cleared as we neared my little rented home, and sure enough, sunshine as we got in the driveway. I also want to issue an apology on behalf of the big-rainy-left-upper-corner to all who had trouble getting home (Shanna, Paul, etc.) – it sucks getting to and from anywhere in the Pacific Northwest via plane. I have had too many bad airport experiences here to even count, and I’ve tried Seattle’s airport, Portland, and Vancouver, numerous airlines, etc. What can I say? It’s like we have our own little Newark airport spirits out here.
Back to AWP…OK, first of all, I don’t think I mentioned in my last post how very attractive all the bloggers I met were in person. Everyone was way cuter than their pictures. And also interesting and friendly, the kind of people you’d invite over for pizza and xbox but could still talk to til 3 AM about “important subjects,” you know? Also I’d like to give the friendliest editor award (and there was a lot of competition) to Marjorie Manwaring from Switched On Gutenberg, who I met during an otherwise-kind-of-so-so panel on workshops and was just bowled over by how fun she was. I saw very little swanning or excessive schmoozing this year, overall. Last year’s AWP felt very intimidating and more business-like, but this one felt more genuinely good-will-full. Maybe it was all the Northwesterners. They are a gregarious and laid back group. The bookfair was wonderful, I spent a ton of time there and had a lot of fun just paging through books I had heard of but had never had a chance to get my hands on, even with my very own poetry bookstore in our backyard. I encouraged many publishers to send more of their books to Open Books in Seattle, it was surprising how few people knew about it, because hey – a poetry-only bookstore – everyone should know!
Another nice thing about the conference was how encouraging most of the publishers and editors were, as opposed to, say, yelling “Jeannine, quit sending us your damn work!” which is what I picture them saying when I lose a contest or get a rejections slip. Apparently, those who remembered my work wanted me to send again. It’s so funny, because usually one rejection slip is enough to scare me off a magazine for years – I’m like, yep, they hate me and my work, what’s the point of sending there again, etc. So, I had to remind myself to get over myself and not have such a fragile ego. Lots of poets out there, lots of them are really good, so persistence seems to be part of the deal. The other good thing I got out of talking to publishers was a sense of economically the problems with publishing poetry – the problem of debt, not selling enough copies of poetry books for them to be affordable to publish, the lack of support, the lack of audience, etc. One publisher suggested a “non-fiction hook,” like including music or non-fiction or artwork in books of poetry. I would like to become a poetry publisher someday and I’m trying to get a sense of what makes a publisher successful or not. I think active promotion of authors must help both the authors and the publishers – readings, book parties, ads, etc…Red Hen and Tupelo seem to be two publishers who are really good at that part – but there’s more – it’s sensing which book will connect with an audience and then how to get that book in front of said audience. Interestingly problematic. I am always dragging people who think they hate poetry to poetry readings that they end up loving and giving books of poetry to people who are genuinely surprised by how much they end up liking the books. You poets out there teaching freshman English 101 are part of it too, considering the problem of how to introduce people to poetry in an appealing way, and the high-school teachers, and the people that donate poetry subscriptions to libraries. Matthew Shindell is doing an innovative radio show in San Diego (click on his blog link at left and send him some poem recordings) and it will be interesting to see how those poems are received by the listeners. Will they be like, shut the poets up and play more music? Which poems might they connect to? On the drive home from Vancouver my family back in Cinci huddled around one computer listening to the show included me by calling me on my cell phone and holding their phone up to the computer while they made commentaries on the show. Some poets they liked, others they hated. It felt like the 1890s, somehow, listening to poetry on the radio, as a group, and my family is made up of robot scientists, corporate trainers, dojo-running graphic designers, and telecom network administrators, not the typical poetry audience, so it was good to hear their feedback.
Anyway, yup, getting audiences interested in poetry, how to do it, etc…any ideas? It is poetry month after all, if we can’t talk about it now, then when?

The first morning-after AWP – daylight savings time and I haven’t had my caffeine yet – so this first blog may be a bit incoherent – I am exhausted but pretty happy overall with the way AWP went this year. Went to some great readings, sold a couple of chapbooks, met a lot of the editors I pester on a regular basis – the best part was meeting all the bloggers – of course Kelli Agodon was up there, so we got to hang out, also got to chat with Victoria Chang, Paul Guest, Aimee Nez, Shanna Compton, Peter Pereira, Jennifer Thorton, and a lot of others that I’m probably forgetting – I think I saw C. Dale Young and Laurel Synder but I was too shy to walk up to either of them – also got to meet Kim Addonizio, thanks to Dorianne Laux. Got to say hi briefly to my previous advisor Marvin Bell, and my former professor from UC Don Bogen, which was great. Some fantastic readings – Pitt’s reading with Denise Duhamel, Alicia Ostriker, Virgil Suarez and Bob Hicok was up there, the Canadian and American Cross-Pollination reading with Peter Pereira, Susan Rich, Judith Barrington, Annie Finch, and Rachel Rose (and others I enjoyed but am forgetting), the Northwest Women reading (Lucia Perillo, Dorianne, Nance Van Winckel and Linda Bierds) were some of my favorites. Most surprisingly likable magazine editor was David Hamilton from Iowa Review, a charming grandfatherly type. Great quick conversation with a woman editor at University of Michigan Press, who said that “I’ll believe we’re done with feminism when I don’t see a bunch of male poets here talking about a female poet of equal stature in terms of body parts.” Wow, a cool person. Of course ran into friends from the low-res MFA program at Pacific University, and sat through many panels which I will detail at a later date. Went to the Wompo party and my school’s reception but didn’t party as much as I could or should have. Didn’t get to shop as much as I wanted, but am going home with truckload of free literary magazines, new books by Margaret Atwood, Kathleen Jesme, Alicia Ostriker, Denise Duhamel, Annie Finch (delightful in person) a Canadian Women’s Poetry Anthology, Shanna’s Gamers anthology, and lots of older books with new signatures.
I promise to blog in more detail when I get home. Have a class with Ilya Kaminsky in Seattle tomorrow and will be listening to Matthew Shindell’s radio show tonight.