Teaching in Port Townsend today and tomorrow

I’m teaching an afternoon class on haiku and haibun (with a little bit of Miyazaki in there for good measure) at the Port Townsend Writer’s Conference today from 2 PM to 3:30 PM at and another class tomorrow at the same time on poetry manuscript organization. Should be fun! And I have handouts!

Getting up here was a bit of a nail-biter – an hour-long wait at the ferry, and then being the last car to get on – and then the B&B we were supposed to stay at that I’d made reservations months ago at didn’t work out, so we had to pack up again, get on the internet only to find everything booked up, and ended up having to stay at a Holiday Inn an hour a way last night and a similar place an hour a way in the opposite direction tonight. Not exactly convenient.

But on the plus side, I got to see Kim Addonizio read and say hi to some old friends, including Erin Belieu and Dana Levin (superpoets!) And I saw one deer, one very large otter, a beautiful sunset  and other various wildlife. Yay for Port Townsend. Wish me a little more luck with my lodgings tonight…

The official announcement: Jeannine Hall Gailey is the new Poet Laureate of Redmond

The official announcement is finally here! I’m the new Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. This is the “new job” I’ve been talking about here for the last couple of months. Redmond is a city located a few minutes from Seattle, across Lake Washington, and is home to Microsoft, in case you were wondering where it is.
I’m very excited about the position and hope to help create excitement about poetry in the community. My new slogan is “Geeks for Poetry, Poetry for Geeks” – what do you think? I’m also going to try to launch a book-reading series called “Redmond Reads Poetry” with our library, where we read a book of poetry a quarter as a community – usually a book with some “geeky” aspects – science, comic books, etc. So I have some ambitions for trying out some new programs. My first big reading won’t be til this fall, but there’s plenty of work to do setting things up til then! I’m dying to know what people in Redmond are interested in, poetry-wise, what they think the community really needs, etc. So if you happen to be a Redmond person, please fill me in in the comments!

Thanks to our Washington State Poet Laureate, Kathleen Flenniken, for doing this feature on me today at her blog: http://kathleenflenniken.com/blog/?p=655 

And here’s the official Redmond site: http://www.redmond.gov/ParksRecreation/artsandculture/PoetLaureate/

 In the last few months, I’ve gotten to meet the mayor (who is lovely,) the City Council, and almost the entire Arts department of the City of Redmond, and spent more time in the City Hall than I ever thought I might. When I made my first visit to City Hall to interview, I saw a fox statue, on its hind legs, near the entrance. I decided it was a good omen, what with the whole “fox–wife” and Kitsune thing. Here’s a picture of me that day with the little guy. Doesn’t the fox look like it’s smiling?

The The Poetry Interview and a Busy Week!

Still experiencing repercussions from the bad news of last week, but pulling myself together, especially since I’m up against a super busy week! Check out all this cool stuff:

Check out this surreal interview Saeed Jones did…with my poems! In The The Poetry:
http://www.thethepoetry.com/2012/07/in-a-dark-room-jeannine-gailey/
Saeed is a gifted writer with a really interesting imagination, as you can see from the interview. I just tried to keep up!

Tomorrow I’m finally allowed to make the official announcement about my new job. I’m about to go to a meeting with the Arts Coordinator to finalize some plans. Lots of meetings involved with this job, at least so far…

Later this week I’m going up to the Port Townsend Writers Conference to do two afternoon classes, one on haiku and haibun and another on how to put together a poetry manuscript. I hope to see you there! I’m working on the handouts as we speak. I’m a handout addict!

So that’s today’s news. Tune in tomorrow for our super-secret special official announcement!

Special Appearance by Redmond’s Poet Laureate at Derby Days and thanks

If you come by the Redmond Arts booth at Derby Days today from 2-4 PM you can meet and greet the new official Redmond Poet Laureate. I wonder who she is?

Thanks to all of you who have sent me notes re: the last post. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.

In Which Obstables Appear and the dichotomies of being a writer

So, of course, after a post about realizing that we might be already living our perfect life, how we can reach out and improve our communities, being grateful, etc…I’ve had a couple of days of sad news, setbacks, rejections and unexpected problems. Terrible surprises. A little bit of a health scare on top of it. Right now it’s hard to see the upside, the benefits, the possible blessings that will come out of the many slaps in the face, “no” messages from the universe, and just plain bad news.

One of the weird things about being a writer is the dual expectations – we have to be at least somewhat inward-facing, shy, introspective, and focused on art to be writers at all, much less good writers – but we also have to be aware of audience, focused on messages and marketing, extroverted enough to connect to others, someone who can not only write poetry well but get out and read it and sell it and teach it. Hard work. Some weeks, harder than others.When your own dreams get knocked over, can you turn around and inspire others to pursue those dreams themselves?

I am wishing good thoughts to my friends who are going through hard times. I am wishing for myself for faith and more courage and I’m wishing for unexpected solutions to problems that seem hopeless to me right now. I am hoping for better outcomes for all of us than we might expect.

Maybe You Are Already Living Your Perfect Life

I was talking to a friend last night who is embarking on a new adventure in her thirties (medical school!) just as I am starting a new job, and how we had both just moved, and how what we envisioned for ourselves at this age when we were younger didn’t exactly resemble what was happening to us. We talked about all the things we wished we had done differently, how we wished we had arrived at our current states earlier.

And I thought, sure, we’re doing all these crazy things (like starting medical school and being poets,) and our lives didn’t turn out as we had expected – but that doesn’t mean we’re not exactly where need to be. Though we have frustrations and money worries and pressure, though the camera-ready families we envisioned might never have materialized, maybe we are already living our perfect lives. After all, we’re following our dreams, everything that we’ve experienced along the way has taught us what we need and what we do not really need. Though we’re both nervous and stressed, though rejection slips still come in and we might be frustrated with daily obstacles, the objects in the mirror might be brighter than they appear.

Yesterday I was in for my yearly exam and in the waiting room there was a young woman crying into the chest of her boyfriend/husband. I thought, ten years ago, that would have been me (although I’m not really the cry-in-public type, these waiting rooms are an odd kind of purgatorial space, where people are waiting for good and bad news, waiting for their hopes and dreams to be answered. They raise a lot of anxieties…) Across the room, a middle-aged woman played, unselfconsciously, with her two toddlers while this young woman sobbed about losing her ability to have babies. And I wanted to tell the young woman, it will all be okay, later, you won’t feel like everything is such a tragedy, that not having kids doesn’t ruin your life. It is not the only way a woman defines herself. I wish we heard that message more often. Sometimes, happily-ever-after just looks different than you planned.

I have a wonderful husband, a new home to worry over, a new job to stress out about, a wonderful set of friends, plenty to eat and read, I have four books of poetry written and a fifth one in process. My health has been better lately, enough so I can focus on doing the things I love. I live in a city I love, though I might hate its weather nine months of the year, I love its libraries and bookstores, its coffee and farmer’s markets, its art and literary communities, the snow-capped mountains that peek out just when you’ve forgotten they were there.  It’s really not such a bad life at all.

Caution: You may already be living your perfect life, but you may not recognize it. Look around. You might already be exactly where you need to be.

Recommendations for Geek-Flavored Poetry Books and Useful Links

Have been in a whirlwind of work for my can’t-yet-announce-it-officially new job! It’s a good thing with had such grey cold drizzly weather, it helps me stay inside and organize and submit work and write e-mails.

One thing I’m looking at is a project for a community reading the same book of poetry together. My idea is to have the book appeal to the folks in my community – namely, a huge number of techies – so I’m looking for recommendations for recent “Geek-flavored” poetry books – leaning to the “accessible” side of the scale, something non-poets would enjoy as well as poets – with connections to science, math, comic books, sci-fi, etc…I’ve already decided on Kathleen Flenniken’s Plume and Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars, but want more!
Post your suggestions in the comments, please!

I’ve also got some useful links today.

For those stressing about sending out or marketing their poetry books, here are interviews with poets about the journey to publishing their first books:
http://www.kickingwind.com/interviews.html

Presses with open readings instead of contests:
http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/presses-with-open-readings-for-full-length-poetry-manuscripts/

A wonderful post from Marisa Crawford on the importance of creating a creative writing community for teen girls:
http://herkind.org/articles/on-my-mind/girl-talk-on-valuing-teen-girl-voices-creating-community

Kelli Agodon gives poets some marketing advice:
http://ofkells.blogspot.com/2011/06/marketing-for-poets-writers-who-prefer.html

A new poem from me up at the new Blue Lyra Review (with bonus childhood photo:)
http://bluelyrareview.com/category/current-issue/

Happy 4th of July! Go and try my grilled watermelon salsa out for tomorrow’s cookout, too! We are going to try out the house’s new grill for the first time, as long as we have some sunshine…

What would you want to do for your community for poetry?

If you had the opportunity to do whatever you wanted to make your community a better place for poetry, a more artistic place, a place where people would actually want to read and talk about poetry…what would you do?

I’ve lived intermittently on the East side of Seattle for thirteen years, ever since I was recruited here by Microsoft in late 1999. Back then, I wandered through libraries and coffee shops looking for posters or notes about poetry readings or workshops, not finding anything. I remember complaining, I am ashamed to say, with other East siders, about the lack of culture on the East side, how we had to go downtown to do anything literary – even though the East side is and has been crawling with artistic types, writers and visual artists. Redmond and Bellevue actually have some of the best libraries I’ve ever used. Yes, the lack of bookstores (since Borders closed recently) is a little offputting (I have to drive 20 minutes to Woodinville or Overlake to find a literary magazine…)

So over the last ten years, I got the opportunity to know some people with RASP (Redmond Association of Spoken Word) and volunteered briefly with the poetry reading series at Soul Food Books. So there are poetry communities here. But if I wanted to do more…to create more opportunities for people to hear poetry, to write their own work, to create a useful space for poetry…Instead of complaining, to actively go out and create what we’re looking for…

What would you do?

The first poems you loved – Summer flu edition

I confess to having been in bed all day today due to a sudden onset of flu, complete with middle-of-the-night stomach upset and fevers that make me flushed and hot and then freezing, so forgive me if I indulge in a little nostalgic reminiscing. You can blame the fever! Although I was productive yesterday, today it took all of my mental and physical energy just to catch up on reading magazines. I just read Mary Ruefle’s lovely essay in Poetry Magazine’s 100 Years issue, and her essay made me reminisce about the first poems I fell in love with. My mother went back to college, having dropped out when she was 18 to marry my father, when I was in grade school, and so during her classes she would share what she learned, read me her textbooks out loud. I especially loved two of her books – a biology text by Stephen J. Gould and X.J. Kennedy’s Introduction to Poetry (the 1969 edition.)
Two poems I first loved, I remember being nine, were John Berryman’s Dream Song that begins “Life, Friends, is Boring” and T.S. Eliot’s beautiful ode to middle-aged insecure men, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” My mother would read these poems out loud to me, and we would laugh and repeat our favorite phrases to each other throughout the day. The first poem I ever memorized was e.e. cummings’ “anyone lives in a pretty how town” for a middle school poetry recitation contest. The second was Louis Simpson’s “My Father in the Night Commanding No,” pretty much still the best disaffected suburban childhood poem ever. Mad Men has nothing on this poem in terms of mood and tone, trust me. Though both of these poems had a set rhyme scheme, both seemed to be written in casual, conversation language, none of that awkward phrasing that characterized (I thought as later as a teen in English classes) those terrible Romantic poets. Wordsworth and Longfellow? No thanks! And honestly, while I admire a rhyme that doesn’t call attention to itself, I’d still rather read something that at least seems like free verse, that doesn’t seem…well…caged or trapped in its form. Shakespeare aside. 
I was awfully young at nine and ten to understand or identify with Eliot’s early midlife crisis (he was in his twenties when he wrote Prufrock, FYI) and it’s curious to think about why I loved the poem so much. It’s great sonics? The sense of humor? The precarious sense of decay and disaster? The slightly whining tone and the sense of irony in both this and “Life, Friends…” would seem totally outside the experience of a nine-year old girl who grew up on a farm in Knoxville. I read these poems out loud in my room, memorizing the poem by repetition, trying different inflections, different tones and speeds, trying to understand the mindset of the writers.
I wonder how these poets affected me as a person and a writer, how the idea of humor from Eliot and Berryman being important in poetry, how Simpson’s use of surrealism heightened the sadness of his poem by making it slightly dreamlike, how their tricks might have slipped into my own work over the years. Once in a while I’ll be re-reading a poem – maybe Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom I loved in sixth grade, or H.D., whom I loved as an undergrad – and I’ll notice the echo of one of their lines in a poem I had just written. Now that I am, ahem, middle-aged myself – quickly approaching forty, not thirty – do Berryman and Eliot’s angst resonate any more than they ever did? The magic of poetry is the willingness of a nine-year-old girl to imagine a thirty-year-old man’s fear of balding, a child to imagine the state of mind that would render great art and literature dull. What were the first poems you loved? How do you think they’ve affected you?

Rose Red Review feature, Persona Poetry Discussions and LA Review in Redmond!

A kind of mini-preview of my next book, Unexplained Fevers, is up as a feature at the brand new and wonderful Rose Red Review’s summer issue. There is a poem from Unexplained Fevers and a piece of accompanying art by Deborah Scott here and here. (We’re thinking about using Deborah’s “Snow White” piece, the one with my Rapunzel poem, as the cover for our collaborative art/poetry book…what do you think? She has so many good fairy-tale-themed paintings, it’s hard to pick just one!)

Kathleen Kirk has an interesting discussion my essay on Persona Poetry at Escape into Life here, along with Sandy Longhorn’s work…bringing up interesting points about empathy, how one person’s vanilla might not be so vanilla to someone else…

Last night I got to see two LA Review editors read at Soul Food Books, Kelly Davio and Tanya Chernov. They did a wonderful job reading, and I’m so excited to find more poets on my side of town! And LA Review remains as beautiful as ever – a great journal! 


I’ve got so much stuff coming up this summer…a special (job-related) announcement coming up July 17th…then I’ll be teaching up at Port Townsend Writers Conference…then doing Geek Girl Con and a reading for Cincinnati Review in August – what happened to the long slow days of summer? And speaking of which, as it’s 59 and raining outside…what happened to summer in general? (Weather report: gray cold rain for six days straight. Okay, Seattle, ha ha. Joke’s over. Let’s bring out that blue sky!)