If you just can’t get enough of interviews with me, check out my new interview at Public Republic:
http://www.public-republic.net/i%E2%80%99m-attempting-to-connect-poetry-and-science.php
The interviewer, Bob Baker, really liked the poem “In the Faces of Lichtenstein’s Women” so I put up a recording of it on my sample readings page here in case you are interested:
https://webbish6.com/audio.htm
Plus, my artist friend Michaela Eaves (who did the cover of Becoming the Villainess) is doing her yearly “sketch a day” up on her blog – check it out:
http://corvida.livejournal.com/
I liked Stephen Burt as a critic before this – in fact, I’ve assigned his essays to my class before – but after this terrific essay on poetry and superheroes:
http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_burt3.php
I am even more of a fan. He talks about how poets can connect to wider mythology through superheroes, and also how they can be used as a kind of subversive accessibility:
“Poems about superheroes, famous or obscure, announce their divorce from expectations about high culture, antiquity, “academic” difficulty.”
I was pretty excited that the essay mentioned two poems of mine as well.
I admit that when I was writing Becoming the Villainess, I was writing it for a specific audience – for an audience that perhaps wasn’t that friendly with poetry, but definitely knew something about comic books, video games, and maybe even Greek mythology. I wanted it to be something a college student could pick up and understand, relate to. I wanted it to be something that might make a non-poetry-lover like poetry again.
Anyway, check out the article, and you might be tempted to pick up Rae Armantrout’s new book, Versed, as well.
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.
