The haibun on Ploughshares (and a poem from my second book!)
I’m in love with a Japanese poetry form called the haibun. I teach it in my poetry class at National, I’ve taught it at poetry conferences, and if you’re around long enough, I’ll probably try to get you to write one.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil has a wonderful post covering the basics of haibun on the Plougshares blog and kindly used one of the poems, “The Fox-Wife Describes Her Courtship,” from my upcoming second book from Kitsune Books, She Returns to the Floating World, as an example. Thanks for the shout out, Aimee! I appreciate it and I’m glad to have more props for this very cool (and surprisingly contemporary-feeling despite its ancient origins) poetic form. When can we make an awesome haibun anthology?
Confession: I’ve never been much for a rhyme scheme but somehow syllable counts don’t bother me. Another confession: if you read through my second book and pay close attention, you’ll notice a lot of the poems are in syllabic forms. Am I becoming a secret semi-formalist? The answer: no, probably not.
Kitsune Books – She Returns to the Floating World
So, since my new publisher just tweeted about it, I guess I can make the news official:
Kitsune Books, a wonderful publisher down in Florida of all kinds of speculative lit, has decided to accept my Japanese-folk-tale-and-anime-themed manuscript, She Returns to the Floating World, for publication (tentative publication date – late 2011!)
I am so excited to be working with them and to have a new book on the horizon! Second book second book second book!!! Thanks to everyone who has read it for me and kept encouraging me along the last few years.
Also, thanks for Valerie Loveland for her kind review of my first book, Becoming the Villainess, here.
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.
