All righty, all you who missed Rebecca Loudon (it’s pronounced Low-don, not Loo-don, as I am continually mispronouncing it. I blame all the french R is always speaking) on Thursday night at SoulFood Books missed a wonderful rendition of the poems from Navigate – Amelia Earhart’s Letters Home, read in such as a way as to think Ms. Loudon might be Amelia herself reincarnated. And her friend and co-reader, Susan Butler, read a ravishing series of poems that made me seriously reconsider Richard Burton. A good time and I was so happy I was able to host.
I got to send out a couple of e-mails accepting poems for Crab Creek, which was fun.
I am now in that state where all of my important things are in bins and boxes, which makes it very hard to respond to any correspondance or send out poems or manuscripts. In the upcoming week before M-Day (moving day,) I will a. visit the cardiologist to get my heart checked out, which is good because you know, irregularities of the heart can be nothing, but it’s comforting to know that for sure, b. have a job interview, c. meet with the Crab Creek editors, d. read with a great group at the Cranky 9th issue celebration reading, e. have our final walkthrough and exchange checks for keys, and f. miss my brother-in-law’s wedding in Ohio (which was originally going to be in October but then was rescheduled to the day of our move because his fiancee’s mother is sick and dying with a brain tumor. Terrible stuff, right? So we knew we would miss it – but it’s still sad for us.) Anyway, it’s one of those weeks with too many things in it. I get a nice break tomorrow going over to my Kingston-Bainbridge poetry group, where I get to hang out with friends and talk poetry for a few hours away from the chaos of stacked cardboard that my little townhouse has become.
In other news, I’m looking forward to the season finales of Heroes and Lost, and to the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Escapism = good!
- At February 14, 2007
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Navigate, plagiarism, pop culture
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Well, it’s the week of reviews getting published for me! My review of Rebecca Loudon’s chapbook with No Tell Books, Navigate, is up at Galatea Ressurects:
http://galatearesurrection5.blogspot.com/2007/02/navigate-amelia-earharts-letters-home.html
A very interesting article in Harper’s about our current society’s hysterical preoccupation with “plagiarism” and copyright:
http://www.harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html
The author, a novelist, brings up quite a few good points. Today, TS Eliot, Shakespeare, and Nobokov would be shamed and bullied by professors and publishers into eliminating their quotes, allusions, and borrowing, ultimately creating lesser works of art because of the anxiety towards contamination!
This really honks me off. The way you see the world is unique, although you may be contaminated by the same art, culture. Why not include your entire world, contaminated and all that it is?
Coca-cola and Tide are ubiquitous, so we must pretend they do not exist! Pop culture references keep your work from being timeless – or make it frivolous! I’ve heard these arguments so many times, and I believe they are all BS.
Update: Justin Evans makes a good point in the comment box – of course I don’t mean to discount problems with actual plagiarism as practived by students who copy whole encyclopedia entries into thier papers without references – I was referring to a hysteria around creative allusions and enframing and collage and other tecniques that have been around since before Modernism.
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.
