Hoppy Easter and Spring Awakenings, Weird Vibes in the Lit World, Stress Fractures in Home and Body, More Reading Notes

Bunny with Daffodils, back yard

Happy Easter and Spring Awakenings

Hoppy (or Happy) Easter to those who celebrate, and a happy spring to all! Though our weather is still indecisive—one day, a breezy 57° and another day, freezing rain—signs of spring are all around—cherry blossoms, daffodil, quince, camellia are brightening our Pacific Northwest landscapes. I even saw three kite surfers at a time in Kirkland and managed to snap a pic. The second round of cherry blossoms have bloomed, though the late-blooming cherries have not yet opened, and that’s probably a good thing given we’re supposed to get freezing temperatures again tomorrow.

But let’s focus on all those blooming flowers and a possibly early-ish spring approaching.

Bunny statue in Kirkland

Weird Vibes in the Literary World

There have been a lot of weird vibes in the lit world this week, from the surprising closure of SPD, a distribution center that has been the sole source of distribution for many small presses and literary magazines, who also stiffed all those nice presses and lit mags for their sales in the last year, so if you have extra money, be sure to order your poetry books straight from your favorite small press. There was a weird article from a 27-year-old about marrying someone older being the key to solving all your life goals as a woman and a writer which had a lot of weirdly internalized misogyny and tradwife vibes. (Um, nope, say all the members of my family who have huge age differences in their marriages.) Also, just general negativity and snarkiness, which always feels like it’s amplified by the internet.

Tomorrow, National Poetry Month begins, and I’m doing several appearances and readings, including a reunion reading with Jack Straw writers and a class visit to a university or two. Ironically, April becomes a little harder to write and submit during, because so many of us are busy organizing book club poetry readings or class visits or other things to promote poetry in our communities. America in general does not seem very interested in poetry right now, though its citizens are reportedly lonely and depressed at record levels. (Not that poetry is a cure-all, but it can help you feel not so alone.) It seems like decreasing money towards the arts in general is starting to have spiraling consequences, which is a bummer if you are an artist and you need money to live, like many of us.

Me with white cherry blossoms and Lake Washington

Stress Fractures in my Personal Life and Body

In my personal life, I’ve been very stressed out by the fact that the company we hired to redo our main bath to make it ADA accessible doubled their original estimate, and then after we signed a contract, added another 50 percent to it. I’m not sure whether to cry or call a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure one of those things is the answer. Add to that I had an accident this weekend in my non-ADA shower that may have resulted in a possibly broken foot, it’s just been one of those weeks. You know, those weeks where you wake up heart-racing and weeping with stress at 4 am. That’s not normal, right?

I’m still struggling to figure out how to make money and feel like I’m able to financially contribute, despite my physical problems. It’s hard to feel “useless” to society that bases so much on how much money, what your job is, how able-bodied, beautiful, successful, healthy, you are. It was a good week to watch Frida, a semi-animated documentary about Frida Kahlo in her own words and illustrations, see notes below. Sure, I have health problems, but hey, how many months have I spent in a full-body cast? Even if your answer is more than one, it still wouldn’t be as much time as Frida did.

Easter with white cherry blossoms

More Reading (and Watching) Notes

So, I finished up Emily Van Duyne’s Loving Sylvia Plath: a Reclamation, which I have to say answered a lot of questions, and also will enrage and simultaneously explain why you might have been made fun of and/or belittled for daring to appreciate Sylvia Plath’s writing your whole life (spoiler alert: the result of a lot of men belittling Sylvia’s writing and life after her death.) The author also did an interesting thing by including some personal life details that must have been unsettling to write about given her subject matter, but her vulnerability allows the book to resonate even more.

I watched the wonderful animated semi-documentary, Frida, on Amazon Prime, which includes her paintings and animations from her illustrated diary, letters to and from lovers, her struggles with her health and her art (things I didn’t know: she never sold a painting ’til after she divorced Diego, and when she remarried him she made him sign a no-sex contract),  Frida, like Sylvia, was a frustrated, underappreciated female artist with a cheating spouse, but unlike Sylvia, had no big help from kind wealthy folks or grants or supporters early in life, a lot of really bad health luck (even beyond the bus accident, which left her alive but suffering and in pain for most of the rest of her life, and at the hands of surgeons who may have just made things worse). But she channeled her anger into her amazing art, directing her anger at, in her words, a “bourgeois, petty” art world, a husband with a huge ego and a problem being faithful but simultaneously being super jealous, and yes, a body that left her feeling trapped and broken and unable to do many of the things she dreamed of. (Originally, before the accident, she went to a prep school with dreams of becoming a doctor, which would have been just as revolutionary in her time as being an artist.) By the time she had successful shows in New York and her home, Mexico, she would almost be at the end of her life. Yes, I cried at the end of the movie, because you realize that Frida but it also really inspired me to be a tougher version of myself, because even at her hardest moments, she exuded passion, glamour, bravery and a strangely fierce embrace of her own uniqueness.

I’ve also been reading Percival Everett’s Erasure, the book on which Oscar-winning American Fiction was based, and it is even better than the movie, so if you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, do both. No surprise, the novel is more nuanced, funny and clever than the movie, and just a different experience. Yes, it’s a fascinating satire of academia and the publishing world’s standards and regulations of artists who are people of color, but also a whole new take on race in America. And it was written back in 2008.

Also, speaking of the intersections of race and art, Beyonce’s newest country album (which shouldn’t really surprise us, because she grew up in Houston and has performed at rodeos multiple times) has spawned several mini-documentaries of the influences of Carribean and African music on what’s thought of as country and Appalachian music, and the sort of erasure of black country artists from the beginning of country music’s history. One of the shows featured one of my personal favorite musicians, Rhiannon Giddens, who plays banjo on Beyonce’s album, and is a tremendous artist and music researcher documentarian in her own right. So if you get time, pick up one of her albums as well, because she is definitely worth a listen, and I’m glad people are talking about the weird idea that country music is only for white people (because historically it’s just not the case).

Anyway, it seems that my reading and viewing choices have been all about people who embrace their art in a world that isn’t particularly receptive for whatever arbitrary (racism, sexism, etc…) reasons, and how many artists don’t relate to that? Wishing you a happy National Poetry Month!