My Rumpus Review of “Search for a Velvet-Lined Cape and Synthesizing Bad News at Summertime
- At July 19, 2013
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
1
Thanks to The Rumpus who just published my review of Marjorie Manwaring’s first book, Search for a Velvet-Lined Cape (isn’t that a great title?) You should go read the review and then the book. I get really excited by probably one out of every twenty books of poetry that I read, and this is one of them.
Summer summer summer with its relentless SUNSHINE these days and HEAT and we’re not used to that in Seattle we usually drift through summer in the seventies with no humidity and only the occasional sparkling blue clear day where everyone crowds together by the water, but now we’ve had over twenty days without rain and many days in the eighties and without air conditioning that can be pretty miserable. I walked around a beautiful field of flowers yesterday but the smog hung oppressively over Mount Rainier, so much so you could barely see the white snow on the mountain. I’m so not a sunbunny, as I learned living in San Diego and Napa, I’m quite literally allergic to the sun, so I’m looking forward to Fall, to September, the overcast and the cool rain again.
I’m also figuring out how to synthesize some bad news at a doctor’s appointment, you know how you go and have tests and they let you go again? Well this week, one of my last doctors was all “look at this” and “this shows positively this” (Yes, I’m being cagey as I wait for further testing the next couple of weeks) and I came home and felt scared and blue and made a playlist of songs like “Dark Days” by the Punch Brothers and “Will She Just Fall Down” by Til Tuesday, Fiona Apple, The Cure’s “To Wish Impossible Things” and “Young and Beautiful” by Lana Del Rey, a long playlist and listened to it all and let myself feel a little sad, which I don’t usually indulge in. I’m not terribly addicted to robust physicality but I don’t like the feeling of losing things little by little the feeling of normalcy the expectations I guess of things that lie ahead sort of sinister. I’m a poet after all, I don’t need everything to be perfect, I don’t need all of my body to be functioning correctly at the same time, I know already that I am a little mutant and monster and I guess it’s good to get some answers. See? I’m trying to look at the bright side even now. I wish medicine and tests weren’t so expensive these days. I wish I could just let go of expectations and worry and watch the grebe in the pond outside my house and the little families of hummingbirds in my back yard, the egg-sized baby bunnies in the clover of the house down the street, enjoy the jasmine that has come back to life in all this sun and heat.
I will try to be back to my upbeat usual self by the next post. I will hope for unexpected beautiful things. That is the world, it’s beautiful and terrible and we’re rarely prepared.
Mad Girl’s Love Song, Happier at Home, the Cultural Cold War and a new review of Unexplained Fevers
- At July 16, 2013
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
- 0
Ironic reading pairings? Try the bio of Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted
, and self-helpish happiness study book by an upper-East side millionaire, Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life
. I’m really enjoying this particular bio of Plath, and trying to kind of tease out the subtext, something about how to capture Plath’s infectious ambition without going up in flames. Happier at Home is kind of a weird, how-to-be-a-millionaire-happy-housewife throwback guide for women who have enough money and time that “how to arrange my photos” becomes their biggest problem (I have to admit I was hoping for something different, some sort of modern women’s guide to balancing housework and marriage and money and a creative career, perhaps). Thinking about the repressive atmosphere for women in the 1950s and how there’s sort of a throw-back repression thing going to today in American culture. But I think there’s something interesting in both books about how women can put so much energy and effort into a perfect, happiness-filled home, this idea that women are responsible for the hearth, this primitive urge to divert creative energy into that. I’ve been noticing myself latey that my writing energy can easily be distracted by decorating and tidying up and researching recipes…
The other odd pair of books I’m reading is on the CIA’s involvement in literary and visual art culture during the Cold War era – The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
and Cold War Culture. Last night, to further a theme, I was reading about a 1950’s era book, written by a woman, about a suburban housewife outside NYC who learns to survive a nuclear apocalypse, called “Shadow on the Hearth,” a fictional call-to-arms for American women. Fascinating! I also found out that many “great” artists, literary magazines, and critics were propped up by government funding in an attempt to somehow fight Communism through artistic means. Tim Green posted this link on my Facebook discussion of the subject if you’re interested in further reading: http://web.archive.org/web/20060616213245/http://cia.gov/csi/studies/95unclass/Warner.html. I’ve lately been interested in Cold War culture, what with growing up in America’s Secret City (Oak Ridge, Tennessee) in the seventies with “men in black” hanging around the house, that I’m fairly interested to see the way that the government has tried (and for all I know, is trying now) to control things like art and poetry. (And PS, that big literary or art star might be a government construct! Now everything makes sense!)
Thanks to Collin Kelley for this mini-review of Unexplained Fevers
at his blog, here: http://collinkelley.blogspot.com/2013/07/read-this-poetry-by-erica-wright.html
A nice review can make the sting of rejections a little better. I’ll try to remember that when I’m complaining about writing my next review!
What are you looking for in a poetry publisher?
- At July 12, 2013
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
- 5
I get lots of mail from poets asking about how to get a book published. But a question poets often don’t think about is, what are you looking for in a poetry publisher? I think it is something we should give more thought to before we even start sending out our books. Sandy Longhorn has a great post here about the state of poetry publishing today, and voices some of the frustration at a system that requires writers to pay for the privilege of having an editor or publisher even glance at their work. I piped up a bit because in my own career, I’ve mostly worked with small poetry publishers who either have open submissions or…wait, that’s all I’ve worked with. I like supporting small publishers, but there are pluses and minuses to every decision we make about our books. We actually have a lot more control than we think.
Putting together your first book of poetry, you’ll look at the list of first book contests, which are the most numerous and often the most prestigious, and wonder…You’ll ask….should I part with the $25 contest fee for a lottery ticket to a very expensive, very low-paying lottery? Or should I do research around my city at literary fairs or conferences, find micro-or-small publishers who might be friendly to my aesthetic? Should I wait til AWP’s bookfair and take a look some of the books on offer, find one that offers the kind of design and content I like?
But after your first book, there are fewer contest options, so you’ll have to look around at other resources, like http://www.dacushome.com/Poetry%20Book%20Publishers.htm and http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/presses-with-open-readings-for-full-length-poetry-manuscripts/#comment-1345. You’ll probably want to take a look at the books a press produces BEFORE signing up to publish with them, so you’ll want to either check them out in person (easy at AWP, harder the rest of the year unless you’ve got a terrific all-poetry bookstore like Open Books around the corner) or order a copy of one of their books online.
What are the most important things do you think for your publisher to do? Is it great distribution? Is SPD or Ingram okay, or do I want Consortium? What about a dedicated marketing department or PR service? Or is my priority that I want to work closely with a friendly editor who loves and is enthusiastic about my work? Do I want to help promote a new publisher and do extra work to get the word out about both them and my new book? Do I care about the royalty statement, prize money, or profits? Have their books won prestigious prizes? Do I even care about prestige? Can they afford to buy any ads or do any promotion? What about review copies? Do I get input on my book’s cover art? Do they have a decent web site, use social media, are their books available on Amazon, who seems to be on the way to being the monolith of book publishing? Or do I want to try to do everything myself and self-publish?
I have a friend who will remain nameless, who sent out his book manuscript, which I got a chance to read and knew was excellent, for a long time. Lots of years. It was really good and I was anxious for him to get it out into the world, so I advised him to go look for a smaller publisher, and not to concentrate just on the big poetry book contests. Still, he persevered. Then he won the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize. So ha ha, joke’s on me. Remember not to take my advice if you’re about to win the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize.
I’m thinking hard myself about these questions for manuscripts #4 and #5. Please leave your own advice, questions or thoughts in the comments! If you ask questions, I promise I’ll try to come up with an answer, but it may not be the answer. That will be up to you.
Black Magic Woman, Derby Days Reading, Teen Workshop with Karen Finneyfrock, Mad Girl’s Love Song, and a 19th anniversary
- At July 09, 2013
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
- 2
An interview about black magic influences up for Spoila Magazine here, where you can find about my favorite black magic women, among other things…
http://www.spoliamag.com/talking-black-magic-with-jeannine-hall-gailey/
If you’re going to Redmond’s Derby Days this weekend, I’ll be opening for the band Recess Monkeys on the main stage on Saturday July 13th, reading some lighthearted geek-themed poems at 3 PM. It’s supposed to be a beautiful day, and if you’re an Eastsider, you’re trapped here anyway! Because they’re closing BOTH floating bridges to Seattle this weekend.
I’m particularly happy to be working with Hugo House and Karen Finneyfrock at my last teen workshop on July 24, which Redmond Reporter wrote up here – you should RSVP if you’re a teen or have a teen who enjoys geeky subject matter and creative writing!
http://www.redmond-reporter.com/community/214797091.html
In the middle of reading the Sylvia-before-Ted bio Mad Girl’s Love Song, which I am really preferring to the previous Sylvia bio on my reading list this summer, Pain, Parties, Work – I think because the author seems less enamored of Sylvia and more down-to-earth, I can enjoy it much more and not feel the strain of a biographer trying to gloss over some rather unpleasant Sylvia aspects. I’m definitely not reading either biography to get, you know, tips on how to be a happy poet or how to balance writing and marriage from Sylvia, so what I’m getting from “Mad Girl’s Love Song” that I like is a sense of Sylvia’s fierce competitive side and equally fierce intelligence. Her ambition is daunting to me. I think of myself as pretty ambitious, but compared to Sylvia, I’m sort of lazy. In a fit of serendipity, I also found an article in this month’s Town and Country about artist’s colonies, which told the story of how Sylvia got into…either Yaddo or Macdowell, but basically it was word of mouth, and the whole article made artist residencies seem glamorous and insider-y and unattainable.
Speaking of happy poet marriages…today was Glenn and my 19th wedding anniversary today, but we had so many meetings, appointments, and errands (including a wasted hour at the Courthouse trying to renew our passports (giant fail! and grrr to the unfailingly rude ladies working the booths there, who were not only unhelpful to us after we stood in line endlessly in their grimy un-air-conditioned-on-a-ninety-degree-day holding chambers, but to a single mother holding a squirming toddler trying to get a restraining order for a man who had been threatening her outside her house, whom they also turned away for the improper paperwork that the cops had given her – for shame!) I’d also had an anaphylaxis attack late the night before after getting my b12 shot – it’s happened a couple of times now even pre-medicating with Benadryl, so I may have to stop getting them – and so I wasn’t feeling my best, sort of worn-out and achy, which often happens after those allergic attacks. (PS If you’ve had an allergic reaction to b12 shot, let me know! I hope I’m not the only one, and I’m not sure exactly what in them I’m allergic to yet.)
So we hopefully will celebrate tomorrow, it’s supposed to be lovely and back to my beloved 70’s temperatures, maybe making some osso bucco with polenta, a chocolate souffle, maybe a visit to the Seattle Zoo or the Seattle Art Museum before they shut down our bridges…It’s important to celebrate when and where we can. For every terrible bureaucracy experience, there is a gracious and beautiful experience waiting to happen, right? I’m hoping so.
Mini-Reviews of Render and The Wishing Tomb, Blessing of Long Weekends, and AWP Planning…already?
- At July 07, 2013
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
- 1
The four-day weekend of seventy-degree days, a blessed lack of traffic, walks with the wind off the cool water watching eagles feed their eaglets…time to read a couple of books, including two poetry books I’ve been meaning to review here and a book of Isak Dinesen’s, Winter’s Tales, a melancholy collection of short stories that were combinations of Hans Christian Andersen-toned fairy tale and morality tale with a twist.
Someone mentioned AWP 2014 to me today, and I thought, do I need to start planning things like readings and off-sites and parties already?? Yikes! I was thinking of trying to throw a party at my little townhouse, but we’re twenty minutes’ drive away from the conference site, so that might not be feasible. Maybe a collection of readings at a cupcake shop?
Mini-reviews!
I won a copy of Amanda Auchter’s The Wishing Tomb during the Great Poetry Giveaway, and I was delighted, because I really enjoyed Amanda’s first book and her previous chapbook, and was excited to read her follow-up effort. This was a wonderful sensual exploration of the history and personalities of New Orleans, from the 1600’s to Katrina, and conjures the sights, sounds and smells of the French Quarter, the mysterious charms and dangers, the crimes, the social injustices and heartbreaks. Dead prostitutes and magic charms, Jazz funerals and tombstone offerings. From the title poem, “The Wishing Tomb:” “Give me what you wish:/ bread crumbs, earrings, your high-heeled shoe/ and I will show you what you’ve earned:/ a rain-smeared kiss, a letter, or nothing/ but nights of teacups, an empty bed.”
Collin Kelly’s poetry has been on my radar for a while, because of our mutual love of pop culture figures, particularly superheroes. I think this book might be my favorite of Collin’s, at once more personal and more universal – memories of Knoxville’s 1982 World’s Fair, first boyfriends and early sexual experiences, family vacations juxtaposed with dreams of Charlie’s Angels, Pam Grier, and Lois Lane. Especially touching moments include, in “Parallel Lines,” the speaker describing his grandmother dancing with him to “Heart of Glass,” and the speaker’s empathy during Margot Kidder’s breakdown, remembering her wonder in the arms of Superman in flight. From “to Margot Kidder, with love:” “Margot Kidder was Lois Lane./ Fiesty, brave, in perpetual need of rescue./ Her dark hair, un-PC cigarette dangling,/ whiskey voice, in love with the one man/ she could never truly have.”
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.
