How to Read a Poem, In Between Holidays, and Galloping Toward 2024

Our red maple

How to Read a Poem

Hello from chilly, blustery November in the Northwest. This picture is from my maple tree during a brief break of blue sky. I was under the weather for a lot of the week (some days not even able to get out of bed)—not covid, but another equally annoying bug I caught probably when I went to the dentist earlier in the week. Sigh. Even Glenn got the sniffles and slept in a bit.

I’ve been trying to prepare a 15-minute talk for my winery bookclub this Wednesday. We’ll be discussing the late Louise Gluck’s terrific book, Meadowlands.

I’ve taught classes to veterans and disadvantaged high school kids and college students, but since I usually teach creative writing, I would instead talk more about how to write a poem than how to read one!

I know what I don’t want to say—poetry isn’t supposed to be an escape room, it’s supposed to be something enjoyed or appreciated the way a piece of visual art or music is. Poetry isn’t autobiography—it can be memoirish, but it can also be fictionish.  But there are some tools poets use that non-poets might want to understand or know about, so I thought I’d talk about those—tone, diction, punctuation, sonics, images, metaphors, etc. Anyway, I hope it will be useful! And if you have any suggestions, leave them in the comments!

Sylvia and Charlotte with Halloween decorations

In Between Holidays

As we took down the decorations for Halloween (see the cats who had a lot of curiosity about said decorations), we started thinking about our plans for Thanksgiving (this year we’ll be celebrating with my little brother) and Christmas (only five weeks away now, somehow…which means it’s almost the new year—an alarming thought).

The state of the world, such as it is, seems like the opposite of peace on earth, good will towards men right now, so it’s hard for me with the cognitive dissonance of the news and the celebrating of our usual holidays. But there are still small kindnesses all around—an older man in a cowboy hat helped me when I lost my balance with my cane at the grocery store, waving off thanks, and there’s the kindness and love of my friends and family that they show to each other, even struggling through cancer, covid, money troubles.

Glenn and I with poinsettia tree at Molbaks

I know in my last post I talked a little about feeling down and I’m still struggling myself with—I don’t know, depression and anxiety for cause? It’s hard to motivate myself to do my usual things. Especially when my MS acts up as it did this week, when I got the dental work-related bug. And it’s extra hard to get out of bed when the wind is howling and the rain keeps falling.

But I’m also trying to do the small things that I can do to brighten the days. Visiting with friends and neighbors, buying little gifts for loved ones, reading books I love, even trying to write and submit a little bit after a break of a few weeks. Yes, even putting up holiday decorations or admiring the ones going up around my neighborhood. I’ve even been gardening a bit—planting bulbs, fertilizing my little trees that I’ve planted over the last few years in my small yard, as it feels like something productive even when I can’t be productive in other ways. I also spent time watching movies I love—Before Sunrise, Christmas in Connecticut…old Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant films never fail to make me smile.

There’s something about the end of the year that makes me take notice of the things that happened in the year, significant, happy and unhappy. In the year 2023, I turned 50, I saw my parents and older brother in person for the first time in years, my sixth book came out with a terrific press, and I even did a mini book tour for Flare, Corona (my next reading, by the way, is online on November 19th—no rest for the wicked!) I made new friends among local farmers and winery workers and book club participants. I spent a lot of time walking with my cane through flower fields and pumpkin farms. And even though I feel a little down now, I can say this year really did have a lot of gifts in it.

Carousel Horse at a local shop in Bothell

Galloping towards 2024

Yes, just like this little carousel horse, I’ve felt like I’m galloping towards 2024. It seems like it’s creeping up on us whether we want it to or not! The year of the Dragon! The year of America’s next Presidential election. What good and bad await us next year we have to wait and see.

I’m hoping for a more peaceful year in 2024. I’m hoping this darn pandemic starts to wind down a bit, still having a number of friends and family in the hospital—while trying to dodge the germ myself—is a bit wearying. I’m hoping to find a way to make enough money to pay off my student loans and hope to find a magical miracle kind of work that I can do while chronically ill and disabled and that I actually enjoy. I’m hoping to see more loved ones in person, both friends and family.

So, during this “in-between” holiday season, I’m wishing you peace and joy. I wish you time for fun and hope, not just worry.

And in case you missed it last week, our baby bobcat paid us another visit captured on our Ring camera and here it is:

Welcome to the Big Dark—Halloween Costumes and Cats, Hanging with Poet Friends, When You Contemplating Quitting (Poetry, etc) and End Times Mindsets, Bonus Bobcat

Cat disguises self as Halloween candy

Welcome to the Big Dark!

Seattle welcomed—or, grudgingly accepted—the Big Dark last night, when the time change brought us dark mornings AND dark afternoons, and dark all the time in between. Plus, a week of power outages, rain and windstorms! You can see why Seattle-ites—even non-sunworshippers like myself—can suffer from depression this time of year.

Fortunately, the storms waited until after the trick-or-treaters on Halloween! You can see this picture of Glenn and I dressed up as Barbie and Ken (below). I couldn’t attend the Barbie movie premiere in person because my immune system (I was still being fairly protective because of some antibody infusions I was getting) so we brought the props home—a little child-size Barbie box and Glenn looking legit like Western Ken (sans fringe).

Me as Barbie and Glenn as Western Ken

Plus, this cat was trying to escape disguised as Halloween candy. No good, Charlotte! We saw right through your schemes! We did get a lot of cute trick or treaters this year, which is always fun and we took the rest of our candy to a local winery that donates Halloween candy to the troops, which seems much better than Glenn and I eating it.

The weather also mercifully held out until my poet friend Kelli Russell Agodon and her husband Rose got on the ferry back to their home, after their visit out to see us and do some local celebrating at Woodinville’s Molbaks, which does some fantastic holiday display stuff (as you will see in pictures later in the post).

Because we visited the very day after Halloween, they didn’t have ALL the holiday decorations up yet—missing some lights and a huge poinsettia tree that was up two days later.

Kelli Agodon and I with tropical plants at Molbaks

Hanging with Poet Friends

One thing I’ve been trying to do is make time to see friends in person—at three and a half years and counting, it’s been a long pandemic—and this week my friend Kelli and her husband made the long trek from over the water to see Glenn and me. Glenn provided a delicious brunch, we had sparkling wine from a local winery, and then we went adventuring at the aforementioned home and garden store famous for its over-the-top holiday decor—like $1100 stuffed display polar bears, oversized trees, camping scenes, holiday pastel bakery scenes. Hey, when you’re trying to stave off Big Dark (not to mention, horrible news all day everyday) sometimes you’ve got to do some crazy things. It is really good to see people we love in person. Kelli and I got to talk a little shop too—about writing, making money, survival as a poet, book sales during a pandemic, and more.

So below, another pic of Kelli and me, and then two pics of Glenn and I two days later at Molbaks’ holiday party because yes, that’s how much I like being around flowers in November.

When You’re Considering Quitting (Poetry and Etc)

I had the sad news today that Tom Holmes was quitting his quirky-but-fun poetry magazine that I’ve been a fan of for years, Redactions—and that’s the news after a couple of high-profile lit mags went down this week. Funding is being pulled, universities are laying off staff left and right, and lit mags are struggling. The poetry world in general is struggling, maybe just here in America, but it feels like maybe this is a larger phenomenon. People in general are struggling to feel hopeful. This made me think about mindsets of writers in the past. T.S. Eliot wrote his classic “end of the world” poem “The Waste Land” in 1922 – he hadn’t even been through the Great Depression or WWII yet!

I recently read Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party (the book on which the recent movie Haunting in Venice is loosely based – free on Hulu right now, FYI). It was written in 1969, right after the UK took away the death penalty for murder, a change that Christie – a woman who, might I remind you, successfully faked her own death when she found out her first husband was cheating on her and obsessively read crime news articles – thought was definitely signaling moral decay and even an end to civilized society. (Hey, stuff was weird in 69—the first lines of the song “Beeswing” are “they called it the summer of love—they were burning babies burning flags the hawks against the doves”—sound familiar?)

When Virginia Woolf took her own life at the midst of WWII, her house in London had just been bombed and she legitimately thought the Nazis were going to win and come and kill her husband (who was Jewish). Did England at the end of 1941 feel like end times? I bet it did. Add to that health problems and mental health issues, and it became too much.

Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe took their own lives way too young, both thinking they were somehow “over the hill” (!!) and looking at themselves as failures, when years later we still see them as legends. It is a shame neither lived long enough to see how long their legacies would last. If they’d only held on a little longer, maybe they would have known more about their own success, their impact?

It is easy to lose hope. Little and big things—the weather, current events, job and money anxiety—can make life seem that much harder for people who were already struggling. Be sure to reach out to your loved ones and make sure they are doing okay. Be extra kind to the people around you, if you can be. I am a girl who thinks about endings a lot—I mean, I wrote a book that was published a few years ago all about the end of the world, and that was BEFORE the pandemic, Trump, the recent wars in the Ukraine and the middle East.

This year, I turned 50, and I guess I am feeling a bit of the midlife crisis they advertise – that is, questioning my life’s work at this point, wondering why I haven’t been able to pay off my student loans yet, wondering if poetry is something I should continue doing, worrying over the dwindling numbers of poetry mags and book sales. Should I do something that makes more money but that I hate? My health problems at this point probably make working a “normal” job impossible, but taking disability—which some of my family members have advised, given how little money I’ve made in the last couple of years—seems extreme at this point. (Plus, dealing with lawyers and paperwork are two of my least favorite things—I barely apply for grants and residencies as it is because I will do anything to avoid paperwork. That they ask sick and disabled people to jump through so many hoops to get payments that would barely cover my grocery bill is another whole problem. The average wait time in this country to get disability is six years.)

I love art. I love encouraging and mentoring people, but teaching full time—which is the way many poets and writers make their living—seems not likely at this age. (Multiple degrees, and eight books, what do I have to show for it besides a lot of debt? Sigh, sigh.) I could do a part-time low-residency job, but those are few and far between. I’m told I’m good at editing, which I could do part-time, but honestly, it takes a lot of brain power and MS has made it harder than it used to be.

All this is just to say, how do we decide when it’s time to quit—a job, a relationship, or even a passion for an art that just doesn’t seem to be thriving the way we wish it would? I’ve quit poetry twice during my lifetime—in my middle twenties, right after my MA when I decided the poetry world was too corrupt and became a tech writing manager for a dozen years instead, and in my thirties, when I struggled to get my first book—the one that became Becoming the Villainess—published. My love of poetry and desire to do it has flared up intermittently—the two notable times, when I had double pneumonia and was living in California, struggling to pay regular bills, at the hospital on several IVs and oxygen and thought “I can’t die—I haven’t published my second book yet!” and again when I was diagnosed seven years ago with terminal cancer and thought “I can’t die—I still have more poems to write!” Every single decision we make in life has an impact—where we live, whom we live with, what we choose to do for a living, who we hang out with, how we vote, even adopting an animal, taking on volunteer work for a charity—and sometimes it’s good to have moments when we look hard at our current situations and ask: is this right for me, right now?

Anyway, I certainly don’t have all the answers. If you are a writer and questioning whether you’ve made the right decisions, I understand. Just remember we’re not always the best judges of whether or not we live in “end times” or whether or not we’ll be considered “failures” down the line. Don’t give up too easily. I am saying that to you and to myself. Maybe there are good things right around the corner.

And if you’ve made it this far, just for a little anti-darkness cheer, here is a real-life video from this week of a baby bobcat on my back porch. I mean, baby bobcats! Or bobkitten, if you will!

Happy Halloween! Spooky Season, Spooky Poems, Spooky Reading, Upcoming Speculative Reading

Kitten with pumpkins at local pumpkin farm

Happy Halloween! Spooky Season, Spooky Poems, Spooky Readings!

Happy Halloween! I bet a lot of you have already bought your candy, pumpkins, etc and maybe even gone to a Halloween party or two. My husband is a big Halloween fan, and the news (and social media) has been so grim lately, we’ve been trying to create some joy around us. We had two nights of record cold temperatures that knocked out the last of our garden’s flowers and froze our bird baths overnight. We had a lunar eclipse this week and the moon has been rising orange at the edge of the sky.

I myself have been struggling with a low mood, so I’ve been consciously trying to do things that usually cheer me up this time of year—visiting pumpkin farms, reading seasonal poetry and fiction, spending time with supportive people, and helping others. We brought some pumpkins and wine (Woodinville’s most popular exports) to my little brother for his new rental home housewarming, and it was great to see my little brother and his wife (who had been living much farther away, requiring a ferry ride and a rather temperamental and prone-to-surprise closures bridge). I spent time with the local farmers, talking strategy, flower planting, even poetry. Anyway, if you are feeling powerless in the face of evil, hatred, and doom, you’re not the only one. So, even though the pictures often show me smiling—like the ones below—just remember we are all doing the best we can.

Bonjour Witches! At Chateau Ste Michele

Spooky Poem

I have a tradition of posting a spooky poem from my latest book on Halloween, and even though Flare, Corona is a little less horror-and-speculative centric than some of my other books, there are some Halloween-y poems in there. Here’s one of them, originally published in Boulevard: “Self-Portrait as Murder Mystery:”

Fly Agaric mushroom with fall leaves

Spooky October Reading

What do you like reading in October? Our Read-Between-the-Wines book club read Osamu Dazai’s Blue Bamboo short story collection this October, and the discussion was great – and a lot of people got into the spirit and came in costume, so that was fun. I’ve also been reading Agatha Christie’s Halloween Party, the slightly-more-disturbing basis for the new movie Haunting in Venice, Kiki’s Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono, the coming-of-age story about a young witch that was the basis of Miyazaki’s movie of the same name (very Halloween-appropriate for kids!) I also read Louise Glück’s books in honor of her recent passing, including American Originality: Essays in Poetry, and my first editions of House on Marshland and Meadowlands (which will be the book club’s November read!)  House on Marshland includes one of the greatest Gluck poems of all time, “Gretel in Darkness,” also great reading for Halloween.

Book Club at J. Bookwalters

I’m still wrapping my head around the lyric essay and so re-reading some books of lyric essays in my collection, including Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation and her newer Weather.

I’m doing a reading on Zoom for Speculative Sundays, on November 19 at 7-8 PM, and you can sign up for free tickets here: Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading Series presents Jeanine Hall Gailey Tickets, Sun, Nov 19, 2023 at 7:00 PM | Eventbrite

Spooky Orange Halloween Hunter’s Moon

Happy Halloween, My Friends

So, take care of yourselves and have yourself a joyous Halloween, Day of the Dead, All Saints Day, or Samhain. Take time to look at the moon, maybe eat some candy, read something spooky.

A New Review of Flare in New Pages, Pumpkins and Typewriters, Halloween Mystery Parties and Thoughts on the Lyric Essay

Typewriter with pumpkins

Typewriters, Pumpkin Farms, and Spooky Stories

This week has been busy—a new review of Flare, Corona in New Pages, a few visits to pumpkin farms, a Halloween Mystery night at a local winery, and a re-reading of Osamu Dazai’s Blue Bamboo for the October winery book club and reading up on the lyric essay form. Plus, typewriters in the wild has a new location—growing in a pumpkin field!

I have been practicing with my new camera some more, this time with typewriters. I love being around farms and farmers—and they are usually people I feel so comfortable with—that sometimes, even with my MS/health stuff, I wonder if I missed my calling to become a farmer. This week, the kind farmer at McMurtrey’s Pumpkin and Tree farm invited us to take home handfuls of dahlias and tomatoes. We talked about how to keep our apple trees from catching diseases and how to rotate dahlias and pumpkins. I know people say Seattle has a reputation for unfriendliness, but you won’t find it among Woodinville farmers or farm workers. A few pictures from that farm and backyard below.

Glenn and I at JB Growers Pumpkin Farm

A Review of Flare, Corona in New Pages

I was pleased and surprised—I’m always surprised to get a new review of a book that’s been out more than six months, but I’m also grateful. Here’s the link: Book Review :: Flare, Corona by Jeannine Hall Galley – NewPages.com

And a sneak peek of the review below:

Halloween Mystery Parties

This weekend we did a Halloween mystery night (themed: witches and druids) at J. Bookwalter’s Winery in Woodinville (hence the pictures to the left: that is a raven on my head, thanks). A lot of the party was set outside and it was a nice night, thankfully, so we didn’t have to worry too much about the dreaded covid.

It was not a typical murder-mystery scenario—more like a sort of goth video game? I’m very competitive so I was sad we didn’t win, but the team that won had five people who were way more committed than we were—costume wise AND game-wise. Anyway, it was a good way to shake up our routine date night and it was very on theme for the week before Halloween.

Lyric Essays and More

One of the things I’m working on now is an essay, ironically, on lyric essays, so I’ve been doing some research, reading some books of lyric essays. It’s weird for me, since I’ve been a journalist, a technical writer, an ad copywriter, a book reviewer, and a poet, but until the pandemic I didn’t write personal essays or lyric essays. Even though I’ve had some essays published I certainly don’t consider myself any kind of expert.

But on Facebook I put up a query and got some really interesting answers, from people who definitely are more qualified than me. And as a poet I’m attracted to the idea of an essay that isn’t necessarily: theme, point, point, conclusion. That allows for leaps, long parentheticals and ellipses – in short, essays that mimic poetry in a lot of ways.

Here’s a little fun read if you, like me, are interested in creative nonfiction and how to define the lyric essay: my friend and fellow poet Julie Marie Wade’s lyric essay on defining the lyric essay—funny and useful: What’s Missing Here? A Fragmentary, Lyric Essay About Fragmentary, Lyric Essays ‹ Literary Hub (lithub.com)

Anyway, my research has led me to think about experimenting more with the form. Next week, I promise to post a more spooky post with spooky poems!

A Week of Solar Eclipse, Loss and Sadness, a Tribute to Louise Glück, and Some Thoughts on Poetry, Academia, Ambition and the Establishment

Me in an enchanted secret garden

Pictures of Fall and a Post about Solar Eclipses, Sadness, and Poetry

I have some gorgeous pictures from a beautiful bluebird day earlier this week when we managed to get out into nature and visit some local farms, but right now I’ve been sick in bed all weekend, a rainy weekend that reminded me that the end of the year is coming faster than I expected.

I’ve been feeling down this week—no wonder, with the endless tragic stream from Israel and Gaza, with the death of one of my favorite poets, and the shorter days and illness, it’s hard to post a chipper post. I can at least report I’ve been practicing my bird shots on the new camera, so hopefully the new ones will be better.

Tribute (of sorts) to Louise Glück

Anna’s hummingbird with pink salvia

Louise Glück passed away this week, which made me remember all my encounters with one of my favorite contemporary poets. Not a warm and fuzzy person, she was stylish and her writing always had an edge. I call her one of my “villainess” writing heroes—along with Margaret Atwood—who eschew easy, nice, characters and conversations in their writing. They deny the need for women to be, “nice”.

When I was an undergrad at UC (Ohio), she came to visit, and I got to ask her a question. It was just after Wild Iris was published and won the Pulitzer, and I asked her if H.D. was an influence. She replied she had no idea who that was—and to this day, I don’t know if she was messing with me or she genuinely had no idea about one of more famous female modernists who wrote arresting poems about flowers. Maybe? That night she gave a reading from some new poems from Meadowlands, and I brought my little brother who was in high school, and some of his friends —their first poetry reading. He went right up to her after the reading, and, knowing the way to a girl’s heart, complimented her shoes—which were excellent, and she giggled like a schoolgirl and could not have appeared more delighted. And my brother and his friends—all of them looking faintly menacing—could not have had a better time. At a poetry reading!

As I started to try to define who I was a poet, I know that certain female poets—of the dead, Emily D., of course, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sylvia Plath—but Gluck, Atwood, Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Denise Duhamel, and Dorianne Laux – they became like a power source that I could go back to, to read and energize. I only got a few chances to see Atwood, got to have dinner with Denise on one of her trips to Seattle, and worked with Dorianne while she was at Pacific U  but I saw Glück read probably five times, which is amazing, considering we live on different coasts and I don’t think she loved travelling or giving readings, especially as she got older. (I missed Lucille Clifton as she had to cancel her Seattle trip due to one of her final chemo appointments. I’m still sorry about that. I wish I could have told her all her work meant to me.) Anyway, here is one of my favorite poems of hers, perfect for spooky October with its hauntings: “Gretel in Darkness,” from her second book, House on Marshland, published when I was two years old.

Is October a Season of Mourning?

Me at McMurtrey’s Pumpkin Farm early this week

Louise certainly thought it was—so many poems about October and death and mourning, come to think of it. Since Glück was my father’s age, it brought to mind sad thoughts about my parents’ mortality. The news has been relentlessly grim—even SNL, John Oliver and Colbert had to make pre-show statements to comment on the horror before trying to make us laugh about other subjects, just like, as I remember, it was in the aftermath of 9/11.

There is something about the solar eclipse with ring of fire, the new moon this week, that also made me think of portents. In the Northwest, the sunlight becomes weaker, the night coming surprisingly fast. And yes, it’s cold, flu (and covid, still) season, which means I caught something and am probably not in the best shape to be writing anything deep and meaningful, even though I want to.

Some Thoughts on Poetry, Academia, Ambition and the Establishment

Pumpkins and a welcome bench

I had been thinking of eliminating this blog—or moving to Substack—when I ran into a couple of posts that made me grateful for this longform, easy-to-find-and-read, method of thinking and communicating that’s outside the gates of Facebook, Twitter, or academic publishing.

The first was by my friend Lesley Wheeler—about the closing of Gettysburg Review, the waning of literary criticism and of the English Department—and indeed, academe in general. The other was my blog-gatherer-extraordinaire and haiku poet Dave Bonta, who wrote a post about ambition, poetry, and careers. Both posts are thought-provoking and worth your time. One thing that Dave mentions that I have found to be true is that poetry in academia is a colder, meaner sort of world than say, the speculative poetry world, the horror poetry world, or, in Dave’s experience, the haiku/haibun community. When Lesley talks about the closing and narrowing of academia’s support of poetry, literature, liberal arts in general, I am reminded of all my reading on Cold War Culture than indicated the American government was secretly propping up—and using for propaganda—many of the big journals we have come to think of as “permanent” features. Between the fifties and the eighties, the intelligence community thought it was important to show that America had its own artists that could compete with Russia’s—and, of course, they wanted to follow any potential communists into artistic enclaves. So, they gave money to Kenyon Review, Poetry, Paris Review, they helped publish books like Dr. Zhivago. Now, anti-intellectualism is king in politics—the government’s no longer interested in being a patron of the arts. Lesley mentions the patronage that most artists need to live as disappearing—but maybe it was always a sort of mirage. How many people in my generation could even procure a tenure track job in English Literature or Creative Writing? And the chances for the people younger than me, even less. Last week I talked about money and the awards system—a sort of insider trading post about how being wealthy enables you to get more money from grants, awards, and fellowships because you know some sort of secret password—whether it’s a certain college degree, championship by a wealthy mentor, or other. These things feel forbidden to talk about in the poetry world—but I feel it’s also important to point out that the poetry world is as corrupt and given to influence as any field, but also has its havens from that corruption if you look for them.

As a writer, I’ve always felt like an outsider—first, being a woman who did not come (or marry into) money, now, being a disabled and chronically ill woman who still has not won the lottery—and part of me feels like I’ve been beating a fist on the big blank walls of poetry institutions for more than twenty years. I’ve written hundreds of reviews, too, a world that is apparently disappearing, the idea of literary criticism itself being valuable enough to be paid for—was that a waste of time? Dave’s comments on ambitions as it refers to writing—not career—are important, as they get to a truth that might be more important now as it feels so many things we value are decaying before our eyes—that creating art is beautiful and worthwhile, and so is making art accessible to everyone, not just an elite few.

In the Days After the Solar Eclipse

So, in these days after the solar eclipse with ring of fire, a photograph of which became the book cover art rendering for Flare, Corona, my latest book, I hope you are creating, celebrating creating, reading and making art for art’s sake. I don’t wish you to ignore the ugliness of the world—we cannot, even if we want to—but I hope for this particular solar weather to invoke some kind of peace, healing, and hope around the world, and in me and you as well.

I just walked out in my front yard – I couldn’t sleep after sleeping most of the day, and it felt cooler outside—and as I admired Glenn’s work with the Halloween decorations, I heard two owls hooting (pretty close to me) and a coyote. At first, I thought we had spooky sound effects on, but no! It was nature’s own spooky sound effects. Maybe that is the blessing of the world at night—so peaceful, always a little beautiful and a little threatening.