All About You: Review of Sky Burial, Interview with Rachel Zucker, and Other News
This morning my review of Dana Levin’s Sky Burial went up on The Rumpus. Check it out! Dana Levin is one of my favorite poets, and this fierce new book is definitely worth a read. Then buy her other books, Wedding Day and In the Surgical Theatre.
Victoria Chang interviews another one of my favorite poets, Rachel Zucker, on her blog. Thanks Victoria!
C. Dale Young had two poems up on Poetry Daily. You know, C. Dale’s poems always surprise me with their spirituality. He makes me remember my own spiritual side, which I don’t address very often in writing.
Oliver de la Paz has an interview up on the Ploughshares Blog.
And yet another favorite poet, Matthea Harvey, won a big old award.
Ever wonder what the Vida count would look like for sci fi? Wonder no more.
Kelli’s kicking off another grand poetry giveaway!
Today is a celebration of you guys and all your hard work!
Losing Knut, Reading Reviews, and Supermoons
Amid the news of a Libyan war, the continuing disaster in Japan, I admit a little bit of more trivial news stood out to me: the death of a little four-year-old polar bear named Knut. Knut was rejected by his mother and hand-raised in a German zoo. He became a cover model for global warming and environmentalism. Unfortunately, sometimes mothers reject their cubs because there is something wrong with them; a heart defect, or other genetic problems. Knut’s cause of death was not known, but it is uncommon for polar bears in captivity to drop dead so young. (Note to self: glad my mother did not decide to reject me. A recent x-ray revealed an extra bone in my ankle! Even more mutations surprise me every day!) Anyway, here is a picture of Knut with his handler, Thomas Doerflein, who also died young at 44 of a heart attack.
In other news, instead of just talking about it, actually wrote a review of a poetry book, and now it’s up: Erika Meitner’s Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls reviewed at Barn Owl Review.
Japan, nuclear disaster, donations, and Marie Howe
I’m sorry to say that the situation in Japan has not gotten better in the last few days. I spent the last couple of years researching the effects of radioactive contamination in my childhood hometown of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for my third MS, “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter.” The kinds of things – cesium in the body, radioactivity in the food chain – deer, wasps, swallows, increased risks of thyroid cancer and leukemia – that I found make me even more dismayed when I read about the problems with the nuclear reactors in Japan. Exposed rods = very bad. Cesium leaked into the environment now will probably still be there in thirty years. It accumulates in the human body and builds up over time, like many nuclear contaminants like Strontium-90.
I’m going to donate all proceeds from my first book, Becoming the Villainess, sold in the next week or two, to Doctors Without Borders, so if you’d like to order, click here.
I’m trying to write a new dedication for my second book with Kitsune Books, She Returns to the Floating World, to honor the victims and survivors of the terrible events of the last week. I believe Kitsune Books is going to look for a way to donate a portion of the profits to Japanese earthquake disaster charities as well. All my words seem so pitiful and weak in the face of so much devastation and loss. Nothing seems adequate.
Last night I went to see Marie Howe, one of my favorite poets, read in downtown Seattle. I was happy to see some of my poetry friends, and listen to such a wonderful warm poet read her work, which was spunky and funny and direct. Howe’s What the Living Do, about her life in the wake of her brother’s death from AIDS, is a book I’ve read over and over. It embraces the pain, the every-dayness, of surviving. In the end, poetry is something we create as an after-effect of surviving, as a testament to humanity’s ability to observe and survive and create in words some evidence of this.
Here’s a poem about Cesium, one of the nuclear products being released into Japan’s ecosystem as we speak, from Cincinnati Review’s Winter 2010 issue.
Cesium Burns Blue
Copper burns green. Sodium yellow,
strontium red. Watch the flaming lights
that blaze across your skies, America –
there are burning satellites
even now being swallowed by your horizon,
the detritus of space programs long defunct,
the hollowed masterpieces of dead scientists.
Someone is lying on a grassy hill,
counting shooting stars,
wondering what happens
when they hit the ground.
In my back yard, they lit cesium
to measure the glow.
Hold it in your hand:
foxfire, wormwood, glow worm.
Cesium lights the rain,
absorbed in the skin,
unstable, unstable
dancing away, ticking away
in bones, fingernails, brain.
Sick burns through, burns blue.
Japan, anime, apocalypse
All the horrible news coming in from Japan. I still haven’t heard from one family friend from Japan, but most of the people I know in Japan are safe. But still, the images, the terror of the earthquake, the tsunami, and now the nuclear reactor threats, are so terrible, they won’t stop. I’ve been dreaming every night about Japan. Every morning when I wake up, the death tolls have gone up.
I remember someone wrote that anime was characterized by so much apocalyptic imagery because Japan is the only country that has experienced and survived a real apocalypse. The poems in my second book return to these symbols of destruction and pain in the history of the country, symbols we can only partially understand. Haruki Murakami wrote a book of short stories called “After the Quake” after the Kobe earthquake. Many of the stories dealt with the emotional aftermath of that destruction, the estrangement and non-trust of anything, the lack of a feeling of safety, not trusting what literally was going on underfoot. Still, these symbols and stories can only help us understand a little, like watching footage from thousands of miles away is not the same as understanding what it’s like to be there.
There is little I can do from here, the little amount of money I can donate, the prayers, of course, but really, it’s nothing in the face of so much.
A little while ago, I drove from San Diego to Berkeley to see Roland Kelts interview Hayao Miyazaki about his new film, Ponyo on a Cliff. The young girl of the title is an undersea being that falls in love with a human boy, in a sort of variation on The Little Mermaid, and in visiting him and determining to become human, she throws the universe out of balance, bringing storms to a small fishing village where the boy’s father works as a commercial fisherman and his mother works in an elderly care facility. The moon veers closer to earth, and a tsunami swallows the town, including the sweet elderly folks, the mother, and the two main characters. (Of course, this being a Miyazaki film, these characters aren’t in any way harmed, but are somehow protected inside a magic undersea bubble.) Primordial threatening giant fish prowl the streets of the town, now underwater, as Ponyo and the young boy sail around on a toy boat looking for the mother character. It’s very eerie now watching these images, the storm nearly overtaking the cars of villagers, refugees crowded into tiny boats looking for people to rescue, storms tossing boats into each other. Miyazaki, in this interview, said that it time of national disasters, like tsunami, that the Japanese people became very good at taking care of each other, that the feeling of community was increased by the disaster somehow. I only remember this odd comment now because of what has happened.
Two good places to donate (which have good ratings in terms of spending more on actually helping people than administration:)
—Doctors without Borders
—Northwest Medical Teams
Oprah and Poetry, More Girl Poets in a Boy’s Club
My thoughts are with everyone affected by the gigantic quake and tsunami that hit Japan last night. The biggest one that’s ever hit Japan, since the 1800’s when we started keeping measurements. I’m watching local news that showing tsunami surges in Seaside, Oregon.
Go check out these posts on Girls in the Boy’s Club by Kelli and January, definitely worth reading their continuations of the conversation.
Oprah Magazine’s April Issue is poetry focused. Check it out and make your own decisions about how this magazine helps or hurts poetry. Young up-and-coming poets in fashion layouts (weirdly – with no poems from the poets featured, sadly) and interviews with Mary Oliver and W.S. Merwin, little snippets from poets like Sharon Olds and Terrance Hayes. Wish there was more actual poetry in the magazine, but I guess anything that brings poetry to the masses…? Strangely ambivalent about this.
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.
