Yes, it’s been a week of doctor appointments, phone calls from doctors, and sometimes uncomfortable tests that doctors have ordered, but I’m back to thinking about poetry – and back to the blog (no, I haven’t figured out how to migrate the blog yet, though time is ticking down on how much longer they’re going to support this blog…stay tuned for the new link.)
I was thinking about the things that get us through difficult times. The belief in something larger than oneself. Our spiritual yearnings/faiths, for example, our loved ones, and the things that just keep sticking to us, giving us hope when times are hard. The big bunch of daffodils that Glenn just brought home for me that are blooming brightly in their vase by the window. So hard to be depressed, looking at daffodils. And it doesn’t hurt that the weather report, after weeks and weeks of gloomy, blow-y cold and rain, is saying we’re going to have some sunshine and sixty-degree days coming up.
It’s really hard to write poems about hope without sounding cheesy, much as it’s difficult to write about love without sounding sentimental or sappy, isn’t it? (See this article for more on the difficulty of the happy love poem.) But they are neccessary. And I find my poetry tends to be on the hard, colder edges rather than the comforting side most of the time. After all, many of my favorite poets tend to be on that bitter edge – I prefer Gluck and Atwood to Oliver. I usually prefer humour to sweetness. What about you? Do you have any favorite “hopeful” poems?
Once in a while, you get to be on top of the world; other times, it feels like life is kicking your ass. This last week was one of those second ones.
I have never had food allergies, but Sunday I had an anaphylaxis allergic reaction to a cup of tea and half a cookie. I wound up in the hospital, on an IV, and then for four days had purple hives and couldn’t eat anything, even chicken broth or ginger ale, without my mouth and throat swelling up. Good times. It was very scary and not something I’d like to repeat. I now have an epipen and a big old bunch of allergy tests to take. It might have been the bergamot in the tea, but I’m also getting tested for everything else: vanilla, tea, milk, eggs, wheat, citrus.
Anyway, I’ve had so many health setbacks lately, I just thought – wow, I had better get going with this poetry thing. No more wasting time!
On top of the 1001 doctor appointments, I’m going to try to read some chapbooks for a contest and be an excellent thesis advisor. And try to remind people that I love them more often. And send out more poetry. Do the stuff that I need to do. Because in the end, it’s poetry and people that matter to me.
It looks like I’m going to have to port my blog as well, as blogger is no longer supporting people like me who use the FTP option, Dang! Just what I needed to mess with, along with my taxes and surprisingly complicated and expensive physical therapy bills. (California has the worst system for billing, it’s way worse than Washington where insurance billing was fairly simple, and my insurance doesn’t cover all the PT here I’ve needed like it would in Washington. Yes, one more reason I’m considering relocating to the wild wet Northwest.) See, that’s all the junk I don’t want to worry about, but the stuff that keeps getting in my face and taking up my time.
Wow – in the mail today, a cornucopia of poetry! Three books from the Mississippi Review Poetry Series, Issue 7 of Sentence, and Poetry Magazine with a long winded but amusing German essay in it, which I read out loud to Glenn while we were waiting for my orthopedist. It’s about the three questions poets get asked at readings, and also Proust.
And, good news from the orthopedist – no surgery required for the left ankle, and the right ankle is right on track to be healed in a week or two. That means there’s still probably another month or so of physical therapy to go before I’m walking – but walking by spring sounds awfully good! I love my new PT office, too, and the new PT guy I’m working with. Now, if we can get my mystery stomach illness solved, I’ll be ready to party! I think I will like Napa so much better walking than non-walking.
I also found out I have double the thesis students this quarter than I thought – there goes my free time for poetry submissions (not to mention writing…) Oh well. At least thesis work is fairly fun. I want to get some time to put up mini-reviews, too, of January’s Underlife, Reb’s God Damsel, and Allison’s Self-Portrait with Crayon. Maybe I’ll get a lull while the students are working on their reading lists…
Oh yes, and go read Jessica Smith’s post here on gender and blogging…which includes a quote by Reb that I also found edifying…
http://looktouch.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/gender-and-blogging-redux/
Got my wonderful-looking contributor copy of MARGIE 2009 today, with so many names…just a few include Alicia Ostriker, Tony Hoagland, Annie Finch, my publisher Tom Hunley, and a multitude of others. I’ve always enjoyed MARGIE and this issue is no exception. Plus, it has my poem “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter [morbid]” from the new collection I’m working on. I’m getting happier with the collection every day as I work on it, and even submitted work from the manuscript to the NEA.
I also got my MRI results for my left ankle: a torn ligament. Don’t know if it will need surgery. The right ankle is healing up normally for a sprain, right on schedule. Still running a high fever for the third week in a row, but at least the sun was out today. Still very wintry outside, still too far from spring.
And, on the urging of several of my doctors, had a meeting with the local hematologist, a very nice and enthusiastic gentleman who was surprised and excited to get a patient with PAI-1 deficiency, as it’s fairly rare. He even went back and called a hematology guy from UC Davis who has worked with a PAI-1 deficiency patient before, (who reiterated that my Seattle Hem-Onc is one of the best in the country with this particular kind of disorder – go Dr. Gernsheimer!) and called me at home with his advice. And when he talked to me, I was so thankful for those pre-med classes, so the scary stuff he said was all understandable. Sometimes having my rare disorders can make me feel lonely and scared; I mean, really, who can I talk about my fears and worries about? I took inspiration from Jilly and started a PAI-1 deficiency blog, just in case the other, like, 17 people in the world who have it are looking for a place congregate online. Treatments are all still basically experimental, since there’s not many of us to test, but they do exist. Anyway, weird mutants unite! Or something.
With my two bad ankles and the long illness of feverish weirdness, I’ve been watching a lot of movies as I’m not much good for anything else lately. Tonight I watched “Bright Star” about John Keats, and I remembered how his poem “When I have fears that I may ceased to be” echoed in my brain when I was in the hospital with pneumonia last year. The fear of all poets, that they will die before they write everything they are supposed to write? And his fear was warranted; he was unthinkably young, only 25, when he died.
Ha! This post is too morbid. Just like my poem warned in MARGIE!
I know AWP is the place for poets to be in April, but it turns out the universe has other plans for me: my presentation was accepted for WonderCon 2010, which is a few days earlier in April and much closer to home, in San Francisco. The presentation will be on something like this, I think: “From Buffy to the X-Men: Female Comic Book Superheroes in Women’s Poetry.”
I have to admit to being pretty excited. There are supposed to be something like 34,000 attendees. Gail Simone, one of my favorite female comic book writers, will be there, as will Peter S. Beagle, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Seattle a couple of years ago. (One of my early literary heroes, as he penned one of my favorite childhood books, The Last Unicorn.) Plus, some tv and movie stars and comic book royalty and such. Squee!
I’m beginning to feel better after a two-week mystery virus had me bedridden with chills and on a fluid-only diet, and I started at a newer, fancier physical therapy place for my tendon problems/sprained ankles that have had me in a wheelchair since Christmas Eve. It’s very shiny and has a recumbent stair-climber that I think I would like to have in my house, even after my ankle problems have cleared up.
Aside from that, I’m trying to fix up my taxes, apply for the NEA grant though I have a discouraging feeling about it, and send out poems/book manuscripts, which I also have a generally discouraged feeling about. I don’t know if the discouraged feelings have anything to do with reality, it’s just something that happens and I don’t want to send anything out, though I never ever stop writing. Discouragement keeps me from submitting but not from writing, isn’t that odd? Anyway, as a segueway, let me introduce you to this lovely post about rejection from Kelli:
http://ofkells.blogspot.com/2010/01/notes-from-beneath-covers-why.html
that will remind you that rejection is really not all about you, which is pretty comforting, actually.
Also, check her blog for a recent call for submissions for Ekphrastic poetry for Crab Creek Review.
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.
