Do you know why I like blogs more than Facebook? I can’t lose myself in someone else’s perspective on Facebook, but on the right blog, you get to lose yourself. You get inside someone else’s head. That is what I like about writing in general. Facebook is like seeing a bunch of people at a party; a blog is like going for coffee with someone you’re really interested in.
I think I was going to say something interesting here about judging the chapbook contest for Concrete Wolf, something about how there are so many good writers out there, all the finalists this year were wonderful, and how the decisions come down to – “These are equally well-written but I’m more interested in this subject matter” or “this type of writing is more interesting to me than that kind” which makes you think about how relative judgement about poetry really is. It could be all about the mood of the writer at that moment, about how much they like prose poems or narrative poems, about how they feel like they haven’t seen enough of blank and blank should be celebrated this year.
I’m also thinking about chapbooks, about how I might want to do another one.
I think I like Lost because Lost is about the struggle to understand suffering in life, to understand justice, to understand mystery. Lost is a lot like the Bible that way. You’re interested in the characters, but you’re more interested in the mystery.
I’d also like to know about any good superhero poems by female poets, if you’ve written one or have a favorite one by another poet. I’m always excited to find out about these kinds of things, but I’m trying to put together a good diverse sample of poems for my WonderCon paper.
I was so sorry to hear about Lucille Clifton passing away. She was one of my favorite poets, and her use of persona has always been terrific – she uses the voices of everyone from Leda to Satan. I like almost everything in the Book of Light, but here are two great persona poems:
adam thinking
she
stolen from my bone
is it any wonder
i hunger to tunnel back
inside desperate
to reconnect the rib and clay
and to be whole again
some need is in me
struggling to roar through my
mouth into a name
this creation is so fierce
i would rather have been born
eve thinking
it is wild country here
brothers and sisters coupling
claw and wing
groping one another
i wait
while the clay two-foot
rumbles in his chest
searching for language to
call me
but he is slow
tonight as he sleeps
i will whisper into his mouth
our names
won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
I’ve always thought of Barbie as a sort of totem for girls. This new one, computer engineer Barbie, just made me so happy for some reason:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35372184/ns/business-retail/
She has a pink laptop and she wears glasses. That’s my kind of doll. She is still very blonde, but she makes up for it by having binary code on her t-shirt.
(PS, if you haven’t read Kinky, Denise Duhamel’s book of poems on Barbie, go and do it.)
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.
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.
