I liked Stephen Burt as a critic before this – in fact, I’ve assigned his essays to my class before – but after this terrific essay on poetry and superheroes:
http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_burt3.php
I am even more of a fan. He talks about how poets can connect to wider mythology through superheroes, and also how they can be used as a kind of subversive accessibility:
“Poems about superheroes, famous or obscure, announce their divorce from expectations about high culture, antiquity, “academic” difficulty.”
I was pretty excited that the essay mentioned two poems of mine as well.
I admit that when I was writing Becoming the Villainess, I was writing it for a specific audience – for an audience that perhaps wasn’t that friendly with poetry, but definitely knew something about comic books, video games, and maybe even Greek mythology. I wanted it to be something a college student could pick up and understand, relate to. I wanted it to be something that might make a non-poetry-lover like poetry again.
Anyway, check out the article, and you might be tempted to pick up Rae Armantrout’s new book, Versed, as well.
The holidays are speeding towards us! So much last-minute holiday shopping, packing up, and shipping to do…But I love the lights, and the tree, and making egg-nog french toast and pumpkin bread and other weird foods we only make at this time of the year.
I owe you some little mini-book reviews, which will be coming soon.
My review of Kim Addonizio’s Lucifer at the Starlite is up at the Rattle blog. They are one of the few places that want you to personalize your reviews a little bit, so it’s a different experience writing for them; you don’t have to be so stuffy.
Finally wrote a new poem! It’s all about the trope of mad scientists and their daughters in fifties sci-fi movies. Even when I try to stay away from pop culture in my poems, as I have for this latest manuscript, which is based on growing up in Oak Ridge – it sneaks back in!
And I applied for one job and sent in two book queries. Fairly productive for a gloomy December day! We’ve had a cold front that has freaked out the Californians – high of fifty during the day, freezes at night, how crazy! – and I’ve heard a lot of people say “This isn’t what I moved to California for!” I want to point out to them that it is still twenty to thirty degrees colder everywhere else. I admit to breaking out my special-used-to-be-reserved-for-snow-shearling boots, though, at the first sign of forty-degree-weather. I used to wear shorts when it hit fifty – now I’m all shivery. The West Coast had made this former midwesterner weak, I tell you!
I haven’t written anything in a couple of weeks and it’s making me a little…scratchy. I’m not a poem-a-day person, but I like to at least write one every two weeks!
I got two rejections and an acceptance today. After weeks of nothing. Isn’t that always the way.
A poem of mine is out in the new issue of The Cincinnati Review. It’s one of my “element” series, called “Cesium Burns Blue.” It’s one of my husband’s favorite poems. The issue also has poems by Nance Van Winckel, Chase Twichell, and Sherman Alexie.
Speaking of Alexie, he went on The Colbert Report and talked about how the local media doesn’t care about books any more. I don’t know if you noticed, Sherman, but it’s not that they don’t care, it’s that local media doesn’t really exist any more. Little newspapers – and big ones – are drying up and blowing away. Local news and radio shows are getting swallowed up by big conglomerates.
And, tell me what you think, but the local radio shows and newspaper stories don’t really sell books – or not any more than say, a blog or a web site might.
Happy post-Thanksgiving! I’ve had a cold and been grading. I know, too much fun – you’re jealous!
Ring in the new…
Peter put up a post about the first decade of the 2000’s being the “decade from Hell.” Although there have been some good things to come out of it, I’m going to go ahead and put it on my “not favorite decade” lists. Now, the 90’s – there were some good times. The music was loud, everyone was optimistic, and I remember that I always had too many job offers on my hands. (Of course, I was a techie-type then and not a poet-seeking-teaching-positions.) Plus, I was healthier!
I haven’t been so excited to see a year end in a loooong time. In 2009, I must have had a dozen trips to the hospital, my first ever broken bones, a no-exaggeration near-death experience with pneumonia, some other unpleasant firsts involving viruses and an amoeba, and the fact that I spent about ten months, between broken bones and multiple sprains, in crutches. Yes, it’s been a bit depressing. I don’t want to complain, but Universe, if you’re listening, I could use some good news and health in the new year! Let’s hear it for 2010!
Trying to shop local for Christmas this year (except for poetry and obscure books.) Locally-made Napa Valley candy, honey, olive oil, etc. Haven’t put up our tree yet, but hoping to get a chance to do it soon. I’m ready for some Christmas cheer! I’m in the mood to sing carols, watch sappy holiday specials, and rattle some noisemakers.
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.
