I was filing through some rejections yesterday (always a fun way to spend your time) and noticed that in the letter from the Crab Orchard Open Competition it mentioned that my manuscript (the one based on Japanese folk tales and anime) was a semifinalist. I hadn’t seen that on the first cursory glance through the letter. So that just teaches me to read my rejections more closely.
I sent a batch of poems out electronically. I tinkered with my newest MS too. Then I tried to comment on my student’s work a little. My cat is very needy when I’m sick for some reason, and constantly jumps on my computer and reading material.
I was thinking about life trajectories after reading Victoria Chang’s blog post this morning. If I didn’t have any health problems, I would never have gone to get a low-res MFA, would probably never have finished writing my first book, never tried seriously to publish it. It doesn’t mean I love and embrace my health problems with zen-like patience, but they have affected what I’ve done and what I haven’t done – no kids, for instance, no corporate 80-hour-a-week job with accompanying paycheck, but lots and lots of time for things like writing and reading poetry and blogging. It threw a bit of a wrench into my life plan, and still does, I’m not thankful for having been in the hospital for several days, for not being able to breathe in a very scary way last week. But sometimes the things we don’t plan for, the things we can’t control, are the things that have the biggest impact on our lives.
Slowly getting better. And I found out yesterday why I felt so sick when I got admitted to the hospital – pneumonia in both sides of the lungs, a little fluid in there, and pleurisy – and that it will take me about a month to feel all the way better. What’s weird is that only a day or so before the hospitalization I wasn’t even that sick – just the usual sinus and throat stuff. I was just getting excited about walking again after the foot breaking, and now this! It feels like I’ll never get back in shape. And I am definitely getting that pneumonia vaccine (I had one about ten years ago, but apparently asthmatics need one every five-to-ten) when I’m better.
But, I did have two acceptances to cheer me up a little – The Cincinnati Review and The L.A. Review, both really beautiful magazines I’ve admired quite a bit. Both poems from the newest manuscript, too. I’m hoping it finds a home soon. I’m polishing it up on every submission, just a bit.
The teaching has been a bit rough, what with being sick on top of the other usual stresses of teaching. I’m thankful the class is online, at least, so I don’t have to cough on anyone. We’re talking now about Seth Ambramson’s post about The Third Way, Stephen Burt’s essay on The New Thing in Poetry, The New Narrative, and I threw in Tony Hoagland’s essay on the “slippery poem of our time” – you know the one – on top of that. It’s challenging reading for graduate students, I think, but hopefully helpful to students who don’t quite know the lay of the land in the contemporary poetry world yet. I’d like to prepare them, realistically, for the world of editors and critics who have diverse likes and dislikes, to the fact that there are schools of poetry even if no one agrees what they are, exactly, right now, to the fact that there are poets trying to stretch the boundaries of poetry in every direction. I wish I had known about that stuff when I first started writing! It would have expanded my idea of what a poem can do and can be.
- At June 15, 2009
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In drafts
2
It’s drafty in here…(this poem will self-destruct)
[poof!]
Well, recovering from pneumonia at home, I figured it was a good time to peruse the new Pebble Lake Review, which has a new issue on Health and Illness. You’ll find a couple of poems by me there, and great poems by Michelle Bitting, Hsiao-Shih (Raechel) Lee, D.A. Powell and Franz Wright, among others.
I was also thinking how this poem seems so very timely. How many times can a girl be told she’d make a great experimental subject by doctors in hospitals before it begins to affect her psyche?
(This part of post deleted)
On the plus side, the doctor told me I have a lovely singing voice. She said she’d never had a patient sing at the hospital before. I guess I sing when I’m sick and stressed.
Home from the hospital. Thanks for all your good wishes. I was only sort of sick for a couple of weeks, then after the eardrum problem the pneumonia went from zero to sixty in about four hours. I couldn’t breathe, my heart was racing, blood pressure going crazy, my fever was way up – I couldn’t even walk. Crazy! Also, the clue (that I should remember from my previous, less serious pneumonia cases) – coughing up blood. If you are coughing up anything striped with blood, go to the doctor immediately. Do not pass go. That seems like a no-brainer, but when it first happened to me as a college student, I didn’t think anything about it. Also, if you are asthmatic, um, don’t catch pneumonia.
PS – People with autoimmune problems often have reactions to their IVs. I did! Yeah, you don’t want that.
In an attempt to be educational about my health excitements, here is a bit about the class of antibiotics they gave me via IV at the hospital for the last couple of days. Mine was called Rocephin, which sounds like “rose-fin.” Anyway, a little about the mysterious origins of today’s antibiotic-of-the-week, courtesty of Wikipedia:
“Cephalosporin compounds were first isolated from cultures of Cephalosporium acremonium from a sewer in Sardinia in 1948 by Italian scientist Giuseppe Brotzu [2]. He noticed that these cultures produced substances that were effective against Salmonella typhi, the cause of typhoid fever…”
Thank you, sewage! Another strong antibiotic, called Vancomycin, was discovered, I believe, in a kind of rainforest mud.
Interestingly, the doctors told me they were almost sure I had viral pneumonia; but gave me IV antibiotics anyway, and, again interestingly, they did seem to help.
Thanks again ya’ll for your encouraging words…Too sick to talk on the phone, still – I just start coughing when I walk across the room or have a fine-minute conversation. Not sure how long this phase lasts, but I hope not long. I want to try to get back to teaching work and regular life asap. Meanwhile, looking forward to catching up on sleep and trying to avoid hurting myself coughing – ow, my ribs, ow, my lower back, ow, ow ow! (Please leave any helpful tips for painful coughs in the comments 🙂 – I’m allergic to the ingredients in most cough syrups, including guafinisin and codeine, so all advice about how to control a cough without them welcome!)
I hope to soon be blogging about poetry (and more healthy circumstances) soon.
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.
