Well, off to Seattle (where it is not 63 and sunny, but 50 and rainy…brrr) tomorrow, and although I’m now capably limping across rooms in my cast (yay!) I’m still wheelchair-bound for the airport (boo!) Never been in an airport in a cast and a wheelchair before, so it’ll be an interesting (and no doubt, slower) experience. I’m looking forward to seeing a few friends (although not all of them – hard to schedule over husband’s G’s work stuff), visiting Open Books, eating some delicious salmon (and maybe some Rainier cherries if I’m lucky) and drinking a wonderful cup of coffee while browsing wonderful books. For some reason, southern California is devoid of the wild Alaskan salmon that was available at every grocery store in the northwest. Why all the farmed Atlantic salmon, San Diego? I’m looking forward to the visit – we were supposed to go out in February, but I couldn’t even stand on two feet back then (plus I had a cast on my hand as well) so we had to postpone. I picture myself coming home with my arms full of the things we can’t get easily here: poetry, black clothing and coffee.
Got my contributor’s copy of the really beautifully-produced pocket-size Sentence 6, which has its share of bloggers (Nin Andrews and Steve Schroeder) and writers I love, including Denise Duhamel. I’m writing a review of her newest book, Ka–Ching! as we speak. If you haven’t seen Sentence before, it’s devoted to the prose poem, and I’ve found it to be a wonderful read every time I’ve gotten ahold of a copy.
Question: Has the economic downturn affected your life as a writer? Have you submitted to fewer markets, sent out fewer manuscripts, had less time for writing?
Things have been going a little slower on the “walking” front that I had hoped. I’d hoped I’d be easily walking about by now (it’s been almost seven weeks!) but I’m still barely hobbling around, still in the cast and still mostly via wheelchair. At least my hand cast is off – but the right hand still isn’t strong enough to use a crutch. My immune system went bonkers this month and I’m really anemic (just had a bunch of new blood tests) so that may be why the healing is a little slower than normal. And to that I say, Meh!
On a happier note, I found out I was nominated for two different poems for the Rhysling Award, and the poems will appear in the Rhysling anthology for 2008. Next year, I’m going for three! For those of you who haven’t heard about it, it’s an award for science fiction and speculative poetry; previous winners include Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Jane Yolen, and Ursula Le Guin. Thanks to Poemeleon and Mythic Delirium for the nominations…in the words of academy award starlets, I’m honored just to be nominated.
We’re doing our taxes, always exciting. This year (2009) isn’t shaping up to be as financially helpful as last year, at least so far. That’s probably a common story – the downturn affects everyone, even poets! Speaking of which, buy my book (here – signed book and free broadside included! – or here,) buy a book from your favorite small press, go to a reading – keep the poetry economy (such as it is) going! I am thankful for the organizations that donate to poets, to the universities that pay poets to give readings and classes, to literary magazines that pay the small amounts they can and the publishers who pay our small royalty checks, to the individuals who buy poetry on a regular basis. The little things really do add up.
Snippet day!
Allison Joseph, an excellent poet who also happens to edit the Crab Orchard Review, was chosen from the last Steel Toe open reading series…read more here!
Annie Finch talks about women poets and mentoring here…and Barbara Jane Reyes continues the discussion here…
Amy King has a great take on the “greatness” issue here
In the mail: my contributor’s copy of The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, and a little check with it! Hey, if every lit mag and journal paid us just a tiny bit, we poets would at least be able to cover our postage!
People have been discussing the influence of books of poetry, so I thought I’d bring up and discuss this poem, one of my favorites as a kid (when I had to look up the definitions of “Dirge” and “denouement”) It ended up being very influential to me. Kenneth Fearing not only wrote poetry but was also a freelance journalist (who dabbled in pulp fiction.) His use of advertising and comic book language, his anti-lyricism, and irony seeped into my work – I even named a poem after this one, “Dirge for a Video Game Heroine.” Also, he loves the serial comma.
This poem seems appropriate for our times given that is was written during the Great Depression and focuses on the disillusionment with the excesses of capitalism and the emptiness of America’s material obsessions. He was once asked whether he was a Communist in a witch-hunt trial, and he responded “Not yet.” Like another of my favorite poems, T. Roethke’s “Dolor,” this chronicles the unique sorrow of white collar work.
Dirge
1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1;
Bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite
at Bowie but the track was slow –
O executive type, would you like to drive a floating-power, knee-action, silk-upholstered six? Wed a Hollywood star? Shoot the course in 58? Draw to the ace, king, jack?
O fellow with a will who won’t take no, watch out for three cigarettes on the same, single match; O democratic voter born in August under Mars, beware of liquidated rails-
Denouement to denouement, he took a personal pride in the certain, certain way he lived his own, private life,
But nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless, the bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called; nevertheless, the radio broke,
And twelve o’clock arrived just once too often,
Just the same he wore one gray tweed suit, bought one straw hat, drank one straight Scotch, walked one short step, took one long look, drew one deep breath,
Just one too many,
And wow he died as wow he lived,
Going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,
Zowie did he live and zowie did he die,
With who the hell are you at the corner of his casket, and where the hell’re we going on the right-hand silver knob, and who the hell cares walking second from the end with an American Beauty wreath from why the hell not,
Very much missed by the circulation staff of the New York Evening Post; deeply mourned by the B.M.T.
Wham, Mr Roosevelt; pow, Sears Roebuck; awk, big dipper; bop, summer rain;
Bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong.
On a more personal note:
I am happy to hear that in a week I will probably be walking again. The bones are healing nicely and the tendon too. The sprain in my right hand is healing up, slowly, but is getting better every week. I am so ready to go out in the sun and walk, walk, walk. The several-flights-of-stairs may still be a problem as I heal, but still, it’s getting better all the time, as the song goes.
With all the time not spent at physical therapy and doctor appointments, I have been reading, writing, reading, and writing. (Well, and a little movie-and-television watching: Vicky Christina Barcelona, it was great to see you!) I have been researching my childhood backyard, Oak Ridge National Labs, part of the Manhattan Project where the very first nuclear bombs were born, and the environmental damage it may or may not have caused (the DOE and EPA don’t see eye to eye on this one, and believe me, the local papers sure as hell won’t say anything negative about the city’s main employer.) So much about this place is still classified, and everyone who worked there forced to sign papers that basically forbid them from saying anything, ever, about anything, so it’s a bit frustrating – a lot of obscure scientific journals have been pored over. Suffice it to say there’s a lot of evidence but not a lot of full disclosure. Leukemia rates, thyroid cancer rates, radioactive white-tailed deer and swallows’ nests…tantalizing data but all leading up to…what?
Writing about my childhood is odd, too – I’m not, by nature, a nostalgic person, and I’ve never been much of a “confessional” poet, so my ability to reach back and conjure up stories and poems is flexing some of my unused writing muscles. In a not-at-all-metaphorical related fact, my childhood home – not only the two-story brick building but the sight of acres of roses, daffodils, lilacs and strawberries, oak trees and woods – hey, it might have been environmentally poisonous but it was still beautiful in that fertile, Southeast-river-and-mountain-valley way – has been razed to dirt. There is literally nothing left to sift through.
But I’ve managed to put together fifty-plus pages now, a new manuscript born into a world of too-many-poetry-manuscripts-and-not-enough-publishers-or-readers. Whispers of the oak trees, the odd neighbors, my childhood friends who were all the children of physicists from other countries – the Geiger counter my father always had out at all hours, his warnings about radiation exposure from snowmen – they are all ganging up on me, demanding to be heard.
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.
