- At October 14, 2008
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In apocalypse, Oak Ridge, Qarrtsiluni
2
A poem, “Oak Ridge, Tennessee,” with a little recording of me reading it, went up at Qarrtsiluni today. It’s the “Journaling the Apocalypse” issue, so check it out.
Well, after living here for exactly two weeks, and spending most of that time hunched over a computer working or unpacking, Glenn and I decided to take advantage of a cloudless, cooler day (around 70) to finally visit the San Diego Zoo. The hummingbird house was closed, sadly, but the meerkat exhibit was terrific, like Meerkat Manor without the annoying melodramatic narrator, and the baby koala bears were so cute I thought maybe I’d just move in to the zoo right then and there. I did take a whole year of training at the Cincinnati Zoo while I was a biology-major undergrad, after all. I could be a koala handler!
Here are the pics. Cuteness overload, indeed!
PS I forget. Do poets benefit from an economic downturn? People do seem to return to higher education in greater numbers during recessions…how about showing up at poetry readings? What do you think?
Friend and fellow Pacific MFA alum Michelle Bitting has a poem from her new book, Good Friday Kiss, up on Verse Daily today. Go take a look!
Aimee Nezhukumatathil has an essay on scary Halloween-appropriate poems up at Poetry Foundation.com!
And I received Suzanne Frischkorn’s lovely Lit Windowpane and my publisher Tom Hunley’s Octopus in the mail this week. Octopus is full of funny and thoughtful meditations on culture, poetry and fatherhood.
Of course my favorite poem in Lit Windowpane, a group of poems about a disintegrating relationship and nature poems that echo that mood, is the first one, “The Mermaid Takes Issue with the Fable.” You can see that poem here.
As a young teenager, one of the only things I liked about living in Ohio were the beautiful November sunsets. The baleful orange glow on the horizon…
Yesterday there was a beautiful sunset, but the baleful orange glow on the horizon wasn’t from a big ball of flame in the sky, but a wildfire on Camp Pendleton, a Marine base a few miles from our house. It put out a plume of smoke that could be seen from fifty miles away at least. Welcome to California! It is a land of natural disasters.
On the plus side, the watermelons are $1.50 a piece at the local market and avocadoes $2 for a sack full. With the economy the way it is, well, at least we’ll be able to afford to eat!
I’ve been a little discouraged about my two book manuscripts lately. I feel like the checks just keep going out and nothing comes back in. Not good economics. I’ve also has a string of rejections lately, then a punctuation mark of two acceptances in two days. Sometimes I feel like the poetry world takes so much (volunteer work, subscribing, writing reviews, checks to contests and open submissions, rejection slips) and gives back…well, not so much.
The Santa Ana winds are approaching.
In actual poetry-related news…
Got a chance to sneak into downtown San Diego (for the first time since we moved here) to go to City College’s San Diego book festival. Li Young Lee was there, though I didn’t see him read, and I got to catch up briefly with Ilya Kaminsky, a terrific poet who now works as a professor at SDSU instead of as a lawyer. I met Lorna Dee Cervantes, from the blog world, which was pretty neat (I have a couple of her books on my shelf.) And I got to hear Carolyn Forche read. She’s a pretty accomplished reader. She read, to my delight, a lot of her older poems, including “The Colonel” and some new poems, including two about Ilya! I guess it’s not just my former workshop group on Bainbridge Island that he charmed…Carolyn Forche too! LOL. She talked about how her first teaching job was here in San Deigo (!!) and that she learned poetry from her mother’s college poetry textbook (me too!) So that was pretty cool. She looked great and was wearing patent strappy sandals. Glenn and I also made a side trip to a wonderful bakery in Hillcrest called Bread et Cie, which I recommend.
So, we have not yet gone to the zoo, any of the missions, Coronado…but we managed to drag our partially brain-dead selves to a poetry event! Who says our priorities are out of order?
PS Still many boxes downstairs. Also – a bunch of grading tomorrow. Grading gives me hives.
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.
