Sorry to neglect the blog! Husband G got a cold, then I got it, and in my downtime, I got to revamp my two manuscripts and write some new poems. I’m writing more about my childhood in Knoxville, and about the whole “nuclear” thing in Oak Ridge, which is on my mind more and more these days. My father worked as a consultant on the Oak Ridge site, checking in and out with his radioactive-monitoring badge, showing me how to work a Geiger counter at an early age, and owned a black safe in which “secret government documents” were kept. Dad worked on the cleanup end, trying to figure out how to make the place safer, not on the whole “making bombs or reactors” side.
I’m also planning a big web site revamp, moving from the techie main site with poetry subsite to a main site focused on poetry. The site will have fewer subpages, the navigation will be cleaner, and the style will be a little softer, a little more “creative type” and a little less “Matrix.”
After all, when I started webbish6.com lo these many years ago, I was mostly a freelancing technical journalist, who was just starting to get going on the poetry stuff – whereas now, I’m mostly a poet – at least I think so. Plus, the code is old and doesn’t run well on Firefox, which is what about a third of visitors are using, according to my web stats. My little brother, who is a graphics wizard, is helping me build the layout, and we got permission to use some art from one of my current favorite artists. I hope you’ll like it!
I know exactly what you want to do with your beautiful Memorial Day weekend – get a peek at my thesis essay on persona poetry! You know you want to.
If you’ve been following this blog, you know I’ve been interested in persona poetry pretty much since I started writing. Poemeleon, that paragon of online poetry magazines, just published its theme issue on persona poetry, which contains poems by me (from the Japanese MS,) Mary Agner, Dorianne Laux, Bob Hicok, Lana Ayers (her Red Riding Hood is a hoot,) and a bunch of other cool poets.
Plus, a shorter-and-sweeter version of my MFA thesis critical essay on the persona poetry of Lucille Clifton, Louise Gluck, and Margaret Atwood called “Why We Wear Masks.” Also, why isn’t there a good anthology of persona poetry already out there? Paging publishers and anthologists!
Some more on Poets Earning a Living, a continuation of my current fascination with the subject:
http://pshares.blogspot.com/2008/05/bah.html
Ploughshares blog discusses this article:
http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=money
The N+1 article reminds me I am spending too much on rent.
Second Book Blues
So, working on the re-organization of my two manuscripts for the next set of deadlines. For all the “first book” contests, there really aren’t that many places interested in reading second books. It feels harder this time than last, and that could be simple math – there’s just not as many places I can send. Fewer places are accepting open submissions; Copper Canyon’s contest for first or second books is on indefinite hiatus, Wave Books isn’t accepting subs til next year, Ausable decided not to read open subs this year, etc. Sign of the times?
- At May 22, 2008
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Rhino 2008 review
0
RHINO is a magazine I started liking way back when I was a reviewer for NewPages.com. The voices are often direct, edgy, humorous, dark in an odd way, the language interesting but not punch-drunk.
So, receiving my contributor copy this year of RHINO 2008 made me happy. They published one of my fox-wife poems (“The Note the Fox Wife Leaves Him”) with a tiny mistake that I may have made or may have been made at the copy-edit level. You know the difference between a “–” and a “-” can make a lot of a difference to the meaning of a line, I discovered as I tried to piece together what the word “mind-remembrances” could have meant – then I realized it was supposed to be an – which separated two clauses between “mind” and “remembrances,” and the poem became familiar again.
Notwithstanding my own poem, mind-remembrances and all, there’s a lot of great poetry here. The poem “Why Lot’s Wife Was Turned into a Pillar of Salt,” by Mel Patrell Furman, I thought would be a re-telling of the familiar Biblical tale but ended up a sensuous and melancholic meditation on 9/11:
“For doubting the life that continues after the towers have fallen when plum silk lies in lines of ash on the floor of Neiman’s and whitehot blasts have darkened the extra-virgin oil,
after the laundresses have been martyred, and the manicurists…”
In a similar mood, Ivy Alvarez’ “The Ruin” imagines a lost past…”you shamble beside me/ the jester/ /carrying clementines for eyes…there is a ledge/ with room enough for two//we do not sit.”
Wendy Wisner’s lyric prose poem about a seagull stealing her hamburger on a cold beach ends with the terrific line: “It was winter, a time of hunger.” Oliver de la Paz’ “The Dogs of the Orchard” allows the speaker to commune with wild things. Glenn Shaheen’s amazing poem based on the knock-knock joke form, “From a Hundred and One Hilarious Knock-Knock Jokes,” moves to places you would never guess, and the form allows for expansive, ironic musings: “Orange you glad we live in a society of cheap trinkets? It’s not a bad thing at all to be shown this kind of love.”
Anyway, there are only so many little literary magazines I enjoy every time, and RHINO is one of them. Congrats, editors, on your years of hard work – thanks!
Back from the Skagit River Poetry Festival and soo sooo tired. We left the house 9 AM Friday morning to catch a ferry to go over to La Connor, WA (arriving just past 1 PM) and just got back now at 8 PM Saturday night. In between that time, I caught a couple of panels (Poetry and the Spirit, Women’s Voices, etc) and some great readings (Pattiann Rogers, Rachel Rose, David Wagoner among them) and saw lots of my NW friends, and other old friends who’ve moved farther afield, if only briefly.
Got to go out to dinner Friday night with Pattiann, who was my thesis semester advisor at Pacific, and talk about her new book, Wayfare, as well as my plans (who knows?) and how/when I’m going to publish my second book (who knows?) Oh, my life is up the air. Where to live? What to do? Anyway, she was very supportive and funny as always. Her accent always reminds me a lot of my multitudes of Missouri relatives. She took me out to ice cream today and I knocked Carolyn Kizer’s daughter off the sidewalk in my enthusiasm. Oh, my childish ways!
The weather went from a bleak six months of temps hovering at the top at 50 and rain to a sudden 86 degrees this weekend, and boy did that sun come back with a vengeance. Some kind of bipolar weather. I think my lips got sunburned, just walking around. Saw tons of bald eagles, heron, even some wild turkey (the bird, not the drink.) Right before we left Friday morning, we saw a mother deer and her baby on the beach, walking in the water in an attempt, I assume, to cool off.
So good times but such a flurry of poetry activities, long driving times and many restaurants/events without air conditioning that I am exhausted. Off to shower and sleep!
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.
