Webbish6

At March 24, 2008
By Jeannine Gailey
In Novelist's Strike Affects No One, The Onion
2

You know, I never thought I was one of those lazy bloggers who just posts links to The Onion, but…
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/novelists_strike_fails_to_affect

One of my favorite parts?

“No high-profile, red-carpet, star-studded telecasts of the PEN/Faulkner Awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Awards, or the Man Booker Prize Awards were affected by the strike, since no such telecasts have ever existed. “

Of course, it would have been funnier, I think, if it had been a poet’s strike. Maybe I’ll go write for television.

At March 23, 2008
By Jeannine Gailey
In ch-ch-ch-changes, jobs, moving again?, peep shows, somewhere there's a place for us
2

Well, Hoppy Easter!
In honor of our favorite stale marshmallow seasonal treats, please check out the “Peep Show” in case you haven’t already seen it on the Washington Post – some demented dioramas!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/20/AR2008032002753.html?nav%3Dhcmodule&sub=AR
(may have to register to view – and PS – don’t naively google “peep show” and hope this will show up, like I did!)

I’ve been doing some thinking about big changes in life – whether to move out of our new small town (our landlords decided they’d like to come back earlier than they thought), where to move, what kind of job I should be looking for…

I’ve begun to think that although I like freelance writing, something more regular, and more engaged with people, might be nice. I’m actually thinking of applying for (gulp) teaching jobs. It’s pretty intimidating stuff. Low-residency program work would be ideal, since it’s flexible, I could work from home most of the time, but still interact with people at residencies and through e-mail. And other kinds of work – editorial, publishing, working with magazines, or kids – also seem feasible. I’m starting to feel healthier as the weather gets warmer and drier (cue 40 degree weather and rain for a week…) and also more energetic. Which makes me antsy to start doing more with my life.

And if you had a chance to live anywhere, you have a known asthma problem and allergies to mold, where would you move? Here are some of the places that come to mind – the San Jose area, Boulder, Arizona, New Mexico…I’m looking for suggestions, so please throw them out!
(Some of the places I’ve had lots of respiratory problems – the Southeast, especially Florida, Cincinnati, LA, and, now that the relative years of draught have ended, the Northwest. So it seems like wet, moldy, and pollution-y places are on the outs.)

At March 14, 2008
By Jeannine Gailey
In aware, many mountains moving, mythic delirium, radio show
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Some quick notes:

I’ll be reading poems (along with Neil Aiken and fellow Pacific alum Michelle Bitting) on the radio show the Moe Green Poetry Hour (I believe the podcast should be available here:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onword)
at 6 PM Pacific time on March 16.

I’ve got a featured poem up (“Aware for the Woman Who Disappears in Silence”) at the Mythic Delirium web site, and you can hear me read the poem out loud there, plus there’s a cool piece of art illustrating the Bush-Warbler Japanese folk tale that the poem talks about!
http://www.mythicdelirium.com/

And I just received my copies of Many Mountains Moving, which features a bunch of really good poetry, and two reviews I wrote (of Dorianne Laux’s Facts About the Moon and Margaret Atwood’s The Door.)

A big thank you to everyone for their kind comments about the Poetry Foundation interview with Matthea Harvey.

At March 05, 2008
By Jeannine Gailey
In Matthea Harvey interview, Poetry Foundation features
5

It’s up! My interview with the awesome Matthea Harvey is up at the Poetry Foundation web site! Yay!
Go to the Poetry Foundation web site’s front page, or click here to go straight to the interview:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=181239
And please, give Matthea Harvey (and me) some comment-field love at the PF site!

First of all, check out Aimee Nez’s interview (in which she may do a bit of blog namedropping…) about being a poet who blogs here!

Second of all, a pleasant reading surprise – I picked up a copy of Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the practice and the art (a bunch of essays by people who’ve taught at the Warren Wilson program) and just loved Elinor Wilner’s piece called “The Closeness of Distance, or Narcissus as Seen by the Lake.” It’s practically a love song to persona poetry, or, as she describes it, “aesthetic distance” – poems in which the speaker cannot be assumed to be the poet, and poems in which the writer is explicitly not “writing what she knows.” She uses Daisy Fried as one example. She champions – what a novel idea – imagination as a real asset to poets.
There’s also a very decent essay by Larry Levis on elegies, and that Tony Hoagland piece about non-narrative/experimental poetry that appeared in – what? APR or Writer’s Chronicle a little while back? So, to those of you who like to read essays about poetry, it’s a good buy.

I leave the blog on Sunday to teach two weeks of a junior high creative arts camp – sponsored by Centrum – and boy, is it ever intensive: starting at 8:30 AM every day and ending at 9 PM at night. I usually don’t even wake up before 9:30! I will be teaching the kids about the connections between comic books, mythology, and poetry; I will bring in illustrated guides to mythology, and comic books, and hopefully inspire them to write in a new way. If I get ambitious, I may even talk about Carl Jung. I mean, junior high kids can grok archetypes, right? But I may not have much time or energy to blog during that time. So, I’ll miss you, and think good thoughts for me staying phsyically healthy and mentally un-crazy during those two weeks.

Thanks to The Magazine of Speculative Poetry for nominating my poem “Chaos Theory” for a Rhysling Award. It’s a poem about my Dad’s work investigating how to cleanup the Fernald Superfund site – wow, doesn’t that sound riveting 😉 The Magazine of Speculative Poetry is a really fun read, by the way, for those of you who didn’t know there was such a thing as “speculative poetry.”

One note: you may want to check out the Poetry Foundation’s features section in the next few days. In case, you know, a certain poetry supervillainess gets to interview a certain poetry superheroine therein. About comic books and anime and robots and other cool subject matter. I’m just saying.