What are you doing this rainy Saturday in Seattle?
A perfect day for Elliot Bay Book Company and a reading…
(PS My last in Seattle for the near future…)
LYNNELL EDWARDS & JEANNINE HALL GAILEY
Saturday, June 16 at 2 p.m.
Kentucky poet Lynnell Edwards, a contributor to Poets Against the War and recipient of a 2007 Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, reads this afternoon from her second collection of poetry, The Highwayman’s Wife (Red Hen). “Edwards reinterprets old myths and legends, twists the old formal strategies, underdomesticates domesticity, mixes drinks, plants dahlias with a pick-axe, and laments and resurrects …” – Cecilia Wooloch.
She’s joined here by Seattle poet and journalist Jeannine Hall Gailey, who will read from her collection, Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe). “These full-bodies persona poems give dimension to the powerful (and powerless) female heroes of myth and comic books with strong voices that struggle against stereotype and silence.” – Dorianne Laux.
Emerging from the cloud of a bad sinus infection (and the accompanying fog of maximum doses of cold medicine)…
My thanks to Kelli, who answers my “good girl/bad poet” question with a quote from Margaret Atwood: “People think you can’t be a poet without being drunk. Women poets are expected to commit suicide. Someone once asked me when, not if, I would commit suicide.”
Margaret Atwood
As far as my own inspirational poetry quotes, how about this one, from a poem I have framed in my home office – Merwin’s “Berryman:”
“I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write”
and another from Atwood, her poem “The Words Continue Their Journey:”
“The loony bins are full of those
who never wrote a poem.
Most suicides are not
poets: a good statistic.”
From The Onion: Water as Metaphor?
I decided to put together my new poems to see how they were shaping up and found I had a somewhat cohesive 35-page manuscript. Weird. Does this mean I’ll have two manuscripts to send out this fall? Yikes. I’m considering re-arranging my Japanese-themed MS for the next round…
I’ve taken on a slightly reduced role at Crab Creek Review – as a consulting editor rather than a co-editor. This allows me to miss meetings as needed and spend a little more time on other projects, while still helping out the magazine. I’m really still hoping to start up a press this year. A part-time gig would be enough to cover the expenses (if it paid decently.) It’s a matter of time and energy, too. I want to focus on finding some work right now, and writing and submitting (which have both been neglected lately.)
Gearing up for my last Seattle reading for some time at Elliot Bay Book Company this Saturday…
Some great, realistic advice about poetry publication is available in this online excerpt from Salt Publishing’s book on the same subject. If you’re new to poetry, before you send out your work for the first or second time, read this: http://www.saltpublishing.com/info/submissions.htm
A new review of Becoming the Villainess by Diane Lockward in the April 2007 issue of Review Revue.
A few poems in the new issue of The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, and a few more in the first issue of the new journal, Radiant Turnstile. I’m proud to appear there alongside my friend Jeff Walt.
Spent the weekend getting situated in the new place. Furniture keeps mysteriously appearing from the garage, and pictures on the wall…
I’ve been contemplating the expected archetype of “poet.” You know, the Byron/Plath/Breadloaf orgy thing – he/she has a dramatic personal life, gets drunk/smokes/takes drugs a lot, hangs out in seedy bars, hooks up frequently with other poets…I think I don’t fit into this particular cliche very well. In fact, I think Adam Ant wrote the song “Goody Two Shoes” about me. What do you think? Are these still requirements for being a poet?
Come on out tonight to Kirkland’s Parkplace Books to see me read with Deborah Woodard (and Lana Ayers, host extrodinaire!) 7 PM. Be there or be some kind of trapezoid.
Also, see Mary Biddinger’s first book interview with Kate Greenstreet here. She’s witty and self-deprecating – I especially liked the part about opening the first box of books with a jeweled dagger.
PS Did I tell you the story about finding my new local library (we now live in a small-townish, more rural area called Bothell)? I walked in the doors, and the first thing I saw was my book on the “Librarians’s Picks” display rack, with a little sticker on it that said “new and interesting.” The book looked like it had actually been read, maybe dropped in a puddle or two, and chewed on. I took this as proof that someone outside of my friends and family had read it. Cheers to Bothell librarians!
First of all, thanks for your good wishes!
My regular blogging schedule has been interrupted by the need to unpack and unload boxes, pack up and clean the old rental place, and commute between them three times away with carloads of extra “Stuff” we couldn’t fit in the U-Haul/didn’t have time to pack. Moving is such a pain. Also, my writing biz things – envelopes, staplers, stamps, notebooks – have never really been organized, so I keep finding (a cup of highlighters! The draft of a poem! Sases!) in boxes full of shampoo or cartons of crackers. I hope at some point we can settle down someplace. Although Glenn and I have been married 13 years next month, we’ve never lived in any one place longer than two years. Are we pathological or what? I mean, we’re in our mid-thirties now. Don’t most people in thier mid-thirties have a house and two cars and regular jobs and kids and some kind of deeply worn groove? I fear that we have missed some switch, some marker we should have been paying attention to.
Last night I bought and read Haruki Murakami’s new book of interwoven stories, “After Dark.” Its main conceit – two sisters, one a beautiful model who does nothing but sleep, the other a ferociously smart and independent insomniac – was fascinating to me, especially as I have been writing about the “Snow White” story lately. When I was a kid, Snow White was the only non-blonde princess option. But I never really “got” her story – really, her main action is non-action, which wasn’t very interesting. Murakami’s prose style (as far as I can tell – of course I’m reading a translation) is really delightful to me, detached yet playful and poetic.
I read an interesting post on responsible and smart corporate blogging, here. It makes me think about what it means to be a “responsible” blogger in general. Did you know a kid, a few years ago, got fired from Google for posting about the differences between Microsoft and Google’s benefits? Do poets have the same kinds of vested interests, for instance, talking about various literary magazines or influential poets could keep them from a job or from getting published? This guy also talks about the need for transparency and honesty – a blogger who never says anything negative has no cred. I think that’s probably true.
I’m reading a bunch of times in the next few weeks – on the 6th, at ParkPlace Books in Kirkland, WA, on the 16th with Lynnell Edwards at Elliot Bay Bookstore in downtown Seattle, then the 22nd at Pacific’s Alumni Reunion in Forest Grove, Oregon. I’d love to see some folks at any of these readings, so come out!
I discovered the newish online journal Siren because of the illustrious Dorianne Laux’s recommendation. Now I’m up there, along with fellow Crab Creek editor Natasha Moni. Check out their newest issue!
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.
