You guys will be so jealous of me when I tell you who I got listen to yesterday at the poetry festival – Richard Siken, blogger and winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize for Crush. He did a charming reading/talk on spirituality and the self – reading some new work as well as “Crush” poems, which I enjoyed anew. What an interesting and funny guy. He said some accused him of being a “morning after poet.” HA! Here’s my favorite poem from the book, “Poem in Which Things are Crossed Out.”
http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177722
Anyway, I know some of you must be tired of seeing me promote readings, but I promise this is the last one for April! (Oh, poetry month, both a blessing and a curse, and full of your muddy shoes!)
Hey Seattlites! Come out to the Richard Hugo House at 7 PM tomorrow to see me reading with Juliet Patterson, who hails from far away Minneapolis who reads her book, Truant Lover, from Nightboat Press, which is pretty cool. Click here to read her “first book interview” with Kate Greenstreet and one of her poems:
http://www.kickingwind.com/62906.html
(In the voice of the guy who sells Monster Truck rallies…)
SATURDAY SATURDAY SATURDAY is POETRY POETRY POETRY
Sure, you could come out to the Seattle Poetry Festival on Saturday for poetry luminaries like Richard Siken and Mary Jo Bang. Or friends like Martha Silano and Peter Pereira. Or to see slam poets go up alongside academic poets like Heather McHugh for the sheer fun of it.
But, if you make it to The Richard Hugo House in Capitol Hill by 11:45-12:15, you get a chance to see me and fellow co-editor of Crab Creek Review, Natasha K. Moni, go old-skool head-to-head with our “bad girls lost in a dark wood”-style poetry. Becoming the Villainess will be available for sale for 30 minutes afterwards while I sign books. After that I will be hanging out as a spectator, catching all the cool poetry action. Don’t miss it!
In good news, look for Mary Biddinger today on Verse Daily!
In other news:
My poor sweetie has been so sick, the doctors think he has ‘walking pneumonia.’ I took him to the hospital for chest x-rays today. He’s on the same antibiotics I was taking last week, and they gave him an albuterol breathing treatment at the dr office. Think good thoughts for his speedy recovery!
Still don’t know where I’ll be living after the end of May, and still interviewing for jobs. I wouldn’t mind some good thoughts in that direction too!
In good news, Smartish Pace, after having a review I’d written since 2005 of David Lehman’s last book, finally published it this week! There’s a link to it on the front page, and here’s a direct link:
http://www.smartishpace.com/home/dynamic.html?reviews_lehman.html
I’m finishing up a review of Ivy Alvarez’ Mortal as well. And I’ve started up a (still, fairly lame and new) blog for Crab Creek Review, whose web site has proved more challenging for me than I expected, due to its programming – a Unix server, old PHP programming, old server-side includes – I’ve programmed web pages with Microsoft technology for so long (um, 15 years?) it’s a shock to my system! I’m not even sure exactly the way to change the price of the subscription because I’m not sure of the code in the order form! And the CSS form looks like something I’ve never seen. I don’t understand having a CSS – I mean, there’s barely any style to the Crab Creek pages right now, why do they need such a complicated style sheet? I could remake the site from scratch, like I don’t already have enough to do…
- At April 17, 2007
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
2
My heart and prayers go out to the friends and family of the dead at Virginia Tech. I am saddened but not shocked. Campuses are one of the least safe places you can be. And evil, unexplained evil, is all around. I am suprised by all the goodness that still surrounds us, even in darkness. I am surprised by hope. It takes more courage to love than to kill. More strength to have compassion than hate. Being a hero in this world means, sometimes, ignoring the evidence, and reaching out to others, saying yes, saying, you are worth risking.
Back home at last after a whirlwind of poetry, family (almost every member of my family drove into Chicago to see me for at least one day from Cincinnati, and all seperately, so you can imagine the fun) and quick tourist-ing (Field Museum with its giant dinosaurs and the Art Institute, Millenium Park in the rain, driving around Lake Michigan when the waves were ten feet high.) I didn’t get to do any shopping, due to my very low current freelance income, which was a shame, because the shopping in Chicago looked fantastic. In every window, another temptation. On the last full day I got to have lunch with Brandi Homan (whose lovely Dancing Girl Press chapbook, Two Kinds of Arson, is very worth checking out) and coffee with Jessa Crispin (who runs Bookslut and, check it out, was named one of Wired Magazine’s Hottest Geeks of 2005.) and a friend of hers who is a professional confectioner. Doesn’t that sound like a great job?
Still kind of under the weather with the cough and head thing, for which I have now been on antibiotics for, what, like fifteen days now? Dang. Hard to shake. But we made chicken soup with fennel and onion at midnight last night on our arrival, and are now working on a large pot of homeade beef vegetable stew, to be taken with orange juice. If those things can’t cure me, well, there’s no help except to move to a warm, sunny, dry climate.
In other poetry news:
I came home to a really nice issue of Eleventh Muse, which included many fine poems (that admittedly I have only skimmed) and my poem “Rescuing Seiryu, the Blue Dragon.” I ended up liking the poem when I read it again, it seemed to have not been written by me at all but by some alter ego. Isn’t it weird when that happens?
Now, I seriously have to recover before the next two readings – Saturday the 21st and Monday the 23rd. I’ll be under my comforter, watching 30 Rock and Colbert Report recordings, until then.
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.
