Mystery of Hotmail Problems…Solved! It turns out I was involuntarily upgraded to the new “Windows Live Mail Beta” yesterday, and I bet they lost mail or locked out senders or something when they transferred servers. Perfect – thanks Microsoft! If only Gmail’s horrid “threading feature” didn’t make me want to punch a hole in my computer screen. Where have all the good free e-mail providers gone?
Mystery of back problems – Solved! Turns out from an MRI I had a disc bulging against a nerve. Yup, it hurt. But now it’s getting better. No surgery, no steroids. Yay!
Mystery of where to live starting in May – Still unsolved. Stay tuned.
Poetry News Items:
I have tentatively signed on as a co-editor (or possibly some sort of hybrid poetry editor/web editor/jack of all trades) of a little Northwest lit mag called “Crab Creek Review.” I will revamp the web site as soon as I get time. Lots of paperwork to sort out. But the new Crab Creek editorial team seems really great. So, say goodbye to my free time!
Kate Greenstreet and Janet Holmes read from their new books, Case Sensitive and F2F, at Open Books on Tuesday night. They are both really animated, energetic readers. Kate, who comes from New Jersey, has a great voice for radio. That’s just my opinion. Are you listening, NPR? Seriously though, sometimes writers really give you a chance to rethink their work off the page, and the one thing I learned is that Kate’s book, which I had read more than once, actually has a lot of funny bits that I had missed.
Dang it! If you have been sending me e-mails through my web form or to my hotmail address, they have NOT been getting through, so please re-send. I’m so sorry to do this through the blog, but I have missed pretty much all my messages from yesterday and today. I am not ignoring you, I promise.
Endicott Studios blog strikes again – this time, with two poems from Pebble Lake Review, including one of my myterious “fox-wife” poems:
http://endicottstudio.typepad.com/endicott_redux/2007/03/the_sunday_poem_2.html
and “Sibyl” by Kim Young.
Possibly trivial observation – Sarah McLachlan’s song, Building a Mystery, is about a sexualized embodiment of the female’s male muse, in opposition to all those poems and songs about the male’s female muse?
Read Charles Jensen’s take on the lessons of Buffy in the non-profit sector.
Congratulate Eduardo!
And, last, find me a place to live and a decent job.
More mini-review madness
Mary Biddinger’s Prairie Fever:
Don’t expect any mild-mannered nature poetry about prairie wildlife here, although wildlife does appear, torn and bedraggled, birds dead on windowsills, red flowers appearing on throats. Full of dark fragmentary looks at the inner and outer violences of the bored bad girls of the prairie, poking dead bodies with sticks, rinsing their hair with beer, and making out in abandoned barns. Stark, vivid writing illuminating shadows with lightning-sharp imagery and bone-cracking emotion.
Did some more Expedia work today, then combed Craigslist for places to live, which were all too expensive, which made me comb Craigslist for more part-time work. All in all, depressing.
In reading news:
Peter’s new book reading at Open Books was standing room only, and Peter was wonderful. His new book even has a couple of mythology-alluding poems in it! You know I’m a sucker for those. Here’s the first few lines from “Case History: Persephone:”
“The visiting surgery resident
inserts the icy speculum
while the mother stands nearby
clutching her only daughter’s pale hand.
Outside the window – a barren
January day. The long fields lie empty,
their edges stitched with bare trees.”
Isn’t he a great poet?
Today, I’m re-socializing myself by going to Peter Pereira’s new book reading and party, which should be wonderful, and I’m meeting up beforehand for a birthday lunch with a friend (her birthday, not mine) which should be good as well. I always need a little living-in-a-cave-by-myself time after big social weeks, like AWP or the school residencies. I swear I’m an extrovert, I just need breaks in between extroverted events.
So, onto writers and their portrayal in film. I loved the tremendous “Stranger than Fiction,” which features an author obsessing over how to kill her main character, a vulnerable and subtle Will Ferrell. Then I fell into the movie “Music and Lyrics” (Hugh Grant, Drew Barrymore,) a much less tremendous film, which features a foetry nightmare character – a girl who seduces her powerful professor (a la David Lehman) at the New School to get her poems published, (or so the professor says) and when he dumps her and writes a thinly-veiled fictional account of her seduction, she has a nervous breakdown and becomes “charmingly quirky” (except the script allows the quirks to come and go like cats in the scenes. There’s no continuity or integrity about the character.) Then she’s redeemed by writing the lyrics for a pop-tart’s hit single. Nothing like the music business to clean up the dirt left by the poetry biz? LOL.
Post-AWP Reading:
I’m reading Simone Muench’s Lampblack & Ash, which is painfully pretty and powerful, like walking in stilletos over every word, and Brandi Homan’s chap, Two Kinds of Arson, which I read all in one sitting and then promptly wrote a poem afterwards (always the sign of good reading.) I even envisioned a string of poems about Rapunzel. So, my advice: read both books, then get to your writing! I also read the lastest issue of Sentence, which had some wonderful bits by Margaret Atwood and a bunch of fascinating stuff. It’s not just your typical lyrical surreal prose poem kind of writing. A nice diversity.
I may get in trouble for mentioning it (he explicitly asked for no reviews!) but Jim Behrle’s chapbook, She’s My Best Friend, is fun reading, as well as beautifully produced. OK, that’s all I’m saying.
(Music: Reasons to Be Beautiful by Hole)
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.
