Greetings from the land of the slowly recovering poet…
I’ve had bronchitis for two weeks and unfortunately this made my asthma act up so badly I had to go back on twice-a-day inhaled steroids. This is a bummer because they have yucky side-effects. It is also a bummer because the asthma attacks tend to happen mostly at night, and therefore I have been sleeping like nobody’s business. On Saturday, I went to bed at midnight, woke up at 4:30 AM with a bad attack, then slept til 4:30 in the afternoon. This was the day of my 12th Anniversary, which I was supposed to spend in romantic entanglement and various out-to-nice-restaurant-and-movie-type celebrations, but instead husband G brought me flowers and presents and dinner in bed. I’m so lame! Then I missed seeing poet friends on Bainbridge Island because Sunday all I wanted to do was sleep – again, this time til 2:30 in the afternoon. Today, I woke up at 9 AM to take my several dosages of various medicines, then slept til 11:30. I’m turning into such a sloth I am not getting anything done! Plus, even in my dreams, I’m apologizing to people for sleeping so much! So I’m hoping the bronchitis/acute asthma thing GOES away soon.
In the meantime, I’ve been haunted by a California quail that sits on a fence post outside my office window every morning for the last four days going “er-er-EEERRR” for about two hours. When I walk on my trail in the evenings, he follows me. Just one fat little male quail. Is this a message from the universe, and if so, what does it mean?
In other news, I’ve been reading interesting books – particularly Ink Dark Moon and Amy Uyetmatsu’s Stone Bow Prayer and Kimiko Hahn’s Ant and Mosquito. The organization of Uyetatsu’s book is extremely interesting – it is divided into sections based on the lunar calendar, and each section is focused in mood or subject related to the name of that month – for instance, section 2 is “Kisaragi – Month of Putting On More Clothes” which contains poems which discuss adolescence, modesty and the awareness of the male gaze. Brilliant, right? And Kimiko Hahn does these odd little riffs on Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, in the same style of seemingly random prose observations that seem to really work.
I’m behind on my freelance assignments and reviewing, but until I get better, my mind is shrouded in that weird fever-fog – which may be good for reading and writing poetry (and reading blogs) but bad for those practical critical thinking kinds of exercises. Thanks to everyone who wrote in with kind wishes about the Writer’s Almanac thing et al and those who bought my book 🙂 Grosses bises, as my French class friends and I used to say to each other when we were trying to sound cool.

Well, some bookish news…

Here’s Garrison Keillor reading my poem “Female Comic Book Superheroes” on the Friday June 7th The Writer’s Almanac…

and I found a review of my book in Midwest Book Review’s July 2006 issue:

Becoming the Villainess
Jeannine Hall Gailey
Steel Toe Books
Western Kennedy University, 1 Big Red Way, Bowling Green, KY 42101-35760974326437 $12.00 www.steeltoebooks.com
Becoming the Villainess is the debut collection of free-verse poetry by journalist Jeannine Hall Gailey. Addressing the archetypes of myth, from modern pop culture to Ovid to Grimm’s fairy tales, Gailey weaves words expressing the hearts of shunned, reviled, justly and unjustly treated villainesses and female victims of fable. A dramatic, moving collection; each poem has a gripping personal story to tell. “Daphne, Older”: Peel back my skin: / reveal hard fibers, bite marks, // scars from wind and rain. / Life is pain – I won’t tell you // any different. Just that sometimes, / avoiding what you fear // isn’t the answer. See? All these years / my branches sang with birds // and my leaves drank sunlight- / I haven’t missed much. // My heartwood hardens slowly / over time – first, to the music, then, to the light.”

This review, among others, can be found at http://www.midwestbookreview.com/sbw/jul_06.htm under Poetry.

Hope you all had a good 4th of July weekend.
On Saturday I got a chance to read with Kelli Russell Agodon in Poulsbo, Washington, at a little coffee shop called the Poulsbohemian. It was so hot – I think I read less than ten minutes because I literally thought I might pass out from the heat – but we had fun and a friendly crowd, so it was worth it!
Most of the holiday I spent resting, trying to get over bronchitis (I know, I know, who gets bronchitis in July?) I did get a chance to stop by Open Books, the local poetry bookstore, and acquired a big book of Gary Snyder’s poetry and prose, Kathleen Ossip’s Search Engine, and Kimiko Hahn’s Ant and Mosquito (which includes contemporary takes on Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book) which I loved. And went to the Kirkland fireworks, which involved sitting by Lake Washington, watching three sets of fireworks – Kirkland, Lake Union, and another display that appeared to come from Bill Gates’ compound – and their lights glowing in the water. We did have some thunderstorms right before the fireworks, but Glenn and I managed to grill out while it was still sunny – grilled corn on the cob, grilled asparagus, and this year, we tried a spice-rubbed whole turkey breast – which was pretty good, and even better later as sandwiches. So much fruit this time of year you can’t eat it all – cherries, plums, doughnut peaches, figs. We made a gallon of watermelon-limeade which is the perfect respite from hot, muggy weather.
Also, the space shuttle launched – despite the fact that protective foam had fallen off of crucial areas – the same problem that caused the explosion of the space shuttle on re-entry all those years ago. And, North Korea launched several missiles, near Japan, Russia, and a long-range missile (that some think is capable of reaching the Western US, including Washington state and California) that exploded after a few minutes. This seems very disturbing and a return of the threat of nuclear war that I think most of us had assumed had been overshadowed by other threats. The phrase “Sabre rattling” appeared in the news frequently in conjunction to these test missiles.
PS – Check out Rachel Zucker’s blog at the poetry foundation web site.

Went to the Floating Bridge Press reading this evening, featuring this year’s winner Annette Spaulding Convy, a good friend and terrific poet, as well as some entertaining finalists. I was sick (caught bronchitis somehow during a heatwave – how does that happen? and PS sometimes when you feel really woozy and hot during a heatwave, it’s because you have a fever, not because it’s 90 and you have no air conditioning because Seattle’s buildings are apparently built for nothing but mellow 70’s summer temps. Anyway…) so I couldn’t socialize as cogently as usual afterwards, but I still loved seeing Annette read – she writes the kind of funny, clever, heartbreaking work I wish I wrote.
A teeny listing (but I’ll take it!) in the July 1st weekend edition of the Seattle Times: http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=localbooks02&date=20060630&query=books
Also, I finally got the anthology Mary Alexandra Agner edited called Rhymes for Adults in the mail – a little chapbook of formal poetry from the likes of fellow bloggee Steve Schroeder and also AE Stallings and Annie Finch. The poem I contributed was a fun challenge for me, since I don’t often write in form, but the subject – a Japanese fairy tale – seemed more willing to bend into a form that most.
And a copy of Poets & Writers with the little ad for my book and the two other new books from Steel Toe Books. It was pretty exciting. Remember, this is the last day to send in for the Steel Toe Books June Open Submissions so get going with those manuscript!

If you’re looking for poetry news, and/or may be offended by the mention of animal testicles, please skip to the previous entry…

Odd Japanese pop trivia you may or may not need to know…
(brought to you by my extensive research of Hayao Miyazaki’s ouevre)
…the cheesy John Denver song “Country Roads,” as sung by Olivia Newton John, was a huge hit in Japan in the 70s. This song is featured in the movie “Whispers of the Heart.”
Also the film “Pom Poko” was not released in the theaters in America because the cute cuddly racoon-like creatures starring in the animated film have an important magic power that involves swelling their testicles to use as parachutes and weaponry…that film was also an imporant precurser to the current film “Over the Hedge,” although this version, to my understanding, does not feature any giant testicles.
That is all…