No rest for the wicked…

The reading at Open Books, Seattle’s poetry-only bookstore, was wonderful. The owners, John and Christine, provide the most gracious atmosphere one could wish for and John did outstanding introductions – truly moving – for Martha Silano and I. We were both a little nervous about being recorded for a possible local NPR show, but I think we did okay. The place was packed and the audience was terrific. Anyway, I can only say positive things about this experience, and if you get a chance to read at Open Books, you should. And now they have some signed copies of our books, if you stop in. Thanks to everyone who came out – I loved seeing your faces!
Husband G. and I are picking up the lovely and talented Kelli Russell Agodon on the way to the Skagit River Poetry Festival today, which starts Friday morning (I’ll be talking with high school kids all morning) and then readings that night and the full-on, everyone invited festival all Saturday, from sunup to sundown. I’m a little nervous about reading with Gerald Stern & co. on Saturday afternoon (4:15) but excited about meeting a poetry hero of mine, Anne Marie Macari, who reads right before that. Tess Gallagher, Billy Collins, Nance Van Winkel, Elizabeth Austin, and the aforementioned John W. Marshall from Open Books, along with a bunch of other famous poets, including friends like Peter Pereira and Kathleen Flenniken, will be there. After this I’m declaring a one-week poetry sabbatical. Did I mention that Silk Road is going to print next week and all of my MFA end-of-semester materials just came due? Oh, the fun, the madness!
Someone mentioned on Tuesday night how much healthier I am than just a year ago. What a difference a year makes! I’m hoping for the health thing to hold up a little longer…come on, immune system – and I’m grateful for all these fun opportunities. I just need a week of sleep to catch up. Then to school on the 10th on June!

Tuesday, May 16th, 7:30 PM
Jeannine Hall Gailey and Martha Silano read from their new books, Becoming the Villainess and Blue Positive!
Location: Open Books in Wallingford
I hope to see you there! And for margaritas afterwards!

In the everything happens at once newsbin:
Stanley Kunitz, who was 101, passed away.
I had a lovely late birthday party/workshop over on Bainbridge Island with my poet friends there. The cake had rasperry filling and pink roses, we wore leis, the weather was perfect – the yard was full of palm-sized squirrels and chipmunks.
One of my very favorite poets, Annette Spaulding-Convy, just won Floating Bridge Press’s Chapbook Contest. Her chapbook is going to be fantastic.
The lilacs are blooming everywhere.
I interviewed retiring Seattle Review editor Colleen McElroy for a feature Seattle Woman Magazine is going to do on her. Always a fun conversation.
I just got contributor copies of the new 2006 Evansville Review, with my poem “Becoming the Villainess” and poems by poets like XJ Kennedy and my former professor Andrew Hudgins, and the Spring/Summer 2006 Seattle Review, which had two poems from my book and a poem by blogger-and-friend Peter Pereira.
Of course, just to make life exciting, my dear husband G. had some bad clam chowder while I was with the poet friends so I was up most of the night last night bringing him ice chips and gingerale while he was pretty miserably getting read of said toxins. Yawnn…hope I get some sleep tonight…must be alert for the reading…after that, it’s on the Skagit River Poetry Festival – a busy week ahead…

It’s one of those poetry days…
I woke up from a series of disturbing dreams about hundreds of dead swans floating under water with a poem line in my head that I immediately wrote down:
“I could give my cocoon up to the grass”
which is one of those things that seem like genius when you first wake up and then, later, you’re left scratching your head.
I found out from my publisher that my book, Becoming the Villainess, has been adopted for an Intro to Creative Writing class at a University in Florida. I’m so excited! Although, sorry to those of you who will be forced to read my book for homework 😉 Still, it’s more exciting than reading Leaves of Grass for the twentieth time.
And I heard that the reading Martha Silano and I are doing at Open Books this upcoming Tuesday the 16th will be recorded for possible future radio airing on the local NPR station KUOW’s The Beat…exciting!
My little brother sent me an article from Wired talking about the reason young men are captivated by sexy powerful female role models in video games: How Lara Croft Steals Hearts. This article discusses the “Final Girl” theory that Jordan talked about a few days ago. None of this is a surprise – it’s been going on since Wonder Woman was created by a Jungian-obsessed Harvard professor who wanted a positive “anima” role model for boys and also, um, a lot of hot bondage action. Wikipedia has a pretty decent discussion of Wonder Woman’s origins, although they leave out any Jungian references.
Yesterday I wrote a poem that does not belong with any other new poems – instead, it’s a throwback to my old Grimms obsessions. I’m trying purposefully not to keep writing about the same things – hence my new penchant for writing about Japanese fairy tales and animé and trying to teach myself Kanji etc. Hmph. But I guess you should write the poems that want to be written and worry about sorting them later.

Report from a Billionaire’s living room exposed:
The art show that I went to last weekend, DoubleTake: From Monet to Lichtenstein, at the Experience Music Project in Seattle (the Gehry building beneath the Space Needle, which houses all of Paul Allen’s projects, including the Science Fiction museum and the EMP music museum – and now part of his personal art collection) was a little unsettling for me. First, they take you into a small, roped-off room, and make you watch a film defining things like “composition” and “color” narrated by David Hyde Pierce. After two minutes I ducked under the rope, frantic to escape, trying to find my way to the actual art. I hate anything that feels like a lecture about art – I went to my year of Art History, dammit! – I want to experience the art myself. Then you are given a talking handpiece which explains in “hip” language exactly what you are supposed to notice about the juxtaposed works. We, appropriately armed, are led into a single room, divided into three sections, which houses sometimes clever juxtapositions of one piece of art next to another, to highlight their differences and similarities, I assume. Sometimes this felt brilliant, other times condescending. On one wall where the juxtapositions worked, there were several paintings of the canals of Venice, one by Monet, one by Manet, one by Turner, and one by Caneletto. The Manet and Turner were both stunningly beautiful, and I’m not always a big Manet fan, but something about those intense blues, especially next to Turner’s gold light…of course what they wanted you to notice was that the images grew less defined as your eye went from painting to painting. The first wall you encounter was the huge promised Lichtenstein (of course, just having been to the incredible Lichtenstein exhibit at the Henry a month or so, I was less excited than I might have been) of “The Kiss,” a woman embracing a pilot with an airplane outline in the background – this was set next to Renoir’s “The Reader,” inviting comments about the positioning of the woman’s head, the background, etc. A wonderful Jasper Johns called “Numbers” – which was a brushed, beaten metal piece embedded with, you guessed it, random numbers, looked strangely appropriate next to a Monet of the Rouen cathedral. And one of the most amazing pieces of the collection was Jan Brueghel the Younger’s painting, “The Five Senses: Sight,” self-referential and delightfully detailed, a work I could have looked at for hours, next to Seurat’s “The Models” which has three women in varying states of undress seemingly in front of his masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, visible as a background corner – again, winkingly self-referential, and amazing work. A Max Ernst painting of an alien landscape was set next to Van Gogh’s “Orchard with Flowering Peach Trees.”
The framing of all the works was odd to say the least (trying not to give the masterworks’ pieces more importance than modern pieces, some frames looked like ten dollar throwaways, others fancifully elaborate) and the lighting was downright bad, and the juxtapositions of contemporaty versus modernist versus classical work didn’t always serve their purposes. However, since the Seattle Art Museum is closed down right now for renovation and Seattleites don’t have chances to see this many Impressionists together anywhere else, even when the SAM is open, I’d say it’s worth the $8 visit.
On to more poetry-oriented news –
I was delighted to receive a contributor’s copy of Grimm Magazine, my very first appearance in a Canadian journal. This perfect-bound journal has an offbeat, artsy feel, and is named after editor Ed Grimm, in case you were wondering. Check out www.grimmagazine.com.
Also, I don’t know if it’s just me, but I haven’t been sending out much because I’ve got so much work that still hasn’t come back from last year. No rejections, no acceptances, no news whatsoever! What’s up with that?
I’m nervous about my May 16th reading at Open Books, my first ever official “Becoming the Villainess” reading in Seattle. Nervous nervous nervous!

I tell you, it’s not safe to shut off the e-mail for a second! Just cracked open the laptop for the first time all weekend to get this welcome birthday news from my kind publisher Tom Hunley at Steel Toe Books – that my poem “When Red Becomes the Wolf” is up at Verse Daily! Coincidentally, the other new Steel Toe Books author, Martha Silano, has a poem up today at Poetry Daily. Thanks to Tom for letting me know. Seriously, I’m going to have to send those Verse Daily people candy or something.
Thanks for all your birthday well-wishes, by the way – it was a splendidly lazy weekend, with art and duck and many other good things, playing tourist in downtown Seattle. It was super rainy yesterday but beautiful today, which just matches my much uplifed spirits. Nothing like a rest to make you want to write again!
PS If you can find the transcript of Stephen Colbert’s White House Correspondant’s Dinner for a laugh, read it.