Poetry News in August, Fiolet & Wing and Poetry Prompts Contributor Copies, and Night Zoos, Birds, and Roses

 

Goldfinch on red sunflower

Poetry News in August

For a week I spent mostly sick in bed with a summer virus, watching birds from my window, like this goldfinch that ate from my collapsed red sunflower and my little yellow sunflowers, hazily watching the mostly terrible news – multiple mass shootings, crazy weather reports from Shanghai and Europe,  a nuclear missile leak incident in Russia, the Epstein scandal – I had a surprising amount of positive writing news. I got an acceptance of two poems at one journal (paying!,) and another accepted for the Plath Project. I also had a pitch accepted for a health-related article so I’m working hard on a draft of that now (which pays money too!) So after a summer of doldrums writing-wise, and a summer of too much generally bad news, it was nice to get a little good news. And some paying work!

Sylvia posing with the anthology of domestic fabulism, Fiolet & Wing

Contributor Copies: Fiolet & Wing

This week I also got two contributor’s copies. First was the anthology of “Domestic Fabulism,” Fiolet & Wing. (See Sylvia pose with it at left.) It contains a ton of great poems and I recognized a lot of poetry friends (including Emily Rose Cole, Kelli Russell Agodon, and Jenn Givhan) in the collection. I’m thankful to be included in the company. Here’s a sneak peek at my poem, “Serendipity,” from the anthology:

Sylvia posing with Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets

Contributor Copy: Poems for the Writing: Prompt for Poets

Next I received my copy of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets. (See Sylvia posing at left.) This book of prompts included two of my poems under the “Superhero” prompt, “Dirge for a Video Game Heroine: On Dying Again,” and “Female Comic Book Superheroes II: When Catholic Schoolgirls Strike back,” both from Becoming the Villainess. It’s a really fun collection of inspiring ideas for poems, great for August if you have some time on your hands and you’re looking for something to perk up your writing game. It’s really fun to think of my poems being used as poetry prompts! Thank you to the editors for including me.
Here’s a sneak peek at one of those poems:

Superhero poetry prompt

 

 

Glenn and I in the rose garden at twilight

Night Zoos, Birds, and Rose Gardens

So, yesterday I finally felt well enough to get out of the house, and the Woodland Park Zoo had special night hours. We missed seeing the otter babies, but we did see a frisky brown bear, some very active penguins and flamingos, wolves and the red panda adult (since the babies have been relocated.) We were there so late that the zoo actually closed without us getting out – we had to bang on the door of one of the last employees emptying the cash register at the gift shop to make our escape. Glenn was joking we probably could have spent the night if we wanted – it was getting a little chilly after dark, and there were some very brave rats who got up on their hind legs and made eye contact with me, so I was just as happy to make a getaway to the neighboring rose garden.

 

Great blue heron at twilight

I took a bunch of pictures of roses at twilight with a flash, and got really interesting results. The best nature picture we got was this great blue heron at the penguin exhibit, and we got a flyby by a bald eagle on the way in to the zoo, too. There’s also a patch of wildflowers inside the raptor exhibit. We also had a close encounter in our own driveway with a great horned owl, which hooted at us with much urgency from a neighbor’s pine tree! Too bad no picture of that guy – it was definitely too dark by then. The garden smelled amazing at night – something beyond the roses must be a night-bloomer. The rose garden, usually almost done by August, was still in full bloom thanks to the little bits of rain we’ve gotten this August, in between the wildfire smoke and blazing hot days we’ve been having. Like the garden, in August, I’m definitely better at nighttime, out of the sun. Glenn always jokes that I’m really a vampire (I am allergic to garlic, the sun, and hate mornings) but there is something – biorhythms? poetness? – I am always at my best after dark.

August is usually my “down month” so I am wishing you all rest and restoration, unexpected good news in your week, and renewed energy for August.

 

Taking the Fall, A Few Thoughts on that Utne Poetry Essay, and Poetry Reviews, Sales, and Empowerment

 

Orange Sunflower

Taking the Fall

Welcome to August, everyone! A beautiful time for flowers (dahlias! sunflowers! last roses!) but not a great time for me. MS symptoms like to act up in the heat, and I’ve spent time in the hospital the last two years in August. This last week we’ve had temps up to ninety degree, and on one of the hotter days, getting in and out of the car on the way home from physical therapy, I lost my bearings and fell hard into the sharp edge of the car door, which banged up my arm pretty good from shoulder to hand. Glenn and my physical therapist both also mentioned that I’ve been shaking uncontrollably in the hands, feet, and face. Not good.

New Hair and Hot Girls Pearls

But I try to learn lessons. For instance, a low-slung sedan with limited trunk/back seat space is probably not a great car for someone with balance problems, vertigo, and a wheelchair. So Glenn and I will be trading in our old sedan (2010! How is my car nine years old already?) for a car more appropriate for someone like me. Sigh. It hurts to acknowledge the changes in your life you make to accommodate disability. I’m “too young” for a wheelchair (does that even mean anything?) but still, with MS sometimes I need one and I need a car that can fit, say, a cooler and luggage and a wheelchair if I want to make any car trips. I don’t like having to stay inside on hot days, or days with wildfire smoke (currently from wildfires in Siberia – 7 million acres of forest on fire – and Alaska and Canada  – 100,000 acres on fire.) I don’t like basically having to go into hibernation in August. On the plus side, I did find these cool “Hot Girls Pearls” (in picture) that keep you cool for thirty minutes while you’re out and about, which allowed me out long enough to do errands (or get my hair done.)

In the name of praising the beauties of summer in the Northwest (despite my increased MS symptoms,) here are a few more pictures of flowers around Woodinville:

A Few Thoughts on that Bob Hicok Poetry Essay in the Utne Review

So, I posted a couple of observations on that Utne reader Bob Hicok essay on Facebook (if you are interested, you can read the threads here) and thought I might develop further here. This is not just to pile on to Bob’s racist/sexist/privilege issues but to discuss other issues his essay brings up. I think he’s missing a few larger issues in publishing, book sales, and mindset.

  • Bob has won two (!!) NEA fellowships and a Guggenheim, as well as a pretty cushy teaching gig, and has published ten books. I just, sorry, don’t feel like weeping for him because I (and most of my friends) have never had any of those things. Never been in Poetry or the New Yorker either. So, you know, he needs to check his privilege before he gets whine-y. Lots of poets have never been the flavor of the month, but Bob has had a lot of time in the sun. So it was an insensitive essay in more than one way.
  • My friend Kelli is always talking about “scarcity mentality” in poetry – the feeling that because someone else gets something, you get less. She points out that it is not true, even if it feels true, and not only that, it’s destructive. I wrote a little last week about poets cheering on other poets and how important that is. It definitely makes being the poetry world more rewarding. Helping others – by mentoring or reviewing or publishing – will increase your happiness, I guarantee. Everyone feels hurt when their book doesn’t sell or get reviewed or their book or grant gets rejected – but that hurt can be mitigated.
  • What Bob is lamenting – that his books sell less, that he gets fewer reviews – has nothing to do with poets of color, LGBTQ writers, or women getting more air time. It has to do with the landscape of publishing. The print book market is very fragmented, and I’d bet that most poets are selling fewer books and getting fewer reviews because there are so many books out there now. Gen Z have their own book buying tastes and habits – very different than his generation. Instagram poets, for instance. It’s not bad, just different, than it used to be. I’m sure, say, Billy Collins is still doing fine. Book publishing in general is changing. Book reviewing is in flux, too.
  • Also, it seems strange to talk about how all these troublesome non-white-male poets are taking up space when most of the prestige poetry presses and journals ARE STILL RUN BY WHITE MEN. I was trying to name the poetry presses run by women and people of color – can you help me? Are they the ones most poets want to be published by with, or get good distribution? (People have mentioned: University of Akron Press, Mayapple Press, Alice James Books, Sundress, Two Sylvias Press. as presses led by women..I’d love to hear more (especially presses run by people of color?)
  • Most tenure track teaching jobs are still given to men. In academia in general, women have much less chance of being offered tenure, and I’m sure poets of color and poets with disabilities could talk more about their experience with this. You’ve already lucked out if you’re an older poet with a tenured teaching job.
  • I don’t know about other reviewers, but there’s a reason I like to shine a spotlight when I do reviews of poets of color, women, LGBTQ poets, and poets with disabilities. In general, these poets are more vulnerable to prejudice, so I think it’s more important that their voices are heard above the crowd.
  • What am I missing? Anything else to add to the discussion?

More About Poetry Reviews, Poetry Sales, and Empowerment

So, I have been told by more than one person at a major poetry publisher that poetry reviews, Twitter followers, and such don’t always translate into poetry sales. So Bob feeling neglected may have nothing to do with his lack of book sales. I personally choose to review books that resonate with me – and because I have always felt like a little bit of an outsider, that often means books by women, poets with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and poets of color resonate more with me.

If you review books of poetry – and most poets don’t, but I consider it one of the things I can do for the poetry community – you probably want to amplify work you think is great and people that you think are great. Sometimes those things blend into each other. For instance, I probably won’t review a poet that has a reputation for being a jerk, because there’s enough of that in the poetry world, isn’t there? And there are so many kind, generous, not-terrible-human poets out there who just aren’t getting any attention. At all. They’re not winning grants of fellowships. Maybe they’re a little older, or live outside New York City, or write outside the mainstream in some way. But they’re writing interesting, accomplished work. I want to shine a light on them.

Of course, to avoid hypocrisy, I want to say I do care about winning grants, or getting into certain journals or getting books published – of course I do! Most poets don’t write so that their work can sit in obscurity. But PR for Poets was written to help poets channel their frustrations about their books not getting enough attention, or selling enough copies, into something positive – some kind of action. I wanted poets to feel empowered in a process – and a world – that can often seem disorientating and powerless to the participants. It’s best to focus on things you can control – whether we’re talking about MS symptoms or the poetry world – than things you can’t.

What do you do to feel empowered rather than peeved by the poetry world? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Summertime Blues, Poems for Replicants, Game of Thrones Poetry and Other Mysteries in the new Pine Hill Review, and Poets Cheering for Other Poets

 

Mt Rainier over wildflowers

Summertime Blues?

Is this a thing for you? The heat wave that slammed most of America finally hit us here in Seattle. We’ve had days in the high eighties and even low nineties in the last week, which means I’ve wilted and napped and generally felt out of it. I’ve been the opposite of productive. Even my sunflowers were wilting! I snapped this on a day Mt. Rainier was out (some days it was too hazy to appear) and the wildflowers looked so bright and beautiful. In Seattle, we don’t have that many sunny days, so you do feel guilty for “missing out” or cancelling plans (I had to cancel almost everything this week, but most of my things were medical tests, so really, I’m not really missing it!) You feel guilty for not windsurfing or paddleboarding or hiking a mountain. I didn’t take on any editing gigs and couldn’t do even menial mental tasks. I think summertime for some people comes with an opposite sort of seasonal effective disorder. You may not know this about me unless you see the secret codes in my poetry, but I am truly allergic to the sun – hives, fever, the whole bit. (Hence my extraordinary amount of pallor! I call my foundation shade “Corpsey.”) And MS symptoms are worsened by heat. I have to make peace with some amount of down time in the summer as a type A person with these problems. What about you? Do you embrace the summer heat or does it slow you down? Personally, I am counting down the days til September!

Daenerys with dragons

Game of Thrones Poetry and More Mysteries in the New Issue of Pine Hills Review

I am very happy to have three poems in the new issue of Pine Hills Review, which the editors included some cool associated art work. I have written a series of poems about Daenerys (often associated with Joan of Arc mythology) and this includes one of them, as well as a poem tribute to a SyFy original murder comedy movie. So, see? Aren’t you curious? The whole issue is really fun to read, and a little offbeat, which I have to say is welcome in the poetry world Here’s a sneak peek at my Daenerys/Joan of Arc/with a little bit of me poem:

From Pine Hills Review

Origami Unicorn, Blade Runner

Poems for Replicants

This week saw the death of another icon of my childhood, Rutger Hauer, who played the main villain (a sympathetic replicant/robot) in Blade Runner, the villain in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, the love interest in Ladyhawke, among other roles. The SFPA had put out a call for haiku on replicants in June, and I happened to find out I received the SFPA President’s Pick Award for my little scifiku. I have a little origami unicorn pin to remind me of the genius of the original Blade Runner and its source material, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? So I thought it would be a good time to post my little piece:

Replicant Haiku

Poetry reading with friends

Poets Cheering for Other Poets

I was talking to a couple of poet friends lately about women poets, in particular, supporting other poets. I think I have a bunch of very supportive poet friends. I was talking to a friend about reading the complete letters and journals of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf this year. (Um, one of my friends suggesting my reading material and the blues might possibly be related? Could be!) But I did learn something from both women – both truly talented and accomplished writers who did take their own lives – about some secrets of success. Virginia Woolf – who struggled with both physical and mental health issues her whole life – was most productive around my age – her late forties. That’s encouraging in a society that often focuses on “thirty under thirty.” I mean, she was struggling, but she wrote like a fiend, some of her best work.

Part of Virginia Woolf’s success certainly came from a strong circle of artistic friends – she was famous for it – and I was talking to a poet friend today about the importance of having other writers to bounce our good news, bad news, new writing, or just general life things off of. We need someone who understands the particular despair of a bad review or a long cycle of rejection, or the elation of a good review or a particularly exciting acceptance. I was also buoyed by her marriage, strangely enough – though she was famous for writing her husband a rejection letter so cold – admitting her lack of physical attraction to him – but it seems that the marriage was one that worked, despite affairs (mostly on her part) – that she and her husband absolutely loved each other throughout thick and thin, sort of an antidote for the more bleak tale of Sylvia and Ted Hughes’ terrible marriage. And by the way, if Virginia Woolf left you cold in college, I suggest re-reading as an older reader, particularly in tandem with her journals and letters. I found them so much more enriching this time around, and think I understood not only her methods of writing but why she chose to write about the characters she did.

Poetry reading at Open Books, 2011

Anyway, I think that the old “writer is an island” myth is just that – a myth. Writers thrive with the support and help of other writers, and the support and help of spouses and family members and friends. I hope I help other writers and support their work with friendship, or reviews, or maybe even just liking an Instagram post. All of us – every one of us – will need encouragement and support at some point in their life. So if we can build a circle of artists, and musicians, and yes, other writers that we trust and that we support, it might not only enrich your life but your art.  No matter how famous (or not) a writer gets, they could all use one more positive word, slap on the back, a little support. Let’s build a kinder artistic world when we can.

New Poem “How Not to Die” in Eye to the Telescope, a New Review of The Tradition in Barrelhouse, a Poetry Reading and Birds, Butterflies, and Birthdays

 

Painted Lady on mint flower

Summertime Birds, Butterflies, and Birthdays

This week has been busier than we originally planned! It was Glenn’s birthday so we went out to listen to live music and stroll around the gardens at Willows Lodge. We’ve had two visits by a bobcat to our back porch this week, as well as new blooming “cherry rose” sunflowers, always elusive-to-the-camera goldfinches, and an infrequent visitor, the Painted Lady butterfly. I’ve also had a poem and a book review published AND went to a poetry reading by one of my favorite poets!

New Poem in Eye to the Telescope

I was pleased to have a poem in the new issue of Eye to the Telescope. This theme was “infection” and I share the issue with my friend Karen Weyant. My poem is “How Not to Die,” a subject I happen to know a little about. Here’s a link – you have to scroll down to read all the poems, but here’s a sneak preview:

“How Not to Die,” from Eye to the Telescope’s Infection Issue

A New Review in Barrelhouse of Jericho Brown’s The Tradition

I also have a new review of Jericho Brown’s excellent new book, The Tradition, in Barrelhouse. So happy it found a home there! Here’s the first sentence: “Jericho Brown’s third book, The Tradition, is his most powerful, and his most technically accomplished, yet. Brown attempts to interrogate mythology, the news cycle, police shootings, racism, and the vulnerability of his body in this stunning collection.”

Dana Levin and I

A Poetry Reading at Hugo House with Dana Levin and Natalie Scenters-Zapico

I was so excited to be able to attend a poetry reading at the new Hugo House where Dana Levin (one of my long-time favorite poets) and one of her friends/former students, Natalie Scenters-Zapico (who recently moved to the area.) I’m still not used to the starkness of the new Hugo House – hang some art, people! It would really improve the space – and the absence of places to sit and socialize (the old Hugo House had little tables clustered around the bar, which the new one lacks) and the lighting is still not very flattering. But I loved seeing these two poets read. Natalie read from her new book, Lima :: Limón, and Dana read some apocalyptic poems from Banana Palace as well as some new work. Overall an inspiring night of poetry!

One of the results of all this celebration is I am much more tired than usual and needing to sleep in more than usual. The combo of MS and anemia (yes, I’m taking iron and b12 supplements religiously) can really take the wind out of your sails. But the summer has been mild here – even, some might say, gloomy! It’s raining right now. But I like having a break from soaring temps and high sun. I can walk around my garden (and the surrounding gardens Woodinville has) without worrying about feeling beaten up afterward. I saw a family of deer with two fans and a plethora of rabbits on my street. And did I mention I’ve had two bobcat visits to my back porch (caught by my Ring) this week? So, even though I’ve felt a little discouraged poetry-wise (I even took a week or two off from submitting, I felt so bombarded with rejections) I feel that nature has been extra kind to me this July. Sometimes it’s okay to take a break and just read and write and recharge your batteries – and the rain gives us the perfect excuse to spend a little extra time at the library or bookstore. Wishing you a little time to recharge and some good news in your Inbox (and maybe a bobcat visit!)

 

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Jeannine Hall GaileyJeannine 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.

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