Spring, Quarantine, Poetry, and All
- At March 29, 2020
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
- 2
Spring, Quarantine, Poetry, and All
Spring continues its celebrations, despite our mostly silent roads and store fronts, despite humanity’s disappearance from their daily activities. The cherries bloom, the woodpeckers and towhees and stellar jays and hummingbirds are busy. It’s been a cold and gloomy week, but April is almost here.
The big excitement this week was the arrival of a new birdfeeder and the April contributor copies of Poetry Magazine. I’ve been writing and reading more, watching tv less. During the forty-degree, rainy March days of grim reports of deaths and pandemics, it becomes almost impossible to remember anything cheerful. I’ve been practicing my bird photography. I ordered watercolors. I still take pictures of trees.
A Little More about April’s Issue of Poetry
So, to more cheerful news: April’s issue of Poetry has two poems of mine in it, “Calamity” and “Spellcaster.” Someone asked me: what was the secret of getting into Poetry? Well, I sent to Poetry Magazine the first time when I was 19 years old, and I received a really nice personal rejection in return. I wish I still had it. Then I sent twice a year for a lot of years. I have years of back issues on my bookshelf from years of reading. That’s the secret!
So it’s especially meaningful that these two poems appear in the April issue of National Poetry Month and my birthday month. Also, isn’t Sylvia cute with the magazine? I’ve been finally finishing the final pages of the second volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters, and I see how excited she gets for her poetry checks. I guess I am equally excited, as a poet, when I get a check for seeing my work in print. It doesn’t happen all that often! If you want a reading recommendation for something a little more comforting, check out Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, which is a bunch of essays about disasters and people’s responses to them. When calamity does strike, she points out, a lot of bad stuff happens – but also, ordinary people are inspired to help each other in amazing ways. A good reminder.
One More Quarantine Poetry Video: “A Letter to John Cusack, Piloting a Plane Through an Apocalypse Movie”
This poem is another apocalypse poem from my book, Field Guide to the End of the World. Bonus points if you can name all the John Cusack movies referenced in the poem.
https://youtu.be/0kX08JK88g0
Jan Priddy
We called them “blue jays” when I was a girl, but I’ve been corrected: they are Steller’s jay (Cyanocitta stelleri). One visits my garden each day and there is an entire community wary of the Cooper’s hawk that hunts my block.
Poetry Blog Digest 2020, Week 13 – Via Negativa
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