Jeannine Blogs
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Once in a while, you get to be on top of the world; other times, it feels like life is kicking your ass. This last week was one of those second ones.
I have never had food allergies, but Sunday I had an anaphylaxis allergic reaction to a cup of tea and half a cookie. I wound up in the hospital, on an IV, and then for four days had purple hives and couldn't eat anything, even chicken broth or ginger ale, without my mouth and throat swelling up. Good times. It was very scary and not something I'd like to repeat. I now have an epipen and a big old bunch of allergy tests to take. It might have been the bergamot in the tea, but I'm also getting tested for everything else: vanilla, tea, milk, eggs, wheat, citrus.
Anyway, I've had so many health setbacks lately, I just thought - wow, I had better get going with this poetry thing. No more wasting time!
On top of the 1001 doctor appointments, I'm going to try to read some chapbooks for a contest and be an excellent thesis advisor. And try to remind people that I love them more often. And send out more poetry. Do the stuff that I need to do. Because in the end, it's poetry and people that matter to me.
It looks like I'm going to have to port my blog as well, as blogger is no longer supporting people like me who use the FTP option, Dang! Just what I needed to mess with, along with my taxes and surprisingly complicated and expensive physical therapy bills. (California has the worst system for billing, it's way worse than Washington where insurance billing was fairly simple, and my insurance doesn't cover all the PT here I've needed like it would in Washington. Yes, one more reason I'm considering relocating to the wild wet Northwest.) See, that's all the junk I don't want to worry about, but the stuff that keeps getting in my face and taking up my time.
Labels: anaphylaxis, blogger problems, food allergies, poetry and people, work
Friday, January 29, 2010
Wow - in the mail today, a cornucopia of poetry! Three books from the Mississippi Review Poetry Series, Issue 7 of Sentence, and Poetry Magazine with a long winded but amusing German essay in it, which I read out loud to Glenn while we were waiting for my orthopedist. It's about the three questions poets get asked at readings, and also Proust.
And, good news from the orthopedist - no surgery required for the left ankle, and the right ankle is right on track to be healed in a week or two. That means there's still probably another month or so of physical therapy to go before I'm walking - but walking by spring sounds awfully good! I love my new PT office, too, and the new PT guy I'm working with. Now, if we can get my mystery stomach illness solved, I'll be ready to party! I think I will like Napa so much better walking than non-walking.
I also found out I have double the thesis students this quarter than I thought - there goes my free time for poetry submissions (not to mention writing...) Oh well. At least thesis work is fairly fun. I want to get some time to put up mini-reviews, too, of January's Underlife, Reb's God Damsel, and Allison's Self-Portrait with Crayon. Maybe I'll get a lull while the students are working on their reading lists...
Oh yes, and go read Jessica Smith's post here on gender and blogging...which includes a quote by Reb that I also found edifying...
http://looktouch.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/gender-and-blogging-redux/
Labels: cornucopia of poetry, gender and blogging, mini reviews to come, Mississippi Review Poetry series, no surgery on ankle yay, Poetry, Sentence
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Got my wonderful-looking contributor copy of MARGIE 2009 today, with so many names...just a few include Alicia Ostriker, Tony Hoagland, Annie Finch, my publisher Tom Hunley, and a multitude of others. I've always enjoyed MARGIE and this issue is no exception. Plus, it has my poem "The Robot Scientist's Daughter [morbid]" from the new collection I'm working on. I'm getting happier with the collection every day as I work on it, and even submitted work from the manuscript to the NEA.
I also got my MRI results for my left ankle: a torn ligament. Don't know if it will need surgery. The right ankle is healing up normally for a sprain, right on schedule. Still running a high fever for the third week in a row, but at least the sun was out today. Still very wintry outside, still too far from spring.
And, on the urging of several of my doctors, had a meeting with the local hematologist, a very nice and enthusiastic gentleman who was surprised and excited to get a patient with PAI-1 deficiency, as it's fairly rare. He even went back and called a hematology guy from UC Davis who has worked with a PAI-1 deficiency patient before, (who reiterated that my Seattle Hem-Onc is one of the best in the country with this particular kind of disorder - go Dr. Gernsheimer!) and called me at home with his advice. And when he talked to me, I was so thankful for those pre-med classes, so the scary stuff he said was all understandable. Sometimes having my rare disorders can make me feel lonely and scared; I mean, really, who can I talk about my fears and worries about? I took inspiration from Jilly and started a PAI-1 deficiency blog, just in case the other, like, 17 people in the world who have it are looking for a place congregate online. Treatments are all still basically experimental, since there's not many of us to test, but they do exist. Anyway, weird mutants unite! Or something.
With my two bad ankles and the long illness of feverish weirdness, I've been watching a lot of movies as I'm not much good for anything else lately. Tonight I watched "Bright Star" about John Keats, and I remembered how his poem "When I have fears that I may ceased to be" echoed in my brain when I was in the hospital with pneumonia last year. The fear of all poets, that they will die before they write everything they are supposed to write? And his fear was warranted; he was unthinkably young, only 25, when he died.
Ha! This post is too morbid. Just like my poem warned in MARGIE!
Labels: Bright Star, Keats, MARGIE, morbid much, PAI-1 deficiency, When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be
Saturday, January 23, 2010
I know AWP is the place for poets to be in April, but it turns out the universe has other plans for me: my presentation was accepted for WonderCon 2010, which is a few days earlier in April and much closer to home, in San Francisco. The presentation will be on something like this, I think: "From Buffy to the X-Men: Female Comic Book Superheroes in Women’s Poetry."
I have to admit to being pretty excited. There are supposed to be something like 34,000 attendees. Gail Simone, one of my favorite female comic book writers, will be there, as will Peter S. Beagle, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Seattle a couple of years ago. (One of my early literary heroes, as he penned one of my favorite childhood books, The Last Unicorn.) Plus, some tv and movie stars and comic book royalty and such. Squee!
I'm beginning to feel better after a two-week mystery virus had me bedridden with chills and on a fluid-only diet, and I started at a newer, fancier physical therapy place for my tendon problems/sprained ankles that have had me in a wheelchair since Christmas Eve. It's very shiny and has a recumbent stair-climber that I think I would like to have in my house, even after my ankle problems have cleared up.
Aside from that, I'm trying to fix up my taxes, apply for the NEA grant though I have a discouraging feeling about it, and send out poems/book manuscripts, which I also have a generally discouraged feeling about. I don't know if the discouraged feelings have anything to do with reality, it's just something that happens and I don't want to send anything out, though I never ever stop writing. Discouragement keeps me from submitting but not from writing, isn't that odd? Anyway, as a segueway, let me introduce you to this lovely post about rejection from Kelli:
http://ofkells.blogspot.com/2010/01/notes-from-beneath-covers-why.html
that will remind you that rejection is really not all about you, which is pretty comforting, actually.
Also, check her blog for a recent call for submissions for Ekphrastic poetry for Crab Creek Review.
Labels: alternative conferences to AWP, calls for submission, Kelli Russell Agodon, physical therapy and mystery virus, rejections, WonderCon 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
I've been inspired to post this article I wrote, "The Bad Wives Club," by several things:
--This story about a journalist who ran her own piece after it was accepted, then killed.
--The recent discussion about Zucker's newest book, Museum of Accidents, by Stephen Burt and others on a variety of blogs, focusing on her poetry about motherhood.
I wrote this article last year about Rachel Zucker's The Bad Wife Handbook and Beth Ann Fennelly's Unmentionables. I really loved both books and thought that they had something important to say. The article was accepted by a well-paying org, then killed.
Here is a teaser. Click on the link at the end for the full article.
"If we were to plot out the trajectory of American women’s poetry on wife-hood, from Anne Bradstreet to Sylvia Plath to Louise Gluck to Rachel Zucker, what would that look like? Even the word “wife” seems freighted with connotations of motherhood, domestic chores and duty. What does it mean for a woman to be a wife in contemporary society? How can one be a “good” or “bad” wife? These are some of the questions posed to a contemporary reader in Rachel Zucker’s The Bad Wife Handbook and Beth Ann Fennelly’s Unmentionables.
Zucker and Fennelly question the guilt and the societal expectations in an unmerciful, sometimes piercing light. Can a contemporary woman keep her individuality, her art, her erotic self, alive in the face of the expectations of being a “good” wife, a “good” mother? What do those words even mean?
The two poets use different syntactical strategies while addressing similar subjects – Fennelly’s poems simmer and stir, bursting out of their narrative structures to include as much of her inner turmoil and messy, robust sexuality as possible, while Zucker’s tease and bemuse with their constant shimmying of pronouns, subjects and verb tenses."
Rest of article here.
(If you like it, help support a poet - consider ordering my book or asking your local library to carry it. Thanks!)
Labels: articles that have been killed and then posted, Beth Ann Fennelly, Rachel Zucker, support your local poet, The Bad Wife Handbook, Unmentionables
Thursday, January 14, 2010
My French teacher, Abner Genece, was not only a great teacher but a great influence on me as a lover of literature. (We read French poetry, Victor Hugo, and Andre Gide in his class.) He spoke with great love of Haiti (and spoke with great passion about the political injustices there) and even taught us a little Creole, the language most commonly spoken in Haiti.
It has been just awful watching the images coming in from Haiti. Please give, if you can, to one of the charities helping in Haiti. My choice is usually Northwest Medical Teams (now Medical Teams International,) which has an excellent record of actually using funds for helping people, unlike some charities. Here's a link:
https://www.medicalteams.org/NetCommunity/SSLPage.aspx?pid=320&fund=17
Husband G's work does matching funds for disasters, so check into your workplace and see if that is a possibility.
My folks are coming in town, which would be better if I wasn't running 101 fever and was able to eat solid food. I just had, I think, all of my blood taken out at the hospital lab yesterday (or at least it felt that way) to figure out what's going on since I've been pretty sick for a week already (both arms! Multiple sticks! Not my ideal lab visit.) Think good healing thoughts for me. I fear I will not be a very good tour guide in my current state. However, husband G did stay up last night baking them biscotti for their visit. So at least they'll have that!
In poetry news, had a poem, "She Returns to the Floating World," in the speculative journal Goblin Fruit:
http://www.goblinfruit.net/2010/winter/poems/?poem=floatingworld
The speculative poetry world is in a parallel universe that I don't visit enough; the editors have a lot of fun, the readers do too, and a lot of times, they actually pay for poetry. I also notice more friendly correspondance from editors and fellow poets in those journals. I had an article on this topic in the Poet's Market 2010, but basically, if you write poems about fairy tales, science fiction, or science, you owe it to yourself to check out the world o' speculative poetry. Some of my favorite journals for poetry in this genre are Lady Churchhill's Rosebud Wristlet, Mythic Delirium, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Star*Line, Cabinet Des Fees, and Goblin Fruit. I'm probably leaving out a lot of good ones with that list, which is a mix of print and online journals.
Labels: charity, Goblin Fruit, Haiti, Monsieur Genece, sick again, Speculative Poetry
Thursday, January 07, 2010
If you just can't get enough of interviews with me, check out my new interview at Public Republic:
http://www.public-republic.net/i%E2%80%99m-attempting-to-connect-poetry-and-science.php
The interviewer, Bob Baker, really liked the poem "In the Faces of Lichtenstein's Women" so I put up a recording of it on my sample readings page here in case you are interested:
http://www.webbish6.com/audio.htm
Plus, my artist friend Michaela Eaves (who did the cover of Becoming the Villainess) is doing her yearly "sketch a day" up on her blog - check it out:
http://corvida.livejournal.com/
Labels: Bob Baker, Interviews, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Public Republic
Special thanks to Yumiko Kayukawa
for the use of Zen Cracker.
