Jeannine Hall Gailey's Blog, page 119

I was so sorry to hear about Lucille Clifton passing away...

I was so sorry to hear about Lucille Clifton passing away. She was one of my favorite poets, and her use of persona has always been terrific - she uses the voices of everyone from Leda to Satan. I like almost everything in the Book of Light, but here are two great persona poems:

adam thinking

she
stolen from my bone
is it any wonder
i hunger to tunnel back
inside desperate
to reconnect the rib and clay
and to be whole again

some need is in me
struggling to roar through my
mouth into a name
this creation ...

I've always thought of Barbie as a sort of totem for girl...

I've always thought of Barbie as a sort of totem for girls. This new one, computer engineer Barbie, just made me so happy for some reason:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35372184/ns/business-retail/
She has a pink laptop and she wears glasses. That's my kind of doll. She is still very blonde, but she makes up for it by having binary code on her t-shirt.
(PS, if you haven't read Kinky, Denise Duhamel's book of poems on Barbie, go and do it.)

Yes, it's been a week of doctor appointments, phone calls...

Yes, it's been a week of doctor appointments, phone calls from doctors, and sometimes uncomfortable tests that doctors have ordered, but I'm back to thinking about poetry - and back to the blog (no, I haven't figured out how to migrate the blog yet, though time is ticking down on how much longer they're going to support this blog...stay tuned for the new link.)
I was thinking about the things that get us through difficult times. The belief in something larger than oneself. Our spiritual yearni...

Once in a while, you get to be on top of the world; other...

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'...

Wow - in the mail today, a cornucopia of poetry! Three bo...

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 ...

Got my wonderful-looking contributor copy of MARGIE 2009 ...

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 m...

I know AWP is the place for poets to be in April, but it ...

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 ...

I've been inspired to post this article I wrote, "The Bad...

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 tha...

My French teacher, Abner Genece, was not only a great tea...

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. M...

If you just can't get enough of interviews with me, check...

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 yea...