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Poetry reading (and readings: here comes AWP)
Buds on the maple, daffodils up. The annual faculty reviews are complete; a weeklong visiting writer gig we hosted went well; and the end of my role as Department Head feels closer. Two colleagues seem to be getting through a difficult time with flying colors, and I played a small role in helping them, which…
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Sprains, scams, and spells
March got ahead of itself, blowing in like a lion well before February’s end. Everything seems to be on the move–including me, although I sprained my ankle last week by glancing down at an irritating text as I was walking home, tripping down a short flight of steps, and landing hard. Such a classic consequence…
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Flares, small and celestial
I’ve been thinking about smallness, so it was fascinating to read, this weekend, Jeannine Hall Gailey’s dazzling new poetry collection, Flare, Corona, a book that explores parallel crises on many scales, from the microscopic to the telescopic. I plan to teach it so I snagged an advance review copy, but it’s now available for pre-order…
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She carries me
In the Belly As a woman carries an insect, unconscious of the sign it shapes with diplomatic footfalls across her skin, she carries me. As a lake lifts the sky’s image, all burnished admiration, or proffers a crushed cup, a leaf, a rainbow slick of grease. As your network of neurochemicals and electricity carries, through…
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Easy poetry
“Excitement comes from being lazy and fun loving. O’Hara worked hard, but he also took it easy. His Collected Poems are a manifesto of the high aesthetic rewards that accrue from a life—albeit a tragically abbreviated life—of taking easiness as the gold standard. Like Warhol’s professed love of easy art (or art that was easy to make), O’Hara’s…
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New year, old places
I crossed the invisible border into 2023 while in India. The occasion: my son’s close college friend, Rish, is from Bengaluru and wanted to show us the country. The Christmas break worked well for this bunch of students and teachers; the only other break we have in common would be summer, when heat is extreme.…
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Poetry in 2022 (work & joy & religion)
It’s become a private tradition to read poetry in this wintry span of time between the end of one academic term and the beginning of the next. I think it’s because poetry helps me center myself, dial down stress, and look away from my inbox. I’m definitely hit at the end of the calendar year…
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H.D., tarot, & occluded vistas
Above is the first card of the Mountain Dream Tarot created by Bea Nettles in 1975–the Fool, a card of fortunate beginnings and free spirits. I don’t think ANYONE has ever described me as a “free spirit.” But the digitized images of this deck were a lucky chance find as I was doing on online…
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Haunted Matisse & packing light
On the Friday after Thanksgiving, we visited the “Matisse in the 1930s” exhibit in the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts, and there was plenty NOT to like. So many odalisques! The images that stayed with me in a more positive way did so because the way they reflected process struck me as appealingly uncanny. The…
LESLEY WHEELER 