LESLEY WHEELER

Month: February 2018

  • Small amid the sparkle

    Is that a cormorant on that piling near St. Augustine, Florida, drying its wings? Because all the poets at the AWP convention in Tampa the week after next will look comparably, awkwardly exhibitionistic. Yo! I’m not totally unimposing! Come buy my book! Including me, of course. I’ll be carrying around copies of my new chapbook, Propagation, for […]

  • Poetry at the Border: Ann Fisher-Wirth

    This blog’s intermittent “Poetry at the Border” feature returns with two excerpts from the powerful new collection Mississippi, a striking large-format collaboration between poet Ann Fisher-Wirth and photographer Maude Schuyler Clay. While focused on a specific state, this book is full of borderlands and hinges: between poetry and photographs, between history and the present, and among races […]

  • Peering across the Atlantic

    When, back in the primordial mists of the 90s, I was hired to teach 20th century poetry in English, I well-prepared to construct U.S.-based syllabi. British and Irish poetries, however, were visible to me only as hills and treetops peeking above a general fog. I knew the international modernists and a few later border-crossers, especially […]

  • Excerpt from a mess in progress

    1. Once, when she was a toddler-sized blizzard of pure will, I called her “little missy.” Some current of Victorian chastisement must have welled up through me, springing from all the British books I’d read or maybe from some fifties sitcom re-aired in periodic waves. My daughter had created yet another hodgepodge installation of stuffed […]