LESLEY WHEELER

Author: Lesley Wheeler

  • Bialosky, Logan, and taking poetry personally

    Scandals in the poetry world seem sweet from a distance, like triolets blooming in epic slush pile. When, for instance, author and Norton editor Jill Bialosky publishes a memoir, Poetry Will Save Your Life, and William Logan excoriates it in Tourniquet Review, accusing Bialosky of “plagiariz[ing] numerous passages from Wikipedia and the websites of the…

  • Feeling good?

    No, of course you’re not–the world’s a mess, and by cruising social media right now, you’re basically meeting the sewage face-first. So read some poems. My “Feeling Good,” about dumb pleasures, is up at Sweet. Bonus: follow the link in my bio to the National Zoo’s Panda Cam. Furry naps, bamboo-munching, and art. If you’ve got…

  • Birthday-head

    Should I wear the top hat or tiara while teaching Yeats tomorrow? Poe thinks it’s a stupid question. People keep asking me how I feel about turning fifty tomorrow. One answer is: lucky. I’m back in the swing of teaching after a difficult summer, and I find it as rewarding as ever. My spouse and…

  • Our Declaration and our declaration

    An interesting coincidence: after an intense conversation about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, my department commissioned a group of volunteers to draft a public statement. I was among the group of, at various times, six to eight people crafting the text collaboratively over Labor Day weekend. The brief we received from other professors…

  • Videopoems and problems of choice

    If you’d asked me in early August whether I could carve out three full days at the end of the month for a digital storytelling workshop, I probably would have responded profanely. Too many other projects! But I had signed up months before–that was choice number one. I was committed. Choice number two, what kind…

  • Putting my poet’s shoulder to the wheel

    Cities are supposed to be overwhelming, at least in contrast to small-town slowness, but over the last week or two, I’ve felt the opposite. For our family-vacation-ending-in-a-modernism-conference, we rented a flat on a particularly lovely Amsterdam street–Bosboom Toussaintstraat–and all the museums, good food, and friendliness were nourishing. (I wondered, as I strolled through islands of…

  • Krazy Kat among the nasturtiums

    COMICS=POETRY+GRAPHIC DESIGN, says Austin Kleon, who is, in turn, reprising Gregory Gallant, a.k.a. Seth–but wherever the formula comes from, I love the possibilities it raises for both comics and poetry as media. It’s my starting point for a paper I’m giving at the Modernist Studies Association conference very soon. I’ll be discussing the 1920 Krazy…

  • Chapbooks, fairy tales, and spreading the word

    I didn’t know, when writing the fairy-tale-inspired long poem that became my forthcoming chapbook, Propagation, that folktales and chapbooks have a long association. Here’s what Dáithí Ó hÓgáin writes for The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales: “Printed little volumes for popular reading, chapbooks were common in several western European languages. These books contained a wide variety of…

  • Hybrid H.D.

        I’ve been swimming around in H.D.’s work since my undergraduate years, on the recommendation of the writer I eventually married. I started with her memoirs of Freud and Pound, trekking up to the sunny top floor of the University of Southampton library to find them, then worked backwards to the poetry, which became…

  • Coniferous forests of hard thinking

    When your child takes a summer internship in Siberia, you think, hmm, THAT’s a long way for a teenager to go to escape parental interference. Maybe you made the normal adolescent struggle for independence a little difficult? Parents can follow their kids now through multiple technologies and social media platforms, and I do. With trust,…