LESLEY WHEELER

Author: Lesley Wheeler

  • 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,…

  • “The wonder is that you are here”: poetry, community, and Anne Spencer

    One of my favorite visiting-writer stories involves a New York-based author who, while guzzling artisanal cocktails in a local restaurant, said something like, “I don’t know why anyone would bother to write if they don’t live in Brooklyn.” That was a hilariously awful remark to make to his Virginia-writer-dinner-companions, but I get it. The literary…

  • Poetry and the archives by the sea

    A lot of poets write from research, and there are myriad ways to explain why. Just a few of the reasons, for me: because the past presses at me as a citizen and as a human being. Because my particular history–of my current region or my ancestors–needs puzzling through. Because I want to look outward…

  • What I did not tweet from Poetry by the Sea

    Almost passed out during Claire Rossini’s poem about dissecting an albino squirrel What percentage of poets would absolutely love their reading to knock an audience member unconscious? Seymour Lipset via Claire Rossini: Those who know only one country know no country Dolores Hayden: All but death can be adjusted Meena Alexander: We have poetry so…

  • Intertidal zone

    I’m currently reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s flood of a novel, New York 2140, at the edges of the work day. Sea levels have risen fifty feet but stubborn New Yorkers are trying to redefine their big moldy apple as SuperVenice, navigating the street-canals via vaporettos and hydrofoils. When you read a long book slowly, it seeps into…

  • Poetry at the Border: Leona Sevick

    My British immigrant mother didn’t oversee our swimming lessons. Having grown up poor, visiting the kind of beaches where you’d make a fire and boil tea to warm up, she was scared of the water. Instead, it’s one of the very few things I remember doing with my father, who swam daily at the Y.…

  • Writing the motherland

    “How many of you,” Betsy asked the audience, “think you know your mother’s mind, maybe better than she knows herself?” Whoops, I thought, raising my hand. That’s arrogant of me. But trying to read my mother’s mind was one of the most urgent and constant occupations of my childhood and teenage years, and I’ve kept…

  • Killing your 18th c specialist darlings

    My imaginary English Department was overstaffed, according to fictional administrators. Unfortunately, the first readers of my novel ms said the same thing. One of those professors, everyone said, has got to go. And it was pretty clear who had the least seniority. I hated firing the poor guy. Jay’s specialty is not, in real life,…

  • The thing about April

    The thing about April

    My writing ambitions for National Poetry Month were NOT going well. The end of Winter Term–final classes, visiting writers, grading–doesn’t sound like a good time to reestablish a daily practice, but it has worked for me before. I love spring, when the natural world changes so rapidly from week to week, so when, like this…