LESLEY WHEELER

Author: Lesley Wheeler

  • Poetry, suspense, and reading Maria Hummel

    She stared at the screen until her eyes ached, willing an email to flicker into existence: would the prospective poetry publisher like her new manuscript? See, that’s an example of raising suspense in prose, but good poems do that too. As Stephen Dobyns writes in an excellent essay, “Writing the Reader’s Life,” only discovered by…

  • In which I procrastinate with snacks, parties, and fake-writing

    The peony heads slump over in their lushness. I can hear the baccalaureate speaker’s voice faintly behind the air conditioner’s hum, and I wonder again: in what sense does featuring another white Christian minister make this religious event “more inclusive”? Well, I’ll sit it out in my office but don my robes tomorrow for another…

  • Giveaway plus

    I don’t know why it’s so much fun to give presents to strangers, but I enjoy this annual Big Poetry Giveaway project so much. Thanks again to Kelli Russell Agodon for organizing it for National Poetry Month 2014. Twenty-seven people entered (that’s my lucky number) and I just selected a winner via an online random…

  • Elegy for a community reading series

    Local honey It is 5:31 in Lexington a Monday after magnolia and before honeysuckle the second week of Spring Term’s sugar drip and I am driving the hospital road to Kroger in my dogwood-dirty Hyundai with green dents to pick up strawberries, lemonade, pre-sliced cheese and wine with screw-tops because I have finally learned to…

  • Zombie spring term

    Summoning enthusiasm for our super-intense four-week spring term after a long year and a too-short break always feels just about impossible. I watch my spouse bounce along with superheroic energy and think, Good lord, can I do this? The same skepticism is showing on some student faces, too, especially among seniors with honors thesis hangovers.…

  • Lilacs, long poems, life transformations

    I’m at one of my academic year’s four hinges, less evenly-spaced than the solstices and equinoxes: the long winter term has ended, grades are in, and I’m gearing up for our May term, four intense weeks that conclude with graduation ceremonies. It’s a crazy time of year to attempt a poetry experiment: writing every day…

  • High school, the best poetry audience ever

    One way to tell the story of how I came to read poetry desperately and constantly would be: early. I still know by heart a book of nursery rhymes I used to own, with Richard Scarry illustrations. A lot of us, though, had our first serious poetry crushes in, or at least during, high school.…

  • Big Poetry Giveaway 2014

    So it’s national poetry writing month again, and shouldering aside all the forces that prevent one from concentrating on any project in a dogged way, I am writing. The plan: draft a long poem, one section per day, for thirty days. The rules: I just have to write a little bit daily, at any time,…

  • Speculative spoken word

    What to do during a class meeting in which you strongly suspect all the students will be sleep-deprived and unable to complete any assigned reading? Well, snacks, of course. Open-ended discussion, too, of the problems of research writing: my speculative poetry students are, I hope, revising like demons, because version one of their big essay…

  • Instructions for creating England

    My speculative poetry students have been asking brilliant questions during the past two weeks: what’s Tracy K. Smith’s attitude towards a posthuman future in Life on Mars? How does assigning a higher priority to the natural world change Marvin Bell’s sense of what death means? How do Jeannine Hall Gailey’s villainesses differ from their counterparts…