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Poetic feet [sprained]
![Poetic feet [sprained]](https://lesleywheeler.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/summerpoets.jpg?w=1024)
I visited my sister in NJ a little over a week ago–just before a few days’ vacation with my eldest child–and my sister was bruised and scraped from falling during a run. I, meanwhile, recently gave myself a sprained ankle by…walking on the beach? I have no idea, honestly. As a kid, I broke an…
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Tender and furious
A friend sends me haiku most days, under the rule that I don’t comment on them because I do that for a living and it can wear me out–it’s a pleasure to just watch them float by. One of the latest was addressed to a black widow living near his bed, informing it that he…
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Magic reciprocity
My two fall classes are a first-year writing seminar called “Other Worlds” and an advanced poetry class called “Haunted & Strange,” so as autumn starts, I’m feeling weird in a good way. I’m also reading Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book, full of meditations on poetry’s magic and modernism’s intersections with the occult, and wow, I…
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Beginning a hybrid project, anxiously
Anxiety, my medical people agreed about those heart palpitations I mentioned in my last post, then proceeded to treat me with pills, needles, and reminders about breathing techniques. Some combination of those is starting to help, as well as a three-day breather we just took at the beach, a landscape that seems to help me…
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Spiral aboveground, mycelium beneath
Sick for much of the last few weeks, I became a literary twister, pulling in a lot of reading and flinging out a few things, too. I’m not in poetry submission mode, except for a couple of residency applications. Instead, I’m occupying the quiet eye of a poetry storm by preparing a book for publication,…
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The conference program and underprogram
Gregory Pardlo, paraphrased, from a staged conversation with Allison Joseph: I know I might sound like a hypocrite, but don’t worry about the prizes; there’s so much compromise and chance in the process. Just keep doing your thing and saying yes to opportunities. Conferences have a program and an underprogram. Between events I talk to…
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Some indie books for your list
This week in the U.S. academic calendar involves a lot of reflection on and (less rewardingly) grading of student writing. I always sift and contemplate of my own year’s work, too, looking over what I’ve read and written, considering what I want to do next, or do better. I wasn’t surprised to see poet-blogger Ann…
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Alternate possible worlds of poetry scholarship
A quick postcard from Brooklyn and the annual Modernist Studies Association conference: hello! Having a great time! Wish you were here! The MSA was My Conference during the years in which I wrote my two wholly scholarly books. As a green assistant professor, I participated in a seminar on modernist women poets and made friends…
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Arts and humanities in annular eclipse
John Guillory writes in Professing Criticism, a 2022 book, that literary criticism “originated millennia ago, achieved a maximal state of organization in the twentieth-century university, and now faces an uncertain future” (xv). He begins with a well-known story: nineteenth-century literary critics were self-trained journalists publishing in periodicals, while universities concentrated on philology–language instead of literature.…
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Walking: a footnote
I just finished “Traversals: A Folio on Walking,” guest-edited by Anna Maria Hong and Christine Hume for the summer 2023 issue of The Hopkins Review. Walking and poetry have so many intersections: they foster observation, thinking, feeling, and talking; prompt unexpected encounters; depend on rhythm; and sometimes resemble each other even structurally, because meditation and…
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LESLEY WHEELER 