LESLEY WHEELER

Category: Uncategorized

  • AWP Haiku

    Note to future self:/ skip panels on publishing/ and self-promotion. I used to wonder/ how to break in. Now I want/ to write good. Backwards? Rita Dove talking/ about anything is worth/ ten hummus buffets. That’s as far as I got with seventeen-syllable crystallizations of my experience at this year’s annual meeting of the Association…

  • Teaching Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

    Teaching a single-author poetry book is a different enterprise than assigning poems from an anthology. There’s a lot more information to sift and process: the future greatest hits are interspersed with poems that may be harder to absorb; ordering, epigraphs, and subsections suggest new meanings; there’s an arc to read for, a set of through-lines…

  • Intention / haplessness

    As usual, I’m tripping over my own sleepy feet into National Poetry Month, knowing I should have a WRITING PLAN but instead feeling indecisive, half-awake. April is when W&L’s winter term ends in a flurry of meetings, receptions, and papers; exam week and spring break, which are relatively calm, occupy the middle; and by the…

  • Postcard for Jean

    Today I’m thinking of my much-loved Aunt Jean, who died at her home in England this morning. I came to know her best in 1988, when I stayed with Jean, my Uncle Pete, and my cousin Nigel in Cyprus for three weeks. I was studying abroad at the University of Southampton and, during a long…

  • Lucidity, difficulty

    Lucidity, difficulty

    As a grader of zillions of undergraduate essays, I hate the word “relatable.” I never let “universal” sneak through a poetry class without interrogation. I understand why some critics mock the word “accessible,” as if poems could be built to code with wide ramps and handrails. Relatable to whom? People don’t have equally easy entry…

  • The important stuff

    On Thursday afternoon of last week I thought I’d organized all my obstreperous administrative ducklings into a row and marched them off into a soft-focus sunset. Or, if that metaphor isn’t working for you, you could say I was heading into Washington and Lee’s weeklong break with a clear desk and a nearly-empty email box,…

  • The Unbeliever Takes a Hike

    The Unbeliever Takes a Hike Winter is a cracked path, all the plush of moss and needles, mulch and soil swept away by the god of water. I have no choice but to sit down or follow it, so I follow, day after heathen day, sometimes watching my feet lest I trip on an exposed…

  • Pain, pleasure, and Spottswood Styles

    Ghosts of poetry: once, on the current site of Washington and Lee University’s theater, there stood a brick house with a stone fireplace “so large that we could burn whole railroad ties without having them cut.” It belonged to Spottswood Styles, 1869-1946, “Lexington’s Negro Poet.” I’m quoting from volume seven of the Rockbridge Historical Society…

  • Family syllabus

    Reading is often a business of following trails for the love of it. In preparing to discuss Paul Laurence Dunbar with my African-American Poetry course last week, I reviewed Meta DuEwa Jones’ wonderful study The Muse is Music—inspired by that book’s introduction, in fact, I extended our conversation about Dunbar’s vernacular verse by playing recordings…

  • Good reads

    One of my 2014 resolutions was to track my reading via Goodreads, and I’m here to say I hated it. Record-keeping in itself is a good thing. It’s interesting to know I read or reread at least 95 books last year (a few weren’t in the Goodreads system and I can remember a few more…