LESLEY WHEELER

Category: Uncategorized

  • On the 2014 National Book Award for poetry

    I try to be generous, really I do, but I have been known to nurse cynical and petty feelings about the poetry business. I watch various prizes dealt out and sigh inwardly. So many honors go to people who have already won the other honors as if in an endless feedback loop of being-lauded-because-they’re-lauded. Do…

  • Loaded with mysterious cargo and about to launch

    At first she slept in a bassinet by our bed, keeping us awake with weird barnyard noises: grunts, squawks, clicks, snorts. After a couple of weeks we started pushing the bassinet across the room, and even into the hall outside our door, just so we could catch a little rest between feedings. Our tiny baby,…

  • Poetry and injustice

    I don’t have anything wise and insightful to say about our epidemic  losses of African-Americans to police violence. At the “Black Lives Matter” rally at Washington & Lee on Friday—yes, a rally here, and the crowd was big!—I didn’t speak. African-American undergrads, law students, and community members bore witness to fear and humiliation that are…

  • Forgiveness, gratitude, and other things I suck at

    Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday—historically, emotionally, even logistically. (Reason #647 to be grateful: I don’t have to get on the highway this year.) And yet I love all the rituals leading up to the feast. Last weekend, I made stock and baked pumpkin bread to freeze. This Saturday I scribbled out long lists and laid…

  • Thrushes, worms, and bibliomemoir

    What can amateur accounts of literature do better than conventional literary criticism? That’s the question I brought to two recent bibliomemoirs: Alexander McCall Smith’s What W.H. Auden Can Do For You (from Princeton and Oxford’s Writers on Writers series, 2013) and Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (Crown, 2014). The main answers seem to be:…

  • Applying for a Fulbright: one reviewer’s POV

    I definitely did not have time this September to read and evaluate sixty 25-40 page applications from mid-career and senior scholars and artists to the region of Australia/ New Zealand. I said yes anyway because I was grateful for my 2011 Fulbright to Wellington and felt obligated to pay that generosity forward. I also knew…

  • Sylvia Plath Quiz

    My students’ responses to the real Plath quiz I just administered were too red, they hurt me, so I hereby offer an optional retest.* If your brain has not emptied of images like a cup or a room, please answer the following legibly without using the words hook, bald, black, moon, or blood. 1. What…

  • Frank O’Hara didn’t live long enough to write about middle age

    Last week, as another birthday hurried past, I taught Frank O’Hara! It was the first time ever I chucked the Selected Poems at my students instead of relying on anthology standards! Many of the poems I assigned were the WRONG ONES but it was still exciting—the papaya juice, George Washington in his tight white pants,…

  • PS: what my essay on “The Waste Land” repressed

    To frame an argument in words always entails filtering signal from noise: you can’t include all the evidence, so you try to assemble the best evidence in the best order. Making arguments about contemporary poetry, though, may be a particularly messy enterprise. Just look at the Reading List posted by the September Poetry contributors. We’re…

  • Ruthlessly pruning the overstuffed closet of a poetry book manuscript

    After a shopping trip for school clothes on Saturday, my daughter, a rising high school senior, spontaneously cleaned out her drawers and closet to make room for the new. I cannot emphasize enough how out of character this was, but then again, she’s on the verge of so many changes. All summer she’s been doing…