LESLEY WHEELER

Category: Uncategorized

  • Reading, watching, listening after the non-apocalypse

    Inauguration, schminauguration—what we’re all truly excited about is HEARING RICHARD BLANCO’S POEM. And then digging up the two other poems rejected by the president’s staffers (the New York Times says Blanco offered them three), and blogging about how those dumb politicos eschewed the more risky, exciting options. Anyway, that’s what I’ll be listening to this…

  • Amygdala, shut up

    While I boiled myself in the bath Sunday morning, emerging so puce-colored and limp I had to start drafting a blog post because I was just too weak to go buy groceries for my hungry family, I thought about how I’d woken up at five a.m. in a panic about my Twitter handle (too long!…

  • Credo/ for the new year

    Forest view: ranks of slender trunks shoot up vertically in a bid to catch a bit of direct light. The rare anomaly, the difficult-to-spot wolf tree, spreads its limbs horizontally, luxuriously, because it occupied the meadow before all the others grew up around it. I learned the term reading Paula Meehan’s poem “The Wolf Tree”…

  • Book giveaway

    Want a free signed copy of Heathen, Heterotopia, or The Receptionist? Email me at wheelerlm at wlu dot edu and tell me you’ll review one for Amazon. Let me know which you’ll review; which one you want (it can be the one you’ll post about or a different book); and where to send it (I’m…

  • Poetry, conversation, and more small appliances

    I wonder if I’m totally deluded in thinking of poetry as intensely intimate, emotionally and intellectually heightened conversation. As a reader I experience deep, demented, introvert’s friendship with Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, James Merrill, and other poets whose work I’ve spent many, many hours with. Whenever I’ve loved the literary personality projected by a living…

  • “Douchebag” and other rude, not-seasonally-festive epithets

    The one time I tried to smoke a cigarette, my friends mocked me: “Cut that out. You look totally ridiculous.” By common consensus, I couldn’t pull off foul language either. I thought the problem might have been some crisp Englishness lingering in my elocution—my mother’s British and allegedly I started kindergarten with an accent. I…

  • Community, theater, and magic: three performances near Samhain

    October 29th: Hurricane Sandy is swiping her long arms of rain and wind over the eastern seaboard of the U.S., feeling around for houses to smash. Ann Fisher-Wirth has to cancel and I can’t reach my co-organizer Mattie, so I study the weather forecasts and follow my gut: the Writers at Studio Eleven reading, featuring…

  • Events of our exile

    For the first time ever, while teaching “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I felt inspired to act out the last scene for my students: look, this is what she means, I said, crawling around the edges of the seminar room, fitting my shoulder into an imaginary smooch in the imaginary decorative wall-covering. Meanwhile, I’m thinking, I’m a…

  • Fighting about poems: Shenandoah NZ Diary, Part II

    Received by Email While Guest-Editing I reject your rejection. You are not qualified to cast me off. I’m a luminary: let me direct your attention to an interstellar anthology. You, sir or madam, have provoked a righteous snit. A catastrophic reversion of my recent surgery. You institutionalized me. My well- being’s been battered by bad…

  • Noise, Voice, and the T. S. Eliot Society

    Last week, on the night of my birthday, I dreamed that my father phoned from the afterlife. The strangeness of hearing his voice made me think, the next morning, of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s elegies for the voices of lost loved ones: photographs were common then but since audio recordings were very rare, a person’s…