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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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Blockage, re-routing, clearance
Did I ever tell you about the time I was on an AWP shuttle bus and a publicist’s assistant told me that my sacral chakra was blocked? We were chatting about reiki, so I’m clearly receptive to that kind of random conversational offering, but it’s pretty bold to diagnose a stranger. I instantly knew that…
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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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Holding dear
I find it pretty easy to blog about writing, reading, and teaching–but very hard to post about other subjects that are constantly on my mind, from climate justice and social justice to politics. I don’t have special expertise in the latter subjects; I really don’t like jump-on-the-bandwagon social media declarations for reasons I could write…
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Writing about poetry with AI
Poetry’s Possible Worlds emerged from years of teaching undergraduates who don’t believe that learning how to write academic essays about literature has long-term relevance to their lives. Many of my students, though, enjoy–or can be surprised into enjoying–reading, thinking, and talking about books and poems, so the puzzle has been: how do I make writing…
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Stars in my eyes, birds in my belfry
Just for fun, here are a couple of panels from Jamie Fernandez’s Is This How You See Me?, spotted by Chris Gavaler, my spouse and resident comics scholar. It’s not very often that discussions of menopause occur in the comics. Speaking of hot flashes, here we are in Leo. Leo’s my ascendant sign, I just…
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H.D. and my owlish, Fool-ish life
It’s funny what you find in a literary archive–less than you expect, and more. Since I last posted, I spent nearly a week reading the poet H.D.’s papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale, then another week-plus sorting through my notes and beginning to draft an experimentally shaped essay on her use of the Tarot…
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For rain it hath a friendly sound
Good thing this wasn’t a full-on poetry pilgrimage. Mostly my family enjoyed fine, cool weather during our week’s vacation in midcoast Maine, and I’d planned a stop, as we drove away, in Edna St. Vincent Millay territory, just for an hour, before visiting the Farnsworth Museum. Enter heavy rain and flood warnings. I insisted on…
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LESLEY WHEELER 