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Current weather and forecast for the Confederacy
I’m often proud of my brainy, big-hearted students and colleagues, and I’m occasionally even proud of an administrator–when I hear, for instance, that someone deployed funds to help my advisee get through a crisis. Wealthy small liberal arts colleges can be very good places to work and study. And in ways I did not expect…
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My mother as live-in nurse, 1962
Numismatics, 1962 Strange to feel inferior, but that was the job of live-in European servants: to confer shine for a pittance. English nurses, Scottish maids, Estonian women doing laundry, German POWs pruning roses. Out through glitter, back to the dock. Mrs. Anthony motored around town in a humble Ford wagon, but in her garage,…
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May the river/ remember you
“In Berlin, you can’t go anywhere without seeing stones and markers dedicated to the Jewish and Roma residents who were forced from their homes and taken to the concentration camps,” Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights lawyer, says in “A Lynching’s Long Shadow” by Vanessa Gregory. “And that iconography creates a consciousness of what happened that…
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That’s why they call it a practice (NaPoWriMo Day 29)
Threads Meditation pisses me off. All that non-striving time on the floor, therapist-prescribed, noticing the rope of my breath swinging up and down, ringing me like a shivered bell, adds up to another chore I must perform and I have a lot of them— twisted muscles to lengthen, children who need the brushed-hand of a…
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News flash: in April, poet feels moody
Spring’s been happening in fits and starts–blossoms one minute, wind-strewn petals the next. I walk a nearby trail most mornings, and on Tuesday, Woods Creek churned and roared from heavy rains; parts of the path were massive puddles, and the lowest bridge was half-underwater. The next day was frigid; others have been balmy and still.…
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How poetry approaches music (and dances away again)
That’s the little magnolia in our side yard, intensely pink but browned from last night’s ice. A very intense winter term is just ending, one that included lots of grief and good news for the people around me, and that struggling tree, planted by the previous owners, seems a reasonably good emblem for it all.…
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Poetry and presence
Tess Taylor just gave a great reading here, and either there or during my class afterwards, she described poetry as “a dance with absence.” I know what she means–all that white space, evocation, closing in on loss and other big subjects through image and fragment–but when I’m finding my way towards a poem I tend…
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Occasional poem on coeducation
One of my students is currently researching coeducation at Washington and Lee, a guy whose father graduated in W&L’s last all-male class (’88) and whose mother studied here for a semester after women were finally admitted (class of ’89). He’s writing a series of poems based on interviews, newspaper articles, and even obnoxious graffiti from…
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It’s red, reflecting all our sunsets
Prompt: next time you’re at a meeting or professional event, write down the weirdest things your colleagues say. Using one of those phrases as a title, without permission, close the door or at least conceal your screen and write a poem when you should be working. A couple of years ago–maybe it was during a…
LESLEY WHEELER 