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Respect in classrooms vs. crap outside them
Guys yelled slurs and catcalls from fraternity porches and dorm windows. At Rutgers in the late 80s, walking to class could be an ordeal, so one of the first things I learned at college was how to disappear behind an armor of apparent indifference. I often arrived at lectures and seminars demoralized, and sometimes what…
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Urgent: curse for moonlight declamation
Two blessings and a curse–guess which one is the most fun to read aloud? My poxy poem, “All-purpose Spell for Banishment,” written last New Year’s Eve, just appeared in the new issue of Salamander. Maybe if we all chant it naked by moonlight on the solstice, inserting the name of our least favorite president, the new year…
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The spring beauty are starting to bloom
My body and brain tell me it’s December. At work I’ve been teaching, grading, going to meetings, reading files, doing paperwork, conducting interviews; the rest of the time I’ve been making lists, shopping, cleaning, cooking, digging out wool sweaters, and wondering when I’m going to get the house decorated. The sun rises late and vanishes…
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Imaginary journals with real poems in them
If you’re not enjoying what you’re grading, maybe the problem lies in the assignment. I think I’m right in attributing this provocation to Paul Hanstedt, either during a faculty development talk he gave here or on a long-ago Facebook post, but at any rate, it was electrifying, and resulted in real changes in my course design.…
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Bialosky, Logan, and taking poetry personally
Scandals in the poetry world seem sweet from a distance, like triolets blooming in epic slush pile. When, for instance, author and Norton editor Jill Bialosky publishes a memoir, Poetry Will Save Your Life, and William Logan excoriates it in Tourniquet Review, accusing Bialosky of “plagiariz[ing] numerous passages from Wikipedia and the websites of the…
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Feeling good?
No, of course you’re not–the world’s a mess, and by cruising social media right now, you’re basically meeting the sewage face-first. So read some poems. My “Feeling Good,” about dumb pleasures, is up at Sweet. Bonus: follow the link in my bio to the National Zoo’s Panda Cam. Furry naps, bamboo-munching, and art. If you’ve got…
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Our Declaration and our declaration
An interesting coincidence: after an intense conversation about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, my department commissioned a group of volunteers to draft a public statement. I was among the group of, at various times, six to eight people crafting the text collaboratively over Labor Day weekend. The brief we received from other professors…
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Videopoems and problems of choice
If you’d asked me in early August whether I could carve out three full days at the end of the month for a digital storytelling workshop, I probably would have responded profanely. Too many other projects! But I had signed up months before–that was choice number one. I was committed. Choice number two, what kind…
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Putting my poet’s shoulder to the wheel
Cities are supposed to be overwhelming, at least in contrast to small-town slowness, but over the last week or two, I’ve felt the opposite. For our family-vacation-ending-in-a-modernism-conference, we rented a flat on a particularly lovely Amsterdam street–Bosboom Toussaintstraat–and all the museums, good food, and friendliness were nourishing. (I wondered, as I strolled through islands of…
LESLEY WHEELER 