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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 […]
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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 […]
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“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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Climax of the Summer of Water
The text came on Labor Day, while we were driving home from Pittsburgh: a sharp-eyed neighbor had spotted a cataract pouring out from under the back door. We called him, other neighbors, the police to turn off the water supply, a plumber, then we could only keep driving and wondering. I distracted myself with a […]
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Shenandoah NZ Diary Part I
My latest symptom of workaholism is an editing project: this fall, with help from two students described below, I’m coediting a portfolio of contemporary poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand for Shenandoah: Shenandoah is currently seeking submissions for a February 2013 feature on poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand. Please send up to five poems in a […]
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Poetry tourist
St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin. I’m researching Paula Meehan’s “Six Sycamores” but the only big old trees I’m seeing are labeled “plane trees.” I stomp my foot repeatedly until I figure out that sycamores and plane trees are different names for the same thing.
LESLEY WHEELER 