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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.
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Poetic navigation
The kids, you’ll be shocked to hear, haven’t been especially receptive to the Yeats I’ve been reading aloud over dinner. Madeleine thinks the Maud Gonne poems consign Yeats to creepy stalker territory and isn’t nearly as impressed as I am by the beauty of it all—and I was moving chronologically, so I didn’t even get…
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Small appliances
You know on “The Wire,” how Lester just listens for those phone numbers to ping, and meanwhile builds dollhouse furniture? And Baltimore goes to hell all around him, and the hours watching screens and sifting through papers don’t fix the rottenness of the world, but damn he does a good job carving those little highboys?…
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I write my way out of it
One of my talisman poems is section 6 from H.D.’s “The Walls Do Not Fall.” The poet imagines herself as a worm, emblem of lowly persistence, among mist-jeweled grass blades. Her mantra: “I profit/ by every calamity;/ I eat my way out of it.” The calamity for H.D. was living in London during the Blitz.…
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Dead Father Poems
The best condolence note so far was an offer from a former student who grew up in New Orleans: “Let me know and I’ll put the voodoo on her.” It came with an anecdote about an effective curse on a scheming widow. Her jinxed swimming pool cracked as if buckling under an invisible burden of…
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Searching for habitable planets
Otherworldly poetry is an adaptable traveler—it can thrive in many climates and habitats—but the new science fiction-themed issue of the New Yorker does not, apparently, possess a life-sustaining atmosphere. My favorite reading bandwidth is slipstream, new fabulism, whatever you call it: that place on the dial where so-called literary values of complexity, moral ambiguity, and…
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Future tense
My father checked himself into the VA Medical Center in Philadelphia a few weeks ago and it’s not clear when or if he’ll be able to leave again. He’s been managing congestive heart failure for a while. Now he needs surgery for a leaky valve and just isn’t well enough to undergo it. Every time…
LESLEY WHEELER 