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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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Women working
During a recent quick trip to Toronto–my spouse had conference funding so I tagged along–I did a lot of museum-going. Several days and a hellish Air Canada odyssey later, what stays with me most is an exhibit in the Art Gallery of Ontario. It paired two women impressionists: the famous Mary Cassatt with a Canadian…
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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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Summering, ephemera
I dreamed the other night of discovering a sonnet by a woman writer whose name I only knew vaguely. Someone had taped it up on a door frame. I don’t remember the words, just that I found it moving and skillful–all one enjambed sentence, shorter than usual lines, hitting the rhymes and iambics in a…
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The magic of making things
I hereby direct you to the final project of my May term W&L class: a co-created website for a fictional liberal arts college, Bigglebottom Academy of Magic. The participants in English 239: Magical Education worked through four books in four weeks about schooling for sorcerous types: Le Guin’s novelette “Dragonfly”; Okorafor’s Akata Witch; Grossman’s The…
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Voyaging to and through Poetry’s Possible Worlds
May 17th is the one-year birthday of my first nonfiction book, Poetry’s Possible Worlds. Bringing the threads of my life together, it interweaves a story about reading contemporary poetry during personal crisis; critical reflections on how poetry works; and cognitive science about how the process of reading can change people. I was considering a wide…
LESLEY WHEELER 