LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: About Place

  • Washington-bound (the other one)

    Washington-bound (the other one)

    I’m packing now for 12 days in the Pacific northwest (not nearby Washington D.C., which essentially seems like Mordor now). Here’s the poetry part of my itinerary: I’m excited, not just about the barding around part but exploring unfamiliar scenery (the Olympic peninsula! temperate rain forest! mountain and Pacific views!)–and seeing friends. I’ll technically have…

  • Fruiting the substrate

    Fruiting the substrate

    Publishing a poetry book involves nourishing your work in what may feel like darkness, growing networks. It can take a long time until the mushroom-poems themselves burst into the light. And who knows if people will find them, devour them, and find them tasty. Am I taking this metaphor a little far for you? Too…

  • Dreaming

    Deferred Action   Look at the mountain, find my boots, abandon walls, look at the mountain. It’s all I do. The president tweets DACA is dead while the magnolia publishes other news: the future will be pink. Whom should I listen to? Beets for lunch. Do not think of my father, who loved them, as…

  • Practicing Hope

    I’ve never had much talent for hope, and what hope I’ve managed to summon tends to get squashed. It’s a feeling I’ve learned to distrust. Yet widespread public outrage at police assaults to Black lives and dignity: it springs from that four-letter-word. Protests and anger, imply at least some tiny spark of faith that the…

  • Hope, ambition, and other tricky green things

    “Let him who is without my poems get assassinated!” Walt Whitman wrote, when the self-published 1855 Leaves of Grass didn’t make much of a splash, despite the three glowing reviews Whitman himself wrote and published anonymously. I’m reading him for a 4-week, all-remote Whitman and Dickinson seminar I’m teaching right now, and bonus: it helps…