LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: allen ginsberg

  • Teaching the poetic 50s, with sincere relief

    Teaching the poetic 50s, with sincere relief

    And woe betide that poet whose life, when the gossip-columnist-reviewer goes to work on it, does not reveal fornications and adulteries, drug-addictions, alcoholism, and spells in mental homes. “What?” the reviewer exclaims, “when it appears your poems have cost you so little, when the writing of them has apparently disorganized your life hardly at all,…

  • Poetry and fake news

    I don’t think a poem can be true. I also recognize that when a writer works through something risky and important to her in a poem–when the stakes feel personal and significant, and language is used craftily to convey that cost–the end result is a more powerful poem. That paradox is at the heart of…

  • Frank O’Hara didn’t live long enough to write about middle age

    Last week, as another birthday hurried past, I taught Frank O’Hara! It was the first time ever I chucked the Selected Poems at my students instead of relying on anthology standards! Many of the poems I assigned were the WRONG ONES but it was still exciting—the papaya juice, George Washington in his tight white pants,…

  • High school, the best poetry audience ever

    One way to tell the story of how I came to read poetry desperately and constantly would be: early. I still know by heart a book of nursery rhymes I used to own, with Richard Scarry illustrations. A lot of us, though, had our first serious poetry crushes in, or at least during, high school.…

  • “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…

  • Writers’ notebooks

    I returned to Wellington yesterday from Auckland where, during the wonderful “Poetry Off the Page” course she co-teaches with Helen Sword, Michele Leggott presented me with a Tapa Notebook. This practice is a part of an ongoing nzepc project: visiting writers are presented with an empty, unlined spiral notebook and asked to fill up the…