LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: authenticity

  • 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,…

  • “A diary of this kind is neither authentic nor satisfactory”: Millay’s journals

    Champagne for breakfast!–no, I’m only kidding, but that’s what Edna St. Vincent Millay had on her birthday in 1933. I was asked to blurb an edition of her diaries, Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited by Daniel Mark Epstein and forthcoming from Yale University Press. I’ve been reading the galleys…

  • The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

    How intense it was this week to be alternately following and averting my eyes from the Senate hearings as I taught Sylvia Plath to seventeen stingingly sharp students–trying to open up space to talk about anger, violence, gender, and race in powerful but often disturbing poems. Plath’s handling of metaphors related to the Holocaust, slavery,…

  • 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…