LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: bridgewater international poetry festival

  • Future schmuture

    No NEH grant again, a magazine acceptance, a solicitation of poems from a magazine I’d never cracked (!), several poem rejections, some drafting and revising, lots of Shenandoah work, a vague but persistent headache, short days and blustery cold–hello from a mixed-blessing November in Sabbatical Land. I hereby mark the sixth-month birthday of my novel…

  • Gossip, news, & poems

    Gossip is a derogatory and strongly gendered word for how nonpowerful people share information. I have only been called “a gossip” to my face once–by a colleague–but it felt like a mild slur with a smelly pile of patriarchy behind it. I mean, we all know mean-spirited people of various genders who are delighted to…

  • It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall

    …The dark threw its patches down upon me also, Walt Whitman wrote in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Nearly as often as he reflects on his own tingling senses, Whitman, it turns out, writes about distance and solitude, sometimes expressing pain about it and reaching for touch across impossible gaps. “It avails not, time nor place–distance avails…

  • Rainbows, snakes, and book launches

    Among my latest thrills: nearly stepping on a hissing snake; a double rainbow over an empty Main Street; a frisbee arriving by mail; and, oh yeah, publishing my first novel. On launch day for Unbecoming, I was shut in my house responding to student project proposals; my March launch for The State She’s In came…

  • Live from the surface of the moon

    Live From the Surface of the Moon     The landing leg (porch) jets a web of shadows across lunar powder while brilliantly bleached astronauts lope across the frame   On Sunday July 20th 1969 I am not yet two : : do not divine how the moon mirrors the sun and the magnificent desolation…

  • My mother as live-in nurse, 1962

      Numismatics, 1962 Strange to feel inferior, but that was the job of live-in European servants: to confer shine for a pittance. English nurses, Scottish maids, Estonian women doing laundry, German POWs pruning roses. Out through glitter, back to the dock. Mrs. Anthony motored around town in a humble Ford wagon, but in her garage,…

  • Good reads

    One of my 2014 resolutions was to track my reading via Goodreads, and I’m here to say I hated it. Record-keeping in itself is a good thing. It’s interesting to know I read or reread at least 95 books last year (a few weren’t in the Goodreads system and I can remember a few more…