LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: H.D.

  • H.D. and my owlish, Fool-ish life

    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…

  • Summering, ephemera

    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…

  • H.D., tarot, & occluded vistas

    H.D., tarot, & occluded vistas

    Above is the first card of the Mountain Dream Tarot created by Bea Nettles in 1975–the Fool, a card of fortunate beginnings and free spirits. I don’t think ANYONE has ever described me as a “free spirit.” But the digitized images of this deck were a lucky chance find as I was doing on online…

  • Hybrid H.D.

        I’ve been swimming around in H.D.’s work since my undergraduate years, on the recommendation of the writer I eventually married. I started with her memoirs of Freud and Pound, trekking up to the sunny top floor of the University of Southampton library to find them, then worked backwards to the poetry, which became…

  • Teaching Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

    Teaching a single-author poetry book is a different enterprise than assigning poems from an anthology. There’s a lot more information to sift and process: the future greatest hits are interspersed with poems that may be harder to absorb; ordering, epigraphs, and subsections suggest new meanings; there’s an arc to read for, a set of through-lines…

  • Poetic navigation

    The kids, you’ll be shocked to hear, haven’t been especially receptive to the Yeats I’ve been reading aloud over dinner. Madeleine thinks the Maud Gonne poems consign Yeats to creepy stalker territory and isn’t nearly as impressed as I am by the beauty of it all—and I was moving chronologically, so I didn’t even get…

  • I write my way out of it

    One of my talisman poems is section 6 from H.D.’s “The Walls Do Not Fall.” The poet imagines herself as a worm, emblem of lowly persistence, among mist-jeweled grass blades. Her mantra: “I profit/ by every calamity;/ I eat my way out of it.” The calamity for H.D. was living in London during the Blitz.…