LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: James Merrill

  • The conference program and underprogram

    The conference program and underprogram

    Gregory Pardlo, paraphrased, from a staged conversation with Allison Joseph: I know I might sound like a hypocrite, but don’t worry about the prizes; there’s so much compromise and chance in the process. Just keep doing your thing and saying yes to opportunities. Conferences have a program and an underprogram. Between events I talk to…

  • Collaboration

    Lone wolf humanist here to tell you that while reading and writing in solitude are some of my favorite things, experiences with intellectual and artistic collaboration have astonished me, shaking loose all kinds of work and thinking I might never have otherwise produced. As poets Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton say in this great piece–which…

  • Instructions for creating England

    My speculative poetry students have been asking brilliant questions during the past two weeks: what’s Tracy K. Smith’s attitude towards a posthuman future in Life on Mars? How does assigning a higher priority to the natural world change Marvin Bell’s sense of what death means? How do Jeannine Hall Gailey’s villainesses differ from their counterparts…

  • Same sex marriage–plus, talking cats!

    Our daughter said to us recently about our first cat, Gladys: “All I really remember is her voice, the funny things you used to pretend she said. At the time I wasn’t sure what powers grownups had. I thought maybe you were actually translating.” Gladys, a petite gray-and-white creature we adopted in the early nineties,…