LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: Mary Oliver

  • Impossible, improbable, and infinitely full

    Impossible, improbable, and infinitely full

    It’ll be Shenandoah‘s 75th anniversary in 2025 and celebrations are beginning. First up, an exhibition at W&L’s Leyburn Library curated by Editor in Chief Beth Staples and students. It features precious and startling items from the archive. For example, poems and letters from Langston Hughes and E. E. Cummings are on display, and, more unusually,…

  • Pain, pleasure, and Spottswood Styles

    Ghosts of poetry: once, on the current site of Washington and Lee University’s theater, there stood a brick house with a stone fireplace “so large that we could burn whole railroad ties without having them cut.” It belonged to Spottswood Styles, 1869-1946, “Lexington’s Negro Poet.” I’m quoting from volume seven of the Rockbridge Historical Society…