LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: memory

  • Comics, newsreels, retrospectives

    Comics, newsreels, retrospectives

    A comic in a blog can have a filmic quality–you scroll down through image after image, with screen light shining behind them. This week I’m delighted to show you Chris Gavaler’s comic “Rhapsomantic” based on my poem “Rhapsodomancy,” a poem from my forthcoming book Mycocosmic. (Text-only version here, in ASP Review). He and I consulted…

  • Revising reality in poetry, sf, & our partisan brains

    Revising reality in poetry, sf, & our partisan brains

    Mini-interview below with Nat Goldberg and Chris Gavaler on the occasion of their latest publication. Topics range from Star Trek to hybrid poems to literary collaboration to the Church of America. Enjoy! LW: Congratulations on the debut of your great new book Revising Reality: How Sequels, Remakes, Retcons, and Rejects Explain the World. A question that…

  • Still life with two relaxed superheroes and a sparkle pen

    Sometimes, if I wake up extra-early, I’ll make a pot of tea and read one of the many bound-to-be-good poetry books stacked on the cyborg (what we call the sideboard, for obscure reasons). This morning I read Diane Seuss’ Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and Girl. It’s full of elegy and ekphrasis, a very rich book…

  • May the river/ remember you

    “In Berlin, you can’t go anywhere without seeing stones and markers dedicated to the Jewish and Roma residents who were forced from their homes and taken to the concentration camps,” Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights lawyer, says in “A Lynching’s Long Shadow” by Vanessa Gregory. “And that iconography creates a consciousness of what happened that…

  • 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…

  • Poetry & change & cocktail recipes

    When someone says, “Poetry changed my life,” you expect to hear of a high-stakes transformation. Former students have told me, for example, how poetry gave them permission to embrace and admit their sexuality. Reading and writing poetry sustains people through all kinds of crises, and hearing it helps people feel moved and connected at weddings,…

  • Anthroposcenery

    Washington and Lee students often refer to their version of Lexington, Virginia as “the bubble,” as if were a protected from the world by those soft, old mountains. It’s not, nor would that be a good thing, and they know that. But seeming out-of-time is part of the attractive weirdness of some universities in the…

  • Credo/ for the new year

    Forest view: ranks of slender trunks shoot up vertically in a bid to catch a bit of direct light. The rare anomaly, the difficult-to-spot wolf tree, spreads its limbs horizontally, luxuriously, because it occupied the meadow before all the others grew up around it. I learned the term reading Paula Meehan’s poem “The Wolf Tree”…