LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: Oliver de la Paz

  • Reading T. S. Eliot’s tarot cards

    I was talking to my British and Irish poetry class about the “wicked pack of cards” Madame Sosostris wields in “The Waste Land” when one person said, “There should be a Modernist Poets tarot deck.” My brain exploded: H. D. as The Star, Pound as The Emperor, Sassoon as the Nine of Wands, maybe Yeats […]

  • Virtual Salon #3 with Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers

    There’s one scar a river carved, but this ground isn’t a bible you know. True, there are chapters of basalt and clay, but no leaves get saved between them. -from “Amazonis, Mars” The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers documents a different crisis than the one we’re currently, ineffectively navigating: people […]

  • the salonnière introduces …the state she’s in!

    My book is now available from Tinderbox Editions! And, once we get through this, it will also be available in independent bookstores near you. In the meantime, I hereby introduce a virtual salon for authors launching poetry books plus anyone who enjoys a pretend party. Imagine this space as a high-ceilinged room, art-fans lounging on […]

  • Poetry and heart

    I looked up “heart” and found definitions including feeling, courage, enthusiasm, vital part, “the condition of agricultural land as regards fertility,” personality, disposition, compassion, generosity, character, charity, humanity, and of course love. It has associations with memory, too (“by heart”) and deep concern (“to heart”). Obsolete: intellect, which is pretty much the opposite of what […]

  • November invocations

    Write a blog post that is a spell, Oliver de la Paz said to my class, only he said poem, of course, because I had asked him to give us a poetry prompt. The first line and the last line must be the same, he added, as the afternoon light toasted up golden and he reclined in […]