LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: poetry

  • Woman escapes monster

    Oh, the existential horror of a North American professor in August…Teaching at a liberal arts college full of talented students is an excellent gig, but during teaching terms, the job eats me alive. This is going to be an especially intense fall for coursework, plus I’m running a search. In a few weeks, in short,…

  • Gender shrapnel, from one foxhole

    “The first time you’re hit by it, you have no idea what it is, what it came from, or why…If you ever try to confront the events, you feel half crazy and afraid…People start to tell you to calm down, to pick your battles more carefully, and to be grateful for what you’ve got…As you…

  • Book promotion, reading, butt-sitting

    Lately I’ve been reading in a fragmentary way–journalism, parts of books, letters in archives–in the shadow of crises. Too much death and division in the news; too many friends ill. The latest small, stupid pain came from a hornet’s sting Sunday. I guess the hard crying afterwards was cathartic, but my foot is still swollen…

  • Oh, mother

    Writing is a confidence game, and while generally I can play it with the necessary brio, occasionally I drop all the cards. In many ways, I’m having a great spring. I love this new essay on Radioland by Athena Kildegaard in Bloom. I’m happily tinkering with fall syllabi, but I still have a few months before…

  • Watch me listen

    On Saturday I met my daughter at Union Station in D.C. and we ended up at the National Portrait Gallery, standing in front of paintings until our feet ached. I’ve done the rounds there a few times but don’t remember seeing “The Hermit Thrush” (1890), above, by Thomas Dewing. I love those postures of keen,…

  • As if suspense were a permanent state

    Poetry isn’t generally associated with suspense. It seems like an art of uncertainty–and a consolation for that uncertainty. Yet I find myself more and more convinced that poetry’s fragmentariness needs to be anchored by story (earlier post related to this idea here). I’m also wishing I could see the shape of my own story more…

  • Marginalia and interleavings

    When you read, you think someone else’s thoughts–which is why it’s interesting and good to read books by people whose experiences are different than yours. Sometimes, however, there’s an intermediary spirit in the mix. Pick up a heavily marked used book and you end up glimpsing another reader’s mental processes, too. Students experience this all…

  • Thanks David Bowie

    …for giving me permission to become a scary monster. Sigh Like Twig the Wonder Kid A party tonight with real boys / who needs trouble Better the problems of representing shadow Electric snap of static when fingers touch vinyl then the amplified hush as needle meets its groove Better to ponder freakishness / whether the…

  • Close-reading the 2015 National Book Awards

    Forecast: capricious poetry weather ahead. Last year I tackled the National Book Award’s poetry long list in time for a new year’s post and learned a lot from the exercise. This year I was completing the same task, reading with admirable industry and dedication, when I picked up Sunday’s New York Times Book Review and…

  • Distraction and vegetables

    I have been misbehaving again. Instead of finishing  a draft of my critical book this month–it’s close to done–I seem to have shelved it temporarily in favor of writing fiction, a genre I haven’t done much with since college. Ten thousand words last week alone, so the project is thundering along, and I’m having SO…