LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: poetry

  • Jigsawing together a poetry ms

    I finished this 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a Van Gogh painting, and it only took 2 1/2 years! Seriously, my family started it on Thanksgiving 2020, stalled out, rolled it up on one of those felt contraptions, bagged it, and threw it in a corner of the living room. This week was quiet with Chris…

  • Working unpoetically

    Working unpoetically

    This was probably my least poetic National Poetry Month ever–not that the label matters, really, but spring is usually a good writing season for me. I did read poetry but didn’t write or revise a blessed thing. Instead of feeling poetic, I’ve just been really, really tired. Maybe it’s Covid aftermath, or seasonal allergies, or…

  • Occult AWP

    Occult AWP

  • Flares, small and celestial

    Flares, small and celestial

    I’ve been thinking about smallness, so it was fascinating to read, this weekend, Jeannine Hall Gailey’s dazzling new poetry collection, Flare, Corona, a book that explores parallel crises on many scales, from the microscopic to the telescopic. I plan to teach it so I snagged an advance review copy, but it’s now available for pre-order…

  • Broadside giveaway, reviews, & long views

    Broadside giveaway, reviews, & long views

    If you’ve reviewed Poetry’s Possible Worlds in a magazine, or on Goodreads, Amazon, or your blog–or if you can post a review, even a brief one, in any of those venues in the next month or so–I’d be glad to send you one of the beautiful broadsides Ecotone commissioned after awarding my poem “Unsonnet” the…

  • Poetry’s Possible Worlds for pre-order–so there, Three of Cups reversed!

    One great thing this week: Poetry’s Possible Worlds arrived at the distributor, so you can pre-order it from SPD! This is particularly excellent because of the great thing NEXT week: the first book launch event! Virginia’s Poet Laureate was kind enough to connect me to the Muse Writers Center, which is hosting a virtual event…

  • Conference report containing not nearly enough gossip

    There’s plenty I’m NOT going to tell you about the Sewanee Writers Conference until the next time we can share a cup of tea or glass of wine together, after I check that your phone’s voice recorder is off. I’m also still processing and will be for a long time yet–a lot happens in twelve…

  • Multiple worlds in poetry, fiction, and politics

    Traveling to an alternate universe of thinking and writing has been helpful lately given an attempted coup, and racist police response, AND the apocalyptic daily death count and a catastrophically lame vaccine rollout. I don’t manage the leap into literary concentration every day, but that’s actually what my next book is about: what helps us…

  • A Very Good Anti-Best List

    It’s exasperating when people refer to a work of art as “great” as if that were an objective pronouncement. Great for what? The idea that there could be stable, neutral criteria by which literature could be judged more or less worthy is at best nonsensical. In practice, it’s often a way for powerful people to…

  • Wall, whatcha got?

    My son, a college sophomore, is a fiend for math and loves teaching it, too. Since he’s finishing the term at our dining room table, I get to eavesdrop on the tutoring he does by Zoom as well as his study groups’ conversations. Sometimes he and I break for a midday walk in the middle…