LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: poetry

  • Prove or disprove and salvage if possible

    Both your children will be away, people said, thus you will have a productive summer. In honor of my younger child, who is studying number theory for six weeks straight, let’s do the math. On the plus side: Cooking, cleaning, shopping, and laundry are far easier and cheaper. (I cannot BELIEVE how much less money…

  • Not fleeing

    When I was eleven, I started to plot my escape. Financial independence seemed like the prerequisite, but the 50 cents an hour I earned babysitting weren’t going to take me far. So, baby steps. I started by purchasing my own shampoo and toothpaste, keeping them separate from the family stuff. I figured I’d gradually work…

  • How poetry approaches music (and dances away again)

    That’s the little magnolia in our side yard, intensely pink but browned from last night’s ice. A very intense winter term is just ending, one that included lots of grief and good news for the people around me, and that struggling tree, planted by the previous owners, seems a reasonably good emblem for it all.…

  • Poetry and presence

    Tess Taylor just gave a great reading here, and either there or during my class afterwards, she described poetry as “a dance with absence.” I know what she means–all that white space, evocation, closing in on loss and other big subjects through image and fragment–but when I’m finding my way towards a poem I tend…

  • Small amid the sparkle

    Is that a cormorant on that piling near St. Augustine, Florida, drying its wings? Because all the poets at the AWP convention in Tampa the week after next will look comparably, awkwardly exhibitionistic. Yo! I’m not totally unimposing! Come buy my book! Including me, of course. I’ll be carrying around copies of my new chapbook, Propagation, for…

  • Poetry at the Border: Ann Fisher-Wirth

    This blog’s intermittent “Poetry at the Border” feature returns with two excerpts from the powerful new collection Mississippi, a striking large-format collaboration between poet Ann Fisher-Wirth and photographer Maude Schuyler Clay. While focused on a specific state, this book is full of borderlands and hinges: between poetry and photographs, between history and the present, and among races…

  • Unmade boundaries of acts and poems

    I had a long bout of wakefulness last night, but W&L cancels classes on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so I slept until the cold January sun had actually risen, hallelujah. Over my first pot of tea, I picked up a section of Sunday’s paper, and found this article about the amazing playwright, memoirist, and…

  • Respect in classrooms vs. crap outside them

    Guys yelled slurs and catcalls from fraternity porches and dorm windows. At Rutgers in the late 80s, walking to class could be an ordeal, so one of the first things I learned at college was how to disappear behind an armor of apparent indifference. I often arrived at lectures and seminars demoralized, and sometimes what…

  • Bialosky, Logan, and taking poetry personally

    Scandals in the poetry world seem sweet from a distance, like triolets blooming in epic slush pile. When, for instance, author and Norton editor Jill Bialosky publishes a memoir, Poetry Will Save Your Life, and William Logan excoriates it in Tourniquet Review, accusing Bialosky of “plagiariz[ing] numerous passages from Wikipedia and the websites of the…

  • Krazy Kat among the nasturtiums

    COMICS=POETRY+GRAPHIC DESIGN, says Austin Kleon, who is, in turn, reprising Gregory Gallant, a.k.a. Seth–but wherever the formula comes from, I love the possibilities it raises for both comics and poetry as media. It’s my starting point for a paper I’m giving at the Modernist Studies Association conference very soon. I’ll be discussing the 1920 Krazy…