LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: tarot

  • The Judgement Card

    The Judgement Card

    For once this spring, I pulled a good hand–not that I’ve been checking in with the tarot often these days, but I like to find an hour when I can to ask the cards what I should be thinking about. It’s meditative, quiet, grounding. When I say “good” I really mean “not dispiriting.” Essentially my…

  • 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…

  • Myco-comic for Mycocosmic

    Myco-comic for Mycocosmic

    My spouse Chris Gavaler is a comics scholar and creative writer who does crazy things with Microsoft Paint, an old graphics editor that’s supposed to be very limited but which he keeps inventive finding ways to redeploy. He’s also on sabbatical and just finished taking a drawing class that developed his visual arts skills. One…

  • Three of swords time

    Three of swords time

    The best thing this week: my poem “Sex Talk” was featured by Poetry Daily. Lots of friends and a few strangers sent or posted lovely notes about it. This poem came not long after my mother’s death, if I’m remembering right, as I worked through the grief and freedom that follow the death of a…

  • Stars in my eyes, birds in my belfry

    Stars in my eyes, birds in my belfry

    Just for fun, here are a couple of panels from Jamie Fernandez’s Is This How You See Me?, spotted by Chris Gavaler, my spouse and resident comics scholar. It’s not very often that discussions of menopause occur in the comics. Speaking of hot flashes, here we are in Leo. Leo’s my ascendant sign, I just…

  • H.D. and my owlish, Fool-ish life

    H.D. and my owlish, Fool-ish life

    It’s funny what you find in a literary archive–less than you expect, and more. Since I last posted, I spent nearly a week reading the poet H.D.’s papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale, then another week-plus sorting through my notes and beginning to draft an experimentally shaped essay on her use of the Tarot…

  • Summering, ephemera

    Summering, ephemera

    I dreamed the other night of discovering a sonnet by a woman writer whose name I only knew vaguely. Someone had taped it up on a door frame. I don’t remember the words, just that I found it moving and skillful–all one enjambed sentence, shorter than usual lines, hitting the rhymes and iambics in a…

  • H.D., tarot, & occluded vistas

    H.D., tarot, & occluded vistas

    Above is the first card of the Mountain Dream Tarot created by Bea Nettles in 1975–the Fool, a card of fortunate beginnings and free spirits. I don’t think ANYONE has ever described me as a “free spirit.” But the digitized images of this deck were a lucky chance find as I was doing on online…

  • 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…

  • 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…