Posted on May 31, 2020
by Lesley Wheeler
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…The dark threw its patches down upon me also, Walt Whitman wrote in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Nearly as often as he reflects on his own tingling senses, Whitman, it turns out, writes about distance and solitude, sometimes expressing pain about it and reaching for…
Category: Shenandoah, teaching, The State She's In, UnbecomingTags: bridgewater international poetry festival, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Green Mountains Review, Massachusetts Review, Prospectus, Rose Solari, social distance, sweet, Walt Whitman, Washington Independent Review of Books
Posted on May 2, 2020
by Lesley Wheeler
2 Comments
“Let him who is without my poems get assassinated!” Walt Whitman wrote, when the self-published 1855 Leaves of Grass didn’t make much of a splash, despite the three glowing reviews Whitman himself wrote and published anonymously. I’m reading him for a 4-week, all-remote Whitman…
Posted on March 10, 2016
by Lesley Wheeler
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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”…
Category: UncategorizedTags: birdsong, Ecotone, National Portrait Gallery, poetry, sound, The Hermit Thrush, Thomas Dewing, virginia festival of the book, vision, Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Posted on February 12, 2012
by Lesley Wheeler
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So if poems are time-travel devices, they ought to travel sideways and forward as well as backwards. I recently hosted a reading by Natasha Trethewey, who definitely points her universal remote towards the past in Bellocq’s Ophelia, Native Guard, and Beyond Katrina. I’m teaching…
