The most interesting tensions and ambitions of twentieth-century American poetry intersect in one resonant word: voice. The term "poetic voice" emphasizes poetry's reliance on sound, which is prominent in ethnic American writings, new formalism, and many species of performance and sound-directed poetry, both mainstream and avant-garde. However, voice is also a metaphor for originality, personality, and the illusion of authorial presence within printed poetry―meanings that have been particularly useful (and provocative) in literary criticism and creative writing.
In Voicing American Poetry, Lesley Wheeler explores how and why American poetry of the twentieth century and beyond keeps returning to voice as an idea, even though the term frustrates definition. Poetic voice is a crucial term precisely because of its ambiguity: both poets and critics invoke voice to argue for poetry's power. Because voice can also be a medium for poetry, this book offers a uniquely full history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry performance in the United States. Beginning with Edna St. Vincent Millay's captivating performances of presence on the page, the stage, and the radio, Wheeler investigates the rise of the academic poetry reading circuit and its various lively alternatives, from the Beats to the poetry-slam scene.
Along the way Wheeler examines how Langston Hughes transformed oral culture into visual poetry, and how collaborative poetry challenges the very idea of self-expression. Voicing American Poetry also features an annotated list of important poetry readings in the United States since 1950. Wheeler finds that American poetry itself remains a vital, coherent enterprise and that this commitment is constantly renewed in lecture halls, auditoriums, coffee shops, bars, and classrooms.

Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present

Literature & Fiction

Wheeler, Lesley

History & Criticism

Cornell University Press

Poetry. "In Lesley Wheeler's exquisite debut collection, HEATHEN, the otherworldly flit among the actual like imaginary chameleons in real gardens. The dwarves of Eden think it's a stable and refuse to touch the wine: 'Gah,' they cry, 'it's dung' ('Religious Education'). Marianne Moore, hired to teach typing at the Carlisle Indian School, feels 'false as a New World chameleon' and sows 'sedition' in the Business Department until it's closed down ('A Place for the Genuine'). And in the wondrously rhymed quatrains of the title poem, a son fits his ear to his mother's 'so that the god in your head can talk / to the god in mine. I hear a forest / creak like the binding of a book' ('Heathen'). Wheeler strikes an impossible balance between the wildly witty and tenderly elegant detail. Heathen is sheer magic"--Cynthia Hogue.

Heathen

Poetry

C&R Press

Poetry. Winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize selected by David Wojahn. For philosopher Michel Foucault, "heterotopia" designates a real or imagined space of escape, transformation, or revelation. In Lesley Wheeler's prizewinning second collection, the heterotopia is Liverpool, England, during the middle of the twentieth century--a time and place defined by the Blitz and the privations that followed. Her imaginary Liverpool, however, has a complicated relationship to the real city and to her own life in the United States: it makes visible what was gained and lost in the transition from poverty to prosperity, from oral culture to print overload.

Heterotopia

Barrow Street Press

Honor List for 2012 James Tiptree, Jr. Award Edna, the heroine of The Receptionist, is a mother and the receptionist for an academic department. The morning after hearing a Voice telling her, "The first revolution: simply to refuse, " going through her email inbox, "Edna thought to check her spam." The message she found there from "nomic Utterance" changed everything. Gwyneth Jones, author of Spirit and The Universe of Things writes: "Lesley Wheeler's The Receptionist is a delight: a stirring narrative of fantasy and derring-do, set in the ivy-clad towers and poky offices of modern academia, in which the warrior princess of an ancient line returns to the fray at last and summons ancient powers to defend the right, all told in technically assured terza rima cantos, full of ingenious rhythms. The forces of evil are all too recognizable, the bad guys satisfyingly bad and the good guys not too goody-goody. The infusion of classic children’s fantasy, and other bedtime folklore sources, is wonderful too. In the bonus package of shorter poems, 'Zombie Thanksgiving' (T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' retold) is stunning, an absolute tour de force." Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Lavinia and Cheek by Jowl, writes: "How much Modernism deprives us of when it declared both the fantastic in fiction and the narrative in poetry unrespectable, and what a pleasure it is now to see the exiled witches and the forbidden rhymes return. Where can an evil Dean meet his doom more fitly than in terza rima? Lesley Wheeler’s brief novel of misbehavior in academia, subtle and funny, rashly inventive and perfectly realistic, uses all the forgotten powers of metaphor and poetry to make the mundane luminous." Review For the lover of poetry and fantasy, for the survivor of academic politics or anyone interested in feminist speculative work, this book is a new and valuable Voice. 
Sally Rosen Kindred, Strange Horizons

The Receptionist and Other Tales (Conversation Pieces)

Aqueduct Press

Cynthia, chair of the English Department at a Virginia university, finds herself gaining uncanny powers as she reaches middle age.

Unbecoming

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fantasy

Poetry. "The tinder of Lesley Wheeler's latest collection of poems ignites a tremendous bonfire with the glow of both history and the future illuminated in the present dark. In poem after exquisite poem she writes of both the spark and the ember, where 'Scent resonates / even though the blooms are closed.' Here in her breathtaking work the landscapes of the past are indelibly linked with our hardwired present."--Oliver De La Paz

The State She's In

Tinderbox Editions

In her debut essay collection, award-winning poet and critic Lesley Wheeler tells the story of her father's unraveling. While she studies poetry in New Zealand on a Fulbright fellowship, his dishonesty smashes her parents' marriage and destroys their savings. Nothing is resolved, even after his death. The past and present keep shifting. 
Reading contemporary poetry helps Wheeler negotiate the crisis. Cognitive scientists use the term "literary transportation" to describe getting lost in a book--and poems can transport a person, too, not despite but because they are brief and full of gaps. Wheeler's frank, lively essays demonstrate how traveling through a poem's pocket universe can change people for the better. 
"POETRY'S POSSIBLE WORLDS turns and counterturns between personal remembrance and scholarly observation as Lesley Wheeler pays homage to verse from across the globe. An insightful account of the revision of self that happens over a lifetime, Wheeler charts the complex negotiations of both childhood and adulthood (conflicts of illness, employment, racial violence, and the anthropocene). Rather than laboring toward the illusory comforts of "closure,"however, Wheeler reminds us of poetry's restorative power: its intricate gifts of entrancement and communication, its ability to reflect our all-too-human contradictions and limitations. Ultimately, Poetry's Possible Worlds champions the joy and open-endedness of the lyric, as well as the lasting impact of close reading as proof that, in an ever-changing world, art is manifold."--Shara Lessley, author of Two-Headed Nightingale and The Explosive Expert's Wife 
Nonfiction. Literary Criticism. Essays.

Poetry’s Possible Worlds

Essays & Correspondence

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Books by Wheeler, Lesley

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wheeler, Lesley. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present

Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present

Heathen

Heterotopia

The Receptionist and Other Tales (Conversation Pieces)

Unbecoming

The State She's In

Poetry’s Possible Worlds