Four of Lesley Wheeler’s poems, including “The Book of Neurotransmitters,” appear in Fringe issue 24. Poetry editor Anna Lena Phillips interviewed Wheeler by email in November.


Your second full-length poetry collection, Heterotopia, won the Barrow Street Prize for 2010. It includes the sonnet sequence “The Calderstones,” which was part of your first chapbook as well. Did it act as a generative force for other poems in the book?

Writing that sonnet sequence was an interesting experience. I had just returned from three weeks in England, part of it spent on research for the collection. With my kids in summer camp, I had a window of a couple of weeks for intense writing. I wanted to try writing a crown and had recently read some collaborative sequences by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton that handled the repeated lines with a liberating looseness. As I went through my notes, I realized that the Calderstones would be a perfect central image for a circular form, so I mapped out a progression of topics and just started drafting like a demon—two or three sonnets a day. I generally revise heavily and repeatedly, but not this batch; these poems came together shockingly fast. I did revise them again for Heterotopia, but they needed much less screw-tightening than other pieces in the manuscript. I wouldn’t say that “The Calderstones” generated other poems, exactly, but the sequence does occupy the center of the project for me.

It looks like you’ve published a book each year for the past four years! What are you up to now?

Yes, it has been crazy. I’m a fast writer but not that fast. I worked on Heathen, my first full-length collection, for fifteen years, and had a good draft together for several years before C&R Press offered to publish it. I took the advice of a friend and started work on a new project while still making the rounds with the first one. I am very lucky to teach at a place with a generous sabbatical policy, and I have earned fellowships enabling me to extend those leaves to a full year (I’m on one now), and that certainly helps.

Right now I’m working on multiple manuscripts, as I usually seem to be. I’m beginning a new scholarly book with the working title Poetry and Community in the Twenty-First Century. I just finished an essay called “Formalist Modernism” that was solicited for a collection. The working title of my next poetry collection is Signal to Noise. My research has fed my obsessions with sound and communication and those concerns have really permeated my work. There’s also a science-fiction edge to many of my recent poems; I have a 33-poem narrative sequence full of fantasy tropes that I’m trying to figure out what to do with.

You seem to be one of those rare people who successfully balance rigorous academic work with playful, intensive creative work. How do these two forces or modes relate to one another?

I suspect the balance is precarious and won’t last! Teaching, scholarship, and poetry-writing do feed each other; I get ideas for one while pursuing another, and each activity actually makes me better at the others. The time issue is the big obstacle: there’s only so much one person can do and remain sane, and I think I’ve pushed that edge in recent years and need to dial back. I would rather have too much interesting work to do than the opposite problem, though.

Are there any nonfiction books that have especially informed your poetry writing?

I read many histories of Liverpool for Heterotopia, and the Lern Yerself Scouse books by Linacre Lane were invaluable. Now I’m reading lots of scholarship about community, especially virtual community. The Science Tuesday section of the New York Times is often inspiring, and I do online research as well.

You’ve worked on several collaborative sequences. What have you enjoyed about them, and what have been the challenges?

The most sheer fun were these poems, published in Admit2. My collaborator, Scott Nicolay, is a maniac, and it was always great to see what crazy turn he had taken and try to top him. I wrote more of my own poetry when that collaboration was occurring, as if the experience kept me cosmically tuned in.

Kathrine Varnes initiated a collaborative sonnet crown called “Intertidal” that appeared in the summer 2007 issue of Prairie Schooner, and I followed up with another one later that appeared as “Frequencies” in Valparaiso Poetry Review.

The great thing about collaboration is how generative it is. The toughest part of it is finishing a poem. Revising is very sticky, especially if you’re working with multiple people or poets you don’t know well. I like the messy heterogeneity of many collaborative poems, but they never have that perfect, inevitable sound of the very best lyric poems. They’re more like snapshots of incredibly exciting conversations in verse.

Tell us how “Woman Using the Men’s Room” came about.

During one long hot summer, I wrote faithfully in my office every day while the women’s bathroom was being remodeled, and there was a lot of argument about it with the university administration—they wanted to make the women’s toilets unisex and keep the men’s room as it was, even though more women than men use our building. It felt symbolic to many of us of the way women’s work was undervalued here. I crankily commandeered the men’s bathroom for the duration. The reference to Ezra Pound’s bizarre and highly gendered theories of creativity relates to that. At the same time I was full of doubt that the work I was doing really mattered. And I was reading lots of dinosaur books to my young son.

What’s your favorite poem you’ve read in an online journal recently?

I really like “The Dream Animals Long to Return” from Joanne Pearson. It’s deeply weird, which is always a plus, but I also love the sound of it. Her assonantal rhyme is terrific and the almost anagrammatic rhyme of “totems” and “motile”—wow. There’s an offbeat sense of humor, too, which just makes me feel that I’d like the poet if I ever met her.

You can find more of Lesley Wheeler’s work online at Unsplendid, storySouth, Poemeleon, and Verse Daily. And there’s an excerpt from her sonnet sequence “The Calderstones” at Blackbird, but if you want to read the whole thing (which we recommend), you’ll have to get your hands on a copy of Heterotopia.