On Poetry's Possible Worlds by Lesley Wheeler
Who wouldn’t want to read a book titled Poetry’s Possible Worlds?
If you’re a steady reader of this blog, I can guarantee you will be delighted by this book. What I have learned in writing this and other blogs and referencing poetry for eons, is that readers take poetry personally. Lo and behold, the introduction to this book is titled, “Taking Poetry Personally.”
But let me begin by saying that I had somehow magically connected with Lesley over social media and when she posted the cover and said a bit about it before it was published, I just knew that this was a book for me. As someone who has side-gigged at bookstores and libraries most of my adult life, I’ve always been fascinated by how we find books and authors, how sometimes the right book will find us at the right time. (I talked about that phenomenon in the context of my own book, Everything Affects Everyone, in an interview with Kerry Clare. It’s known as the “library angel” experience in coincidence theory).
In twelve chapters, Lesley Wheeler discusses twelve poems. Her method is personal, though it’s also informed by her academic and poet cred. The reader feels immediately as though they are in good, capable, empathetic, poetic, and also nimble hands. The life of the writer is intertwined in the readings, and isn’t this the case for how most of us read poetry? If we spend a lifetime reading poetry, then our life is going to be brought to our reading a poem. I remember in poetry workshops back in my university days, where sometimes the entire critique or discussion of a poem would be about mechanics, when the subject of the poem was something incredibly heart wrenching. This was probably also at a time when “reader-response” was buried in favour of “critical theory” in the rest of the English department. I could never understand why we couldn’t have both…
In putting together this book, Wheeler says the process “helped me to consider what poetry is good for and how its magic operates.” I loved the discussion around “gut feelings” in the first chapter, where “gut feelings keep you whole and enrich your interactions with other people.” Wheeler says, “we should trust our guts about books, too.” All through Poetry’s Possible Worlds I felt as though I’d met a kindred spirit, someone who reads poetry in the same way that I do.
The beauty of poetry is that it is always more than we can say, and Wheeler gets at this, too. “I find poetry more appealing,” she says, “than other kinds of puzzles because when all the letters and spaces join in a charmed way, they exceed my ability to explicate them.”
Not every poem needs to end on a note of hope or joy, but I’m glad that many do. Wheeler says, “I seek joy as a reader, and I know readers need joy from me, even if it’s uncertain. It also does me good to look for it.” How readers connect with poems is a subject of endless interest to me. In another life, I think I could have written a dissertation on this. We bring our experiences, our sorrows, our joys to every reading of a poem, and our memories. And Wheeler says, “Poems are pocket universes in which memories persist.”
I loved reading this book because of its multiple strands of memoir and interpretation. I love the connections. I love the insight into how someone reads. I love this book because it was personal and authentic. I love it because it offers a way into poetry for a new reader of poetry, and validates the experience for anyone who’s been reading poetry for years. It also reminded me to just slow down and delight in a poem. And to feel fine knocking my own life against the words, to feel fine being entranced, transported, held. And to feel fine feeling the poem and its reverberations, years later in the same ways only different.
What else to say about a book like this, except, thanks?
June 10, 2022
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