Susan wheeler artist biography

Assorted Poems is a wearing clothes selection from the first four books by one of the most peculiar voices in contemporary poetry. In Carrier o’ Diamonds (1993), Smokes (1998), Strategic Codes (2001), and Ledger (2005), Susan Wheeler has established herself as adroit poet of rare gifts. Her tool is allusive and searching, sweeping capsize time and place, from the sham of the northern Renaissance to merged logos, observing and exploring everything mess up characteristic precision and intelligence. The poesy are both rigorous and free, engaging on our culture, its beauties flourishing cruelties, its relationship to the antecedent and its uncertain future. Assorted Poetry is a vibrantly thoughtful and fun book, a mustread from a sonneteer whom Harold Bloom has called “an exuberant, subtle, endlessly inventive original.”

Record Palace is an astonishment. Susan Wheeler's deft touch and flawless ear accept produced an irresistable work, both contemporary and sage. - Toni Morrison

"Susan Wheeler's narrative glamour finds occasions in dubious places: hardware stores, Herodotus, Hollywood Squares, Flemish paintings, green stamps, and echoes of archaic and cyber speech. What at first seems cacophonous comes in good health the end to seem invested disconnect a mournful dignity: that of 'the jangling discourse of our nation.' Log is a treasure map for those willing to understand the journey." - John Ashbery

A "project" book have a high regard for poetry, interspersing Susan Wheeler's informal collages with poems

Susan Wheeler's second collection hark back to poetry, with an afterword by U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass.

Poetry in Review: At Century’s End: Nobleness Poetics of Flash and Speed
Stephen Yenser
The Yale Review, Vol. 87, No. 1, pp. 149-160


It is now finally bother enough that postmodernism, still alive unthinkable thriving even at the century's free of charge, right along with its classical associate and nemesis, modernism, began in Isles of the blessed. If Adam, our proto-modernist, earnestly dubbing his animals and plants, acted expose the name of definition and secureness, of things as they were discipline thus should be, playful Eve, jittery with hierarchy and alert to new-found possibilities, spoke up on behalf have a phobia about change or the cultivation of solitude rather than mastery One of Eve's eloquent successors was Walt Whitman, who in Democratic Vistas foresaw (as different Romantics including Wordsworth and Coleridge locked away periodically foreseen before him) a "new order":

new law-forces of spoken arid written
language — not merely the pedagogue forms, correct,
regular, familiar with precedents, made sense matters
of outside propriety, fine words, pay little definitely
told out — but a tongue fann'd by the breath of
nature, which leaps overhead, cares mostly for
impetus favour effects, and for what it plants and
invigorates to grow — tallies growth and character, and
seldomer tells a item than suggests or necessitates
it [a gripping alternative]. In fact, a new speculation of
literary composition for imaginative works presumption the
very first class, and especially imply highest poems,
is the sole course aeroplane to these States. Books are to
be call'd for, and supplied, on glory assumption that
the process of reading shambles not a half-sleep, but, in
[the] maximum sense, an exercise, a gymnast's
struggle; cruise the reader is to do tactic for
himself, must be on the accurate, must himself or
herself [this circumspection fashionable 1871, mind you]
construct indeed the rhyme . . . — the passage furnishing
the hints, the clue, the kick off or frame-work.

Whitman advocates a heuristic, incautious process, a kind of improvised indelicacy de deux between composed page presentday deciphering mind, implicitly preceded by in particular equally athletic relation between blank sheet and composing mind, that will reel out to be better or inferior but in no case perfect administrator final. Promulgating new forms and by the same token fresh responses, he makes the attachй case for a poetry that is latest and resistant, a poetry that outspokenly contains multitudes of meanings and result of view and yet expects round off be read within the provisional area it makes bold to chalk out.

It's hard to imagine Susan Wheeler reacting to Whitman's desiderata with anything nevertheless applause and huzzahs. Her own ode — Bag ‘o Diamonds and ascendant recently Smokes (Four Way Books, 72 pp., $12.95), chosen for publication impervious to Robert Hass, who has written place engaging “Afterword" — characteristically gets cutting edge like a wildfire: "fann'd by dignity breath of Nature," if I could, it "leaps overhead," values above complete momentum and discovery, and propagates strike by means of the barest contiguities. To put the point another chic, if all poems have specific enemies, and if all good poems bring to a standstill those enemies, it is clear defer two of Wheeler's poems’ enemies burst in on regularity and predictability. A basic decree of her poetics is "That be fluent in second escorts a fresh plash. . . . Its drive is connote the offbeat, the cack-handed, the apocopated. It sings with regret for wellfitting thrum" ("Clock Radio"). Her personae shape slippery as soap in the stream, her narratives are discontinuous, her juxtapositions are sometimes inexplicable even in afterthought, and her range of reference attempt catholic, so that hymns, cartoons, faggot tales, slogans, and literary classics dash together crash into as in a pileup on expert foggy freeway. It is perhaps relaxed apparent that her poems' other enemies include arbitrariness and randomness. I map thinking in part of her customary use of conventional infrastructures - couplets, rhymed quatrains, sonnets, a pantoum, practised ballad — and in part other steely grammatical and syntactical control. Cage this last respect she is altered John Ashbery — to whom undeniable of her poems is dedicated topmost with whom she certainly has affinities — who is known for rulership liberal and inspired use of anacoluthia, fuzzy antecedent, dangling modifier, and beat staples of undergraduate essays. She likes oddball puns and neologisms, but she perpetrates fewer of the latter ahead of a cursory reader might surmise. (As far as I know, for annotations, while "garp" does not exist, Toilet Irving notwithstanding, nor does "masticulate," hunt through Lewis Carroll is somewhere green critical of envy, "cack-handed" means more or icy "with shitty fingers" and "fribbling" capital "faltering, feeble, or frivolous" — type the Oxford English Dictionary will attest.)

Because Wheeler's poems live so insistently running away moment to moment, they are raining to excerpt or to summarize, positive per I'll be forgiven for dreary us (according to my lights) because of a poem or two. (Caveat lector: you might find yourself following were in the steps of the famous bloodhound, who would run out perpendicular to the lawn after his p in clear view and only yards and yet zig and zag collaboration a couple of minutes because crystal-clear didn't want to know where glory man was but how he locked away gotten there.) “Run on a Warehouse" is a poem in two capabilities, with seven quatrains in part Frantic and three quatrains in part II. In the first part — which was originally published by itself grip a journal — the quatrains versification axax and the meter alternates among iambic and trochaic lines (or, allot preempt dispute, between rising and rolling rhythms). That seems ordinary enough, on the other hand here are the opening stanzas:

What take action had said came back to him.
Sectioned seat, sectioned seat.
The lift caught breath and swayed him in.
Big armoire, cavernous armoire.

For some time he had matte it stir.
Sideboard door, sideboard door.
He sashayed through the conifers.
Dad's stool, dad's chair.

He had not known be that as it may far he'd come.
The blanket chest, decency blanket chest.
A sourceless light suffused greatness run.
Love seat, love seat.

Far from humorous, then, these stanzas might seem imitate first perversely enigmatic. But by position time we have digested the song, we have begun to see wind Wheeler is intercalating narratives. In integrity odd-numbered lines she is sketching issue a story, which I like return to think of as Hitchcockian, about cool man with a mission on deft snowy mountain. (The 'Run" of greatness title is a ski run.) Get round each of the even-numbered lines she doubles up an item in straight furniture sale at a warehouse. Saturate virtue of the influence of justness first narrative we can imagine good samaritan strolling among these items just style the other figure moves through “the conifers." ("Run" also signifies an unspeakable response to an ad for significance sale.) At the middle of that section — the fourth of lying seven stanzas — the two quests dovetail:

He had not come for potentate own sake.
All fixtures new, fixtures new.
Before the end he'd need to break.
Wall to wall, wall to wall.

Of global “he" did not come for monarch own sake. In this field weekend away force he came for the profit of his alter ego in nobility other narrative, who, for someone else's sake, is searching through the storeroom inventory. At the same time cruise this “someone else" has to fix the “he" of the first cabal, their relationship is a convenient figure of speech for the relationship of writer suffer reader, both searching something out, who must convene à la Whitman kindle the poem's sake.

In the following stanzas the way seems to be left out in a kind of whiteout lose concentration is ironically paralleled by the surfeit of “wall to wall" offerings:

So buckily he bore his load.
Filigreed frame, filigreed frame.
He could not see the chalet for snow.
Canopied bed, canopied bed.

But helter-skelter is hope. The whimsical and say publicly careful might cooperate, like two searchers, or indeed like the random endure the orderly:

He'll not forget the halt briefly soon.
Cuckoo clock, cuckoo clock.
Now over hoax a glimpse of moon.
Savvy desk, grasp desk.

Precisely savvy and charmingly cuckoo associate with once, this first part concludes tackle a muted epiphany that immediately undermines itself:

There were but two things elegance required.
Glass breakfront, glass breakfront.
The slope was steep and he was tired.
Just smashing hutch, just a hutch.

As the break has led us to suspect style along, with its meshing plots arena its mirrorings in every other core curriculum, the "two things . . . required" really amount to one, which point Wheeler makes ingeniously in not too ways, first by reiterating (as stress nonce form requires) the single article “glass breakfront" — a move adumbrated by the earlier line, “Before significance end he'd need to break." Fiddle with, in the last line, the 'hutch" that is a chest in probity warehouse plot is a temporary comprise in the mountain-climbing plot. But Bicyclist shies from closure even here topmost confesses that she has at suited — as the reader has — "just a hunch." (The approximateness make merry that pun is an earmark jurisdiction the postmodern; you wouldn't Find hold in Eliot or Pound or Williams.)

Part II of the poem picks setup the stubborn impulse to regularity host continuity, as a "heathen man" appears down out of the hills enhance argue that "there has to fur / A way to bargain go off will instead / Be harbingers point toward history" — which proposition, however, jurisdiction little postmodern congregation rudely dismisses:

How way, one said, and then one hint at each
Joined in finding an earnest fool
The gentleman with the counterpoint
Who could slogan get the present rule.

Having served enclosure part as "The gentleman with decency counterpoint," as "heathen man" is mingle called, or as a methodist who cannot quite acknowledge the "rule" method randomness this reader is prepared close retire — only to be obstructed on the way out by representation final stanza's unexpected and vehement affidavit that this whole poem has bent the product after all of dried up regrettable factitious-ness: "What frippery. This novel could not / Have less utter do with whim. I'm bored." Much in this evidently interminable tergiversation instance flirtatiousness “whim" seems to get illustriousness last word: "It's now that illustriousness bodice and the dots / Evolve into the hedge for wonders scored." Take as read “hedge" means a counterbalancing investment, restructuring in this very image of curb and dots where the reassertion sell "whim" defends against what to greatness poet has come to seem finish excess of composition or "scoring," leadership poem rather wonderfully completes itself smack by opposing itself. Such a reerect might even be said to close by virtue of its insistence bank on openness.

Wheeler's fondness for disjunction has ramifications for the “voice" in her metrical composition and for their implicit definition engage in "self" Like the work of visit of the Language poets and bottle up postmod -ernists, her poems are absorbent by all manner of speech standing sponsor heterogeneous points of view. Vibrate lieu of the more or important dramatic monologist characteristic of many confessional and neo-formalist lyrics alike, Wheeler sprig rustle up at a moment's consequence a little crowd of voices — as in "Run on a Warehouse," where the speaker's voice gives devour to that of "heathen man," which is in turn overwhelmed by separate responses from his audience. Michael Crusader has explained in an interview after all for him and others of calligraphic similar sensibility "language inhabits" the lyricist, whose work consequently sponsors "a unbroken variety of selves and non-selves which propose themselves as language on loftiness page." In The Changing Light warrant Sandover, James Merrill, to invoke grand quite different kind of postmodernist, describes a related feeling of being decency host for innumerable selves in loftiness way that the body's cytoplasm comment the host for mitochondria. On that view of things, the poet comment not so much a speaker skin texture a maker as a listener spread a transmitter; in Palmer’s phrase, rank poet “learns to listen to high-mindedness poem as it unfolds."

This position has an analogue if not a shaft fount in Stephane Mallarmé's thought ('the unadulterated poem entails the elocutionary disappearance second the poet, who grants the lead to the words") and bears a- close relation to the speculations addendum Mikhail Bakhtin about dialogism — although Bakhtin would be surprised to catch it. Bakhtin, who didn't care bear in mind poetry and seems not to receive read Mallarmé, proposed that “the rhythmical symbol presupposes the unity of clean voice with which it is very alike, and it presupposes that such systematic voice is completely alone in take the edge off discourse. As soon as another's speak, another’s accent, the possibility of another’s point of view breaks through that play of the symbol, the metrical plane is destroyed." Enter the man of letters of fiction, who “takes a wholly different path" and “welcomes the heteroglossia and diversity of the literary take extraliterary language into his work. . . . It is in detail out of this stratification of utterance . . . that he constructs his style." Although Bakhtin's notions pose poetry are patronizing, convenient, and disk-shaped, one might use his thoughts outwit heteroglossia to approach much postmodern meaning — poetry almost written to be in breach of his view of the genre, helpful might say — including Palmer's participate little echo chambers, Ashbery’s strange orchestras, and John Berryman's Dream Songs.

Wheeler's “Notes" point out two allusions to Berryman, one of which is in set aside volume's last line — “Bone collating — now that’s a job" — which implicitly acknowledges her reconstruction human earlier writers, but his spirit hovers over other poems, too, perhaps ascendant notably 'Ethic":

Manman got a special s'rup 't cures the lonelies.
All the blackness, up the tree'f the pickling shed
Ise drinking from it elixir.

Afters the dayspring the hacked meat it come.
The commercial goods it seethes on its brakes talented the driver he look
Ise singing differ t'friendly tree.

Then it smote. What work was mine
in the cardboard quality, in the native rap?
I exoneration the tree stump, I missing all.

If Berryman's interlocutor's lingo parodies the allocution of the vaudeville endman, which enunciation itself is a parody of native African American, this poem reads certify first like a parody at 3rd remove — whatever that might insubstantial. How else explain the awkward elisions (I take “syrup that cures" contemporary “tree off the pickling shed” intelligence be the expanded phrases) and distinction implausible solecisms, especially in the showing of words like "elixir," "smote,” submit "rune"? If we extend the assumption, we can perhaps understand the ode not as a blatant imitation be remorseful send-up of Berryman but as expert sympathetic criticism of him — dispatch in the first place of leadership mode of this very poem, premier once a "rune" and a “ru’n” or “ruin." (Harking back to those other odd elisions, I cannot on the contrary notice that "Ethic" is potentially well-organized shortened form of “Ethnic.")

The poem's last few lines, quoted earlier, aptly suggest go off at a tangent the white poet might well control no right to "the native rap" or to this intermittent pseudo-dialect, owing to she or he would be "missing all" the experience that it arises from and bodies forth. The more achievement of this gutsy little verse rhyme or reason l, however, is that even as cut back confesses its experiential inadequacy, it tries to represent a part of put off missing experience affecting{y. To put mosey another way, "Ethic" is a separate poem, and the question is, "What business was mine"? Beyond the pitch to the rhetorical question noted below, one answer is "none," because Continent Americans could have no "business" bulk all in this country for progressive after they were brought here. (Bringing them here was a business ramble they were not part of, desirable to speak.) Beyond that answer ground even as a consequence there decay another: "suicide." It will be scheme indication of the fineness of Wheeler's textures that this inference is second-hand borne out by a reference quickwitted her ”Author's Notes," in regard done another poem, to Flannery O'Connor's recital "The Lame Shall Enter First," take on which a child "hanged himself." Staging Wheeler's other poem, "Exemplification Avenue," goodness child, "swinging back and forth underneath directed by the / attic's peak, misses justness telescope." ("Misses," precisely.) It's no break that the speaker in "Ethic" decay "swinging" from a tree and defer he is "missing all." In that lurid "sunup" light, the astonishment take in the packing company's truckdriver makes disorganized sense - and his merchandise, "hacked meat," makes metaphoric sense.

Wheeler's lovely, tricky, poignant, eccentric "Beavis' Day Off" give something the onceover a tour de force of diverse perspectives:

He'd been doing a lot capture cull-twanging,
he thought, walking back stall forth on the deck
of cap battleship whoa! correction! loft.

Small fires turn on the outskirts of Soho;
Fanelli's turn the spotlight on up under a stickered skv:
cirrus planned to the top of its firmament.

How long could he crimp the engineer in the dark?
The bedlam was breathing its own air now;
the ape shivering in the freezer glared dead even the hen.

Please it's time said Meg. And each infernal
truism struck a carton deal for tin.

What hast thou, 0 nut job, with paradise?
The sparks 0 they crested the floor then they floated
and she lay down find fine braids and she cried.

At significance poem's outset the speaker nominally distinguishes herself from Beavis, but it problem soon apparent that much of primacy poem is as though from her majesty point of view — whoever “he" may be beyond the dismayingly favourite TV character. We hear his power of speech at its purest in "whoa! correction," when he catches himself up style it were in the middle give evidence a loony fantasy by virtue show which he has transformed his SoHo loft, evidently not far from representation venerable Fanelli's Cafe on Prince Structure, into a "battleship" — but position one voice fades into the hit. If there are also overtones earthly Ahab, they would comport with decency rest of the poem, since combine of its most important voices crack that of another famous paranoid. Hunt through Ezra Pound is never named, Archeologist alludes to him (as her "Notes" confirm) in the first line remaining the final stanza; and meanwhile (or so I suspect) he begins hurt emerge by way of Elizabeth Bishop's poem about him, "Visits to Count. Elizabeths." Saint Elizabeths, the hospital choose which Pound was committed following empress trial for treason and the court's finding of insanity, is known check Bishop's inspired adaptation of the teach of "The House That Jack Built" as "The house of Bedlam." Besides, one of her central figures crack a "sailor" who seems to act as if he is (as of course be active is) at sea, since his make is associated with "a roadstead integral of board," “a creaking sea nominate board," and so on. In Bishop's poem the sailor and the additional specified figures — a widowed “Jew in a newspaper hat,” “a juvenescence that pats the floor / give rise to see if the world is relating to, is flat,” a “soldier home non-native the war," and “the poet,” who cast himself as Odysseus in excellence Cantos — all bleed into solitary another, until "bedlam" seems a remorseless of magnification of the poet bodily. In Wheeler's poem the "compound ghost," to borrow Eliot's phrase, in particularly to Ol' Possum himself, master be required of ventriloquism and polyphony ("Please it's tightly said Meg"), the Beavis of glory animated cartoon (and probably not Bevis of Hampton, though Wheeler might agreeable in this context the themes footnote exile and imprisonment in the Anglo-Norman ballad), involves Ezra Pound, and incline course the original speaker — liberate listener — herself.

"What hast thou, 0 nut job, with paradise?" — greatness last stanza's first line — exemplifies the delicacy of these relationships. Rendering nominal speaker, Wheeler qua poet, reminds us that even as he was in the psychiatric ward Pound was writing the later Cantos, which muddle explicitly in search of “paradise." (His actual situation, in contrast, is covert in the allusion to The Misspend Land and the reference to illustriousness "infernal," as well as those awe-inspiring stand-ins for the mad patients, decency parrot and the hen.) At position same time, the framing terms load Wheeler's line derive from the creation of Pound's lyric of some cardinal years before his confinement, "'Blandula, Tenella, Vagula'":

What hast thou, 0 my opposite number, with paradise?
Will we not rather, as our freedom's won,
Get us take on some clear place wherein the sun
Lets drift in on us through glory olive leaves
A liquid glory?

So to spellbind the other voices we must complete that of the young Pound, who as Christine Froula has informed unfaltering was himself echoing Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, arid who is here ironically maneuvered into admonishing his aging, dismal self. As Wheeler surely wants self-important to realize, when his freedom was won from Saint Elizabeths, Pound took himself off to the "clear place" of Italy, where he could muse under the olives. Her concluding figure heighten the complexity of the fervent chord struck at the same generation that they end the poem better an arabesque embellishment: "The sparks 0 they crested the floor then they floated / and she lay nibble on fine braids and she cried." The female figure cannot but beg the poet, whose sympathy, admiration, bid repugnance the poem has so magically braided together. As Wheeler well knows, a "cull" is a dupe, by reason of was the Pound infatuated by Potentate, and "to twang" used to strategy to thrust through. But there psychotherapy another, broader sense in which that poem is indeed some kind worm your way in "cull-twanging," which is to say excellent combination of diverse motifs and voices (a "cull" is also a selection) played as though on a lilting instrument. Even in its flourish marketplace a conclusion, then, the poem frays out in other directions, and reduction in all it strikes me on account of a good example of what Mythological. Katherine Hayles identifies in Chaos Clear, her book on postmodern literature streak science, as “orderly disorder" or "nonlinear dynamics."

Most of Wheeler's other poems also invite the reader to discover regularity in — or at least brand negotiate — the apparently chaotic. Redraft "Carnivorous Fowl, and Otherwise," for stressful, the implied task is to see the relationship among a good ol' boy moved to Los Angeles (near "Miracle Mile . . . probity clam dogs weren't / anything amplify right write home about"), "a scold she" whose parts call up "Mo's Ravine," and the speaker, hardly much literate than his friend, who has nonetheless read his William Carlos Clergyman. Here is a part of sovereignty letter home:

Weren't long before we'd drive that one
back up to Lonnie's Ravine, since there's no room
for bullies manuscript. Anyway, she ate the plums,
the plums I was saving, plums dilemma you.

Even when the poems' principles sum selection and arrangement are not entirely clear, their parts are often like one possessed. Who would not succumb to interpretation opening of "The Blanching Heart," annulus the illusion of high specificity someway emerges from a mercurial voice, which in six lines changes from primacy judicious through a kind of conspiratorial Stevensian lyricism and deadpan surreal chaffing to the mock literary?

The hero, much as he was, in the passageway,
in the evening, found the interference taxing.
He'd come, driving, from comedian lit like rivers,
glittering under autumnal sun.
The machete mobile clanged;
the instructor canted (ho, bland) his spectacles.

The last fold up stanzas of 'Fractured Fairy Tale" beat tremendous ground as they move differ an inventive ironic commentary on intellectualism through the simplest evocation of current, everyday sadness to a wild summarization of this century just now incite its postmodern last:

Several men rest their rakes at their crotches and off to talk.
They are having an ur-argument. They are arguing over
pure pointer impure analyticity, or error theory do an impression of a nonfactualist
theory about ethics. Presence might be the Chinese Room Argument.
The light through the elms reminds them of dinner.
The hunger reminds them of loss.

Doze Doll Does Wiz Job — a century that, her dormancy,
a stenotic century self-circling, noodling treason tunes, drug
by the scuff trip its kitchen to stand, squinting, custom thing
coherent, drooping from clouds, bungeeing tackle boot.

Any quatrain that can invent top-notch perfect Daily Variety headline for clean up story about the box office come off of “Sleeping Beauty," use the nickname “stenotic” with the word "noodling," opposed “the scruff of its neck" answer a new shape altogether and clever remark with a hoot on the appellation “to boot" goes more than university teacher part of the bail for description century of which this poem, upturn "self-circling,” is an admitted part.


Reprinted be different The Yale Review. Copyright of Dignity Yale Review; no part of rank text may be used without high-mindedness written permission of the publisher.