An Interview with Susan Wheeler

Susan Wheeler Photo by Jeffrey Greenberg

At once edgy and playful, packed with clever allusions in wackily diverse linguistic registers, Susan Wheeler's poems tend to flaunt their multiple sources, their many debts. Fittingly, her extended poem that recently won the sixth annual Boston Review poetry contest is titled "The Debtor in the Convex Mirror." Responding to Quentin Massys's painting The Moneylender and His Wife, Wheeler notes in the poem that the Flemish artwork was itself modeled on a prior painting by Jan van Eyck with earlier precedent in Leonardo's oeuvre. Her title, meanwhile, recalls John Ashbery's most celebrated poem, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," also an ekphrastic work from which she quotes several times. Sometimes labeled a second-generation New York school writer and sharing the New York school's engagement with the visual arts, Wheeler here acknowledges those debts, though she would more likely position herself as a crossover poet who draws upon the legacies of many schools and trends, even those that might conventionally be seen as antithetical. Like many postmodern writers, she has little investment in myths of originality or aesthetic purity but is fascinated with what can be made using preexistent texts. In addition to suggesting Wheeler's interest in grafting her project onto others' work, "The Debtor in the Convex Mirror" typifies other aspects of Wheeler's poetry. The painting allows her to collage a number of narrative elements, as she imagines a "rube" named Charles who journeys to sixteenth-century Antwerp—"First 'capitalist center . . . in the modern sense'"—to make his fortune as a moneylender, introduces fragments of Massys's biography, sketches a remembered incident of teenage shoplifting in defiance of a store's convex security mirror, and briefly recounts in vernacular suited for a crude joke the tale of Christ's crucifixion. She has long been fascinated by consumer culture and its effect on the individual spirit. Choosing as her subject a portrait of a moneylender who counts his money while his wife leaves off reading in her illuminated prayer book to observe him allows Wheeler to pursue her interest in economics, spirituality, and their interrelation: "The mirror lies between two scales—one banker's, one maker's—// and Massys is but writ on its glass." In Massys's painting, the convex mirror on the moneylender's table reflects the artist himself in the role of debtor, reading a book as he waits anxiously outside. Wheeler's poems, too, offer highly mediated self-portraiture—deliberately costumed and distorted renderings of herself, removed from the personal lyric mode and distant also from Ashbery's inward-turning reflexivity. If questions of the soul's existence and its relation to visible surface preoccupied Ashbery in his famous "Self-Portrait," they figure here (as elsewhere in Wheeler's work) with more Christian overtones and with a sharp critique of contemporary culture's focus on oneself, suggested again through allusion/debt, this time to the public poet Whitman mourning the death of Lincoln:

So the grasping soul is unredeemed. Freak accident—
yeah, guy goes up a hill in thorns, ends up on a stick.
Not quite, not impaled, more tacked up.         Yeah.
And the grasping soul goes clean.
                     Maybe it's our internalness
we're stuck on.
         O Captain Me, O Consciousness.

Refreshingly unpretentious—poets are, her "Debtor" acknowledges, "book-makers with the odds of slugs"—Wheeler's work crackles with verbal energy, wit, and intelligence.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1955, Susan Wheeler grew up in Minnesota, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. She attended Bennington College in the mid 1970s, where she worked closely with Alvin Feinman and Ben Belitt. In 1979 she entered a graduate program in art history at the University of Chicago, but instead of completing her master's thesis, which was to concern what she saw as a false division between abstract and figurative painting of the time, she worked at the School of the...