Lesley Jenike's Blog

I'm so excited to report that my second full-length collection of poems (W)HOL(L)Y ISLAND (yes, it's had many titles, bear with me) is to be published by Gold Wake Press in 2014!

Gold Wake produces beautiful books and I'm so happy to be in such fine company, namely the lovely Hannah Stephenson's! Check out their books here: http://goldwakepress.com/

I'm thrilled for so many reasons but maybe chief among them is the notion that I might get to move on to a new project.

In honor of the book, I give you "A Sailor's Life." If you love me, you'll listen:

The Next Big Thing (Yeah Right):

And thanks, Sophia Kartsonis  and the lovely Catherine Pierce as well! 

What is the working title of the book?
How We Came Ashore

Where did the idea come from for the book?
Monhegan Island, which is a tiny rock in the sea, ten miles off the mid-coast of Maine, Shakespeare's The Tempest (of course), Rossellini's film Stromboli, Powell and Pressburger's film Black Narcissus. 

What genre does your book fall under?
Verse

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Tilda Swinton as Ferdinand, Deborah Kerr as me, Steve Coogan as Ariel, Bob Dylan as Prospero, Joan Crawford as Caliban.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
What terrible wind; what trees!

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
About a year.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
My husband, who first proposed we go to the island, then Shakespeare, who's more than just my Facebook friend.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
It will make you fall in love with Maine all over again! There are couplets! There are lobster traps!

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
The chapbook will be published by the lovely Kristy Bowen and Dancing Girl Press in 2013. 

I tag: Hannah Stephenson , Kristi Maxwell, Matt McBride, Charlene Fix, Natalie Shapero

So it's the first full day of winter vacation. I still have tons to do for CCAD (that will come later this afternoon) but in the meantime, I wanted to make a record of all the ridiculous and unpublishable projects I have rotating their rotisserie of uselessness in my head so that when none of them see the light of day I can laugh at myself even harder later, then cry.

1. A poem about Henry James in Venice (project about dead white guy #1).
2. A long poem/verse play about Benjamin Britten and the writing of A Ceremony of Carols during his transatlantic sea voyage on a Swedish cargo ship called the Axel Johnson (project about dead white guy #2).
3. Essays about Cincinnati and theft especially about Cincinnati's own George Remus (project about dead white guy #3)
4. Play in which two frequent museum and gallery-goers (i.e. Josh and Lesley) discuss famous works of abstract, conceptual and performance art (plotless and ineffectual project that will include some dead white guys #4).

And then there's that collection of poems I need to make better so maybe someone will like it.

So the idea that I'm keeping up with my prose project weekly and in public has completely crumbled under the combined weight of teaching responsibilities, administrative responsibilities, and blah, blah, blah. I look at my calendar now and I wonder who I am.

But the good news is a new ekphrastic poem (about the Diebenkorn show in DC) has been taken by The Southern Review. So that means I am still writing a little here and there, even after having lost three new drafts when I stupidly didn't back up my work computer, I'm still writing about art because it makes me happy, and I'm still, despite my complete, utter, and fruitless obsession with long poems, able to write short ones too.

The other good news is that a few weeks ago I put an 11 inch MacbookAir on a credit card. It's a tiny little writing dynamo and now I can leave my crushingly heavy work computer at work. 

And besides that, this is my new favorite piece of music:

Real disdain was reserved for Northern Kentucky. Cincinnati proved its moral superiority with Underground Railroad stops in rich folks’ homes, and by inculcating German immigrants into its religion of persistence. It had a river valley much like the Rhine’s , with walls of verdant hills on either side, glittering river running through. One persists by remembering what’s been left behind, and by striving to recreate it. Big-wheeled steamboats were enough like windmills. A barge was enough like a warrior’s body on a floating pyre, slow moving and soot-covered, that even the most skeptical immigrants found in their new country enough metaphoric resonance to satisfy. But Northern Kentucky was the South. It stewed like a fistful of tomatoes in its own juices. It bore its own syndicate and to enforce it, had the gall to invent the tommy gun . It was land designated just for hunting by Ohio’s Native Americans. It was a dark land, a bloody land. Escaped slaves longed to be rid of it as quickly as possible. Colts that are born to it are broken at two and run to death by five. To me it was just the state across the river—not much different from the state I lived in on this side of the river, and really just an extension of the same series of neighborhoods sprinkled like ellipses over the same series of hills—constant pauses punctuating a conversation in-progress since the glacier stopped here millions of years ago on its journey to no where in particular. The reason for my family’s stop in the Ohio River Valley is almost as mysterious. Beyond the fact that my paternal grandfather played drums in a few of Cincinnati’s jazz nightclubs , I'm unclear about my claim on the place  and, subsequently, my claim on this story. Everything seems, always, so tremulous, like my own reflection in the downtown Lord and Taylor’s storefront after my mom told me, “Women used to get dressed up to go downtown. They even wore gloves.” When I was a teenager the city center was a museum: old stone buildings peopled by crowds of the sloppy, rumpled young. By nine in the morning they were making their way westward from Eastside suburbs and by six they were headed east in a reverse immigration I understood to be the natural and expected rhythms of her world. Still, I can't help but speculate about my grandfather, and whether he was really as good a drummer as they say—they meaning my dad—who after high school descended into a basement jazz club at Garfield Place where he pretended to be a man, got a taste of Kentucky bourbon , and listened to his father work out the kinks with visiting musicians doped up on too little sleep and God knows what else.  

I interrupt the prose to announce that a little collection of my Monhegan inspired poems, How We Came Ashore, will be published as a beautifully designed, limited edition chapbook by Dancing Girl Press. The title comes from Shakespeare's The Tempest , and it's about feeling shipwrecked: a beautiful and lonely feeling. Look for it early next year!

So last April-ish, I decided to start writing prose. I didn't really know if what I was doing could somehow be construed as fiction or non--or if it was probably some kind of hybrid, lyric essay thing destined to alienate readers and prove I'm terrible at lines that wrap around. But then I got caught up doing other things--namely trying to figure out what to do with a poetry manuscript and writing poems about Dorothy Wordsworth, and frittering away whole evenings watching HBO.

Anyway, I'm back at it. I don't really know where it's going or how it'll end up, or if it's even a useful way to spend my time. All I know is it has something to do with art theft, something to do with George Remus, something to do with Cincinnati, and something to do with Boston. To motivate myself, I'm going to post a segment here every week (imagining someone besides me may actually read it). Let's say Sunday or Monday. I'm probably running some kind of risk here, but if I'm anything, I'm an idiot. So here's my first installment:


George Remus stole liquor or—not so much stole as illegally imported. Whether Cincinnati knew it or not, it had become a frontier town for the third time in its history; for the second time its borders and liminal spaces were secret; for the first time they were virtual. The Ohio River, as an actual demarcation between the North and South, now became just another byway to be bridged on whisky’s path from Kentucky to Ohio, distillation to consumption. While older, deeper divisions still existed in some nostalgic haze folks reckoned was like the variable morning fog over Lunken Airport (man wasn’t meant to fly), in reality these divisions were moot. It was all one big country again, but a country divided over the philosophical conjecture that men (and women) could live without booze. The lines lawmakers and dutiful citizens had drawn in theory between sin and decency were fuzzy at best, and Remus meant to cross them, and double-cross them. He had the distinct feeling men (and women) couldn’t live without booze. It was more than a philosophy—it was a business model. And he made Cincinnati his base of operations because it was a crossroads, a doorway, a verge. To the goddess of liminal spaces he pledged his allegiance and made his sacrifices. Her name was Imogene and she was his wife. Remus and his wife drove in separate cars to sign their divorce papers, making of themselves a two-person funeral procession. Their route took them from Quebec Road in Price Hill to Westwood Avenue to Vine Street to East Liberty Street to Gilbert Avenue, up into Eden Park where, in October, the oak groves had begun to blush to a deep red, their dropped leaves like the blood orange rinds Imogene had sucked and thrown down laughing onto their Parisian breakfast table years ago. Her appetite had always been happy and loud. The cars never once lost sight of each other, despite merging traffic, and it was only when Imogene’s driver slowed to yield that George happened to glance up and see her stumbling out of her Rolls’ opened door, breaking into a run—gawky because of her black hobble skirt—toward the park’s Gazebo at Mirror Lake. The next thing George knew he was chasing her, a pistol in his hand.

So last April-ish, I decided to start writing prose. I didn't really know if what I was doing could somehow be construed as fiction or non--or if it was probably some kind of hybrid, lyric essay thing destined to alienate readers and prove I'm terrible at lines that wrap around. But then I got caught up doing other things--namely trying to figure out what to do with a poetry manuscript and writing poems about Dorothy Wordsworth, and frittering away whole evenings watching HBO.

Anyway, I'm back at it. I don't really know where it's going or how it'll end up, or if it's even a useful way to spend my time. All I know is it has something to do with art theft, something to do with George Remus, something to do with Cincinnati, and something to do with Boston. To motivate myself, I'm going to post a segment here every week (imagining someone besides me may actually read it). Let's say Sunday or Monday. I'm probably running some kind of risk here, but if I'm anything, I'm an idiot. So here's my first installment:


George Remus stole liquor or—not so much stole as illegally imported. Whether Cincinnati knew it or not, it had become a frontier town for the third time in its history; for the second time its borders and liminal spaces were secret; for the first time they were virtual. The Ohio River, as an actual demarcation between the North and South, now became just another byway to be bridged on whisky’s path from Kentucky to Ohio, distillation to consumption. While older, deeper divisions still existed in some nostalgic haze folks reckoned was like the variable morning fog over Lunken Airport (man wasn’t meant to fly), in reality these divisions were moot. It was all one big country again, but a country divided over the philosophical conjecture that men (and women) could live without booze. The lines lawmakers and dutiful citizens had drawn in theory between sin and decency were fuzzy at best, and Remus meant to cross them, and double-cross them. He had the distinct feeling men (and women) couldn’t live without booze. It was more than a philosophy—it was a business model. And he made Cincinnati his base of operations because it was a crossroads, a doorway, a verge. To the goddess of liminal spaces he pledged his allegiance and made his sacrifices. Her name was Imogene and she was his wife. Remus and his wife drove in separate cars to sign their divorce papers, making of themselves a two-person funeral procession. Their route took them from Quebec Road in Price Hill to Westwood Avenue to Vine Street to East Liberty Street to Gilbert Avenue, up into Eden Park where, in October, the oak groves had begun to blush to a deep red, their dropped leaves like the blood orange rinds Imogene had sucked and thrown down laughing onto their Parisian breakfast table years ago. Her appetite had always been happy and loud. The cars never once lost sight of each other, despite merging traffic, and it was only when Imogene’s driver slowed to yield that George happened to glance up and see her stumbling out of her Rolls’ opened door, breaking into a run—gawky because of her black hobble skirt—toward the park’s Gazebo at Mirror Lake. The next thing George knew he was chasing her, a pistol in his hand.

Long time, no Blog. Sorry, folks.

But, hey--a lot's been happening. I'm the chair of my department at CCAD now, and that means lots of curriculum stuff plus the awesome teaching stuff, which I love.

The writing life, however, has been slow. Not much to report there. For now, let there be music:

As I'm fumbling through a long poem of quatrains about the Lake District (hard going), I'll just shut up and post some pictures here.