Lesley Jenike's Blog, page 2

On Sunday by accident my friends and I stopped at the Ada...

On Sunday by accident my friends and I stopped at the Adams National Historical Park on our way from Brockton to the Quincy T-stop. We'd planned on a rainy-day shopping trip to Newbury Street, but from the road I happened to notice an odd old mansion with a little rolling hill and a carriage house behind it, and I asked my friends what it was. "Peacefield," they said--the farm the Adams' retired to after their many years of public service were finally over. I guess I'd never realized it was so close to town, or that it was even still standing. It's not as famous as Monticello or Mount Vernon and it certainly isn't at such an arcadian remove from whatever town happened to have grown up around it. It seemed to be just another old house in too-close proximity to our twenty-first century world. But maybe that's why it seems all the more poignent.

The tour guide took us first to a set of little houses built in the seventeenth century--the "birth houses." The first was where John was born and where he decided to become a lawyer. The second was where he began his law practice as well as his family, where Abigail smelted down her pewter plates to make ammunition  for the Continental Army, and where she was left alone for so many years while John went first to the Continental Congress, then on to Europe to ask for ships from the French and a loan from the Dutch. The first house was a little brown saltbox with awfully low ceilings and a fireplace that, from its size, suggested the family at first huddled together around the fire, huddling together against the British Empire and a big, dark land of a size and scope they hadn't yet begun to imagine. The second house had a coat of light-colored exterior paint, straighter wooden floors, an extension in back, and more decorations on the walls. You could actually see  the family's trajectory--from farmers to lawyers to public officials. And it stunned me to imagine them there, John and Abigail, feeling so helpless against what they more than likely saw as the British Empire's  absolute power. And yet! And yet!

The final stop on our tour was Peacefield itself. Peacefield was indeed a mansion becoming the second and sixth presidents of the United States, and it was definitely a family's house--a family that stretched into the twentieth century, bearing the marks of all the technological changes between John's and Abigail's time and now. Unlike Jefferson's Monticello which is, more than anything, the brainchild of an eccentric widower, this is a woman's house. It was Abigail's house and she is still everywhere in it. Her upside-down lucky horseshoe hangs above the front door. Her china is in the basement pantry. I believe I felt her there.

I'll be reading in Brockton, MA's Public Library Poetry S...

I'll be reading in Brockton, MA's Public Library Poetry Series this coming Saturday 4/21. I can't wait to see my nearest and dearest from Emerson.

I'm in love with the basset hound that lives in the apart...

I'm in love with the basset hound that lives in the apartment behind ours. I like to watch him wander around in his backyard from my office window. He seems so aimless, like me. This goes out to him:

In a vice of brown-white skin, a basset hound’s

trapped by the hitch of travelling. Low-slung,

legs short as the span between my wrist

and forearm, it ploughs though snow and lists

its nose to dirt, ears to swell. It hears

above din of engine and yowl, the odd fear

it can’t name to growl: “Come home, Come here!”

At dusk, the biggest sky shrinks for the smallest cur.

From stands of ash to gaze on winter

it shuffles in brevity’s fur. The basset hound

lives by aping the mottled ground.

Take that, NaPoMo! Now I'll get back to work on my essay/memoir/thingee, thanks.

Dear Ether, I've been doing something very strange lately...

Dear Ether,
I've been doing something very strange lately. I've been writing prose. I'm not sure exactly what to call it yet or what it means. It it fiction? Essays? Just sentence-crafting till it's time to break lines again? Whatever it is (as yet to be determined), I'm having a ball doing it. I actually can't wait to get at my computer in the morning instead of dreading it. Then again, a pang of worry about time-wasting and failure strikes about every other hour, and I don't know if it's some lame attempt at trying to recapture my youthful, genre-bending sense of freedom (a.k.a ignorance), or if I'm subconsciously distracting myself from own pathetic, poetic impasse. At the very least I'm telling myself that I've never been someone who keeps doing the same thing because I know how to do it. The not knowing how can be good, right?
In any case, I won't be writing a poem a day this Poetry Month but I'll be trying to add at least a page a day. We'll see what--if anything--comes of it. Whatever it is, I hope it sounds and looks like this:

HERE'S a link to a new e-chapbook of poems called "The Fo...

HERE'S a link to a new e-chapbook of poems called "The Folly Garden" published by Gold Wake Press. The stuff inside is some of my favoritest stuff and I'd love it if, on this St. Patrick's Day, you'd read and indulge in a little speculation about Whitey Bulger, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Alexander Pope, Las Vegas, Marie Antoinette, and Mozart (among others). Cheers!

Dearest Ether--Here are a few things I've been thinking a...

Dearest Ether--
Here are a few things I've been thinking about:

1. I can finally officially announce I'm the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Excellence Award---hence the irresponsible trip to the UK.
2. Today begins my spring break, tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, and it will be nearly 80 degrees. What's going on around here? Where's that angsty March I always seem to be trudging through?
3. A little collection of poems from my manuscript "Genius of the Place" called The Folly Garden will be published as an e-chapbook by Gold Wake Press. I'm very proud of the work and I want you to read it, so check back for a link very soon.
4. The Sarah Palin movie Game Change was good! I loved hearing Emmylou's rendition of "The Great Divide" as a frustrated and exhausted Palin (desperately trying to learn the difference between the Iraq War and the War in Afganistan) arrives at John McCain's compound in Arizona.
5. HBO's show Luck was cancelled suddenly a few days ago because a third horse on the set had to be euthanized. There is something extraordinarily poignant about this news that puts me in mind of my childhood (or I should say my adolescence) spent primarily in barns, mucking stalls and picking gravel out of horses' hooves, dreaming that one of those noble animals would someday carry me away--out of a crummy home life--into some sort of abstract and teenaged vision of freedom. RIP Luck.

So here's what I'm thinking: 2-3 nights in London3 nights...

So here's what I'm thinking:
2-3 nights in London3 nights in Pembrokeshire, Wales1 week in Keswick, Cumbria (the Lake District)2-3 nights in Edinburghback to London for a night
I'm mainly excited about all the great hiking then recovering from all the great hiking in snug, dark pubs. I want to stumble over crumbling stone walls of unknowable age and ramble through meadows and gardens and stare at a very old portrait or two with great consternation in a very big museum. Ah, May! You romantic ideal! When will you get here?
Till then, there's this:

Can you believe it's almost February...because May will b...

Can you believe it's almost February
...because May will be here soon and with it a trip to the UK! That means London, the Lake District and Scotland and/or Wales. Suggestions?
P.S.: The Romantics sure had fun, didn't they?

Thanks to Josh's parents, we're now the proud owners of a...

Thanks to Josh's parents, we're now the proud owners of an Oscar Schmidt electric Autoharp. Tuning it's a real feat, but I managed to punch out PJ Harvey's "White Chalk" last night (plugged into Josh's adorable Gretsch amp) and it sounded a little like this:

PJ Harvey - White Chalk by conchinette
It's a gorgeous instrument and I'm ecstatic to have it in my life. I'm also grateful to my mom and Tom for gifting me an older Autoharp that needs a little TLC. I have a feeling Autoharps in general need a little TLC.
Thanks to my dad, we're also the proud owners of an iPad 2. The flexibility it gives me in terms of reading and interacting with text is just stunning--an excellent help in planning and reading for my Artist in Film honors class this spring. Here's my watch list so far (which will require some editing, of course):
The Red ShoesPollockPoetryAmadeus Tiny Furniture F is for FakeFridaTideland I'm Not There Tree of Life Grey Gardens
If anyone has suggestions, especially films pre-1930, I'd be grateful.
In the meantime, I'll be studying the below (an excellent accompaniment to Moby Dick-- a book I only, at age 34, have just nearly finished):

HERE'S a link to a lovely video Hannah Stephenson made fo...

HERE'S a link to a lovely video Hannah Stephenson made for a poem of mine (that I had very nearly neglected) in Ghost of Fashion. Many thanks to her.

Also, you can preorder the new Anthony Hecht Prize Anthology by Waywiser Press wherein you'll find a selection of poems from my manuscript "Genius of the Place." It's pretty exciting to be included with such poetry heroes as Erica Dawson, Craig Arnold, Lisa Williams, Matt Donovan, Carrie Jarrell, Dora Malech--on and on.

It's been a hectic past few weeks. Josh and I drove down to Charlotte for my nephew's bar mitzvah (really fun and what a drive! The trees were all aglow) and Josh has taken on his SIXTH class. Somehow I managed to birth a second manuscript from the rubble of, well, rubble. It's a mixed bag, for sure, and now the question is: should I revise toward unity, or should I revel in the mixed-bagged-edness? It's funny, I think both manuscripts are about fathers and daughters, only "Genius" is more rhetorical and "How We Came Ashore" more personal. Both are about patrimony and patriarchal legacy. So Prospero shows up, of course. And Jefferson. These collections are twins, I think, and I think I know which is the runt.

In other news, Kate Bush will be releasing her new studio album 50 Words for Snow next Tuesday. What joy! I grew up adoring her--her theatricality, her intelligence, her high, flexible soprano, her melodies. But at one point (back in, well, 1996) I just assumed we'd never hear from her again--that she'd disappear into her own genius. But she came back. And the music is just stunning. I'm looking forward to most of next week off, this album on the stereo, and maybe a crown of sonnets on the screen.