Lesley Jenike's Blog, page 4

Favorite Tori cover lost then found after all these years:

Favorite Tori cover lost then found after all these years:

Academia, literary publishing, and stand-up comedy aren't...

Academia, literary publishing, and stand-up comedy aren't the only male-dominated industries out there; Hollywood is still a man's world, no question, and it's influence on our culture frankly can't be overestimated. That's why two of my graduate school friends started a film and culture studies website a few years ago, because they recognized a need for more writing by women about film, and especially about women and feminist issues in film. Of course we need more green-lit screenplays written by women, and more women directing so, CCAD students, I'm counting on you.

And speaking of a man's world, check out my review of There Will Be Blood on Bitchflicks. It's one of my top-five favorite movies of the past, oh, ten years? Maybe more. And while you're there, click around to read more fabulous reviews of recent-past Oscar winners and nominees for Best Picture.

In other news, we're moving. Stay tuned for more details.

My apologies for having been long absent, Blogger friends...

My apologies for having been long absent, Blogger friends, but I've been hard at work on a new batch of Monhegan-inspired poems, plus I managed to slip down to South Carolina for a few days to spend some quality time with my brother, his wife and kids, and my sister and her three girls. I had such a great time! I'm so lucky to have such awesome nieces--and one nephew (sorry for your misfortune, Jake). Anyway, I'm back in Columbus now, potentially for good, and (relatively) ready to start work on fall syllabi, new/old poems, and the business of getting ahead, though the summer continues to dump its terrifying heat index all over us, and that means no running outside for me for a while. After three days in a row of a fast five miles by the harbor down in Hilton Head, the gym seems beyond depressing. And here's another Sinéad Morrissey poem, this one dedicated to my sister-in-law who's been having some trouble sleeping lately...

Contrail

Nightly now, insomnia lays its thumb
upon my forehead-- an any how, Ash Wednesday cross.
Which, instead of insisting Thou Shalt Pass

to the Angel of Anxiety, hovering over the stairway,
beckons it in, at 3am, to unsettle me gently
with its insidious wings

Sometimes my mother and father.
Sometimes neither.
Sometimes childlessness, stretching out into the ether

like a plane.

I'm slacking. But in the meantime: new glasses.

I'm slacking. But in the meantime: new glasses.

Stay tuned for Part #2 wherein I will attempt to also thr...

Stay tuned for Part #2 wherein I will attempt to also thread Joni Mitchell's 1972 album For the Roses into the discussion...

Monhegan Part #1: We arrived on a beautiful, warm spring ...

Monhegan Part #1:
We arrived on a beautiful, warm spring day. The dock stunk of lobster traps (a similar smell, as it turns out, to wet dog) and was lined with dusty pick ups. Folks seemed to be greeting each other after a long absence. The land, compared to late May Ohio, was bare and grudging. The light was a very pale yellow. I immediately thought of THIS painting, a painting I'd always assumed came from some desolate corner of the Midwest, but, as it turns out, the Wyeths spent a lot of time in Maine generally and Monhegan specifically. The distant house the girl in the painting reaches for suddenly made sense in Monhegan's weirdly beautiful and desolate context: this is a difficult place.
Our hostess found us and packed us into her truck after another woman had grabbed up our luggage and promised to drop it near our cabin in an hour or so. We bounced up the one main road and as we passed through the village, I noticed a visceral buzz of activity, as if everybody had been shut up inside for months and here at last was an opportunity to build, mend, dig, saw, cut and weed; the weather had obviously made a turn for the better.

And everything seemed so small. I don't know if it was the scale of the cliffs compared to the saltboxes (some winterized, some not) folks had built precariously in a place where nature trumps all, or the snug harbor itself, just big enough for a few small boats, that against the backdrop of an immense North Atlantic helped transform the scene into a treatise on man's folly.

I don't mean to be overly romantic—or maybe I do--but for the next several days we had fog, a deliciously gothic fog that enveloped every sunrise.

Yes, we spent two weeks on Prospero's island and I managed to write at least a little everyday. My lines got increasingly longer and maybe even a bit prosy—probably thanks to the fact that I started reading fiction (and only fiction) again: Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Arthur Phillips' Tragedy of Arthur, Henry James' The Aspern Papers.

The through-line, Dear Readers, is of course the palpable absence of some sought-after, long-dead author (Shakespeare? Aspern? Keats?), and/or the manifestations said long-dead author's very real, infernal/eternal legacy.

I couldn't stay on Monhegan and not think about The Tempest or Twelfth Night. Did Shakespeare invent Monhegan, or did Monhegan invent Shakespeare?

Stay tuned to find out.

I'll have a lot to say about this weirdly wonderful place...

I'll have a lot to say about this weirdly wonderful place once we're back in Columbus (the internet connection here is spotty at best), but for now I want to tantalize you abstract painting nuts with THIS GUY who will have a posthumous show here at the Monhegan Museum in July. He was very inspired by the island, as were/are countless artists. His work is really quite wonderful.

Oh Monhegan!!!

Oh Monhegan!!!

Monday 5/23: Columbus to Newburyport, MA. Tuesday 5/24: N...

Monday 5/23: Columbus to Newburyport, MA.
Tuesday 5/24: Newburyport, MA to Boothbay, ME.
Wednesday 5/25: Boothbay, ME to Port Clyde, ME. Port Clyde, ME (via boat) to Monhegan, ME.
Wednesday 6/8: Monhegan, ME to Port Clyde, ME (via boat); Port Clyde, ME to Boston, MA.
Friday (?) 6/10: Boston, MA to Columbus, OH.

I'm so pleased to meet with the kind folks in the Y-City ...

I'm so pleased to meet with the kind folks in the Y-City Writers' Group in Zanesville on Tuesday evening. They'll be catching me at the dead-end of the semester.
So now all I have to do is make sure grades are in by Tuesday afternoon, and it's summer again, officially, kicked off last night by brats on the grill and cold Negra Modelos with lime. I love summer for lots of reasons, but it tends to sag in the middle like an old mattress. Cindy knows what I mean. That's why I sincerely hope my summer composition class goes ahead. I need the extra money and I actually miss working with students on essays (probably thanks to my years spent in UC's Writing Center. Those were the days).
A week from tomorrow we make our long drive to Maine but in the meantime I ought to get myself some new running shoes, download a few books for my Kindle and a few iTunes movie rentals for the laptop, and burn the new Kate Bush album (out next Tuesday) to CD, put it on my phone, my ipod, and on my computer for absolute twenty-first century immersion. O technology!
And another thing: I've been slowly making my way through Anthony Hech t's Selected and, yes, he's a genius with traditional form, but most exciting (at least to me) are the long, blank verse narrative poems from his books The Venetian Vespers and The Transparent Man. How marvelous are the complexity of the worlds he creates, the authenticity of his characters, and of course the music of his lines! But I keep asking myself, who would publish poems like these nowadays? We've become a lyric-crazy bunch of poets but listen, guys, there are other genres, right? Why do staff-writers for HBO get to have all the dramatic fun? So In honor of Hecht's fantastic poems "The Short End" and "The Grapes," I've started something long and I'm trying not to worry about it.
For now, another crystalline poem by Marie Ponsot
Movers and Shakers
The Round Barn vaults a floor blessedby the prayers of feet, a music threshedby steppers ascending into long forgetfulness.
When winter lasts too long the prisoneris tempted to become her own cage.
Though it dine on its own self,for a tadpolefrog is heaven.
The architect of frog is damsel-fly, a mortal/vital alchemy.
Vein and artery vital and inimicalcollaborate in capillaries--take exchange, give thanks.
Independent (in that best dream) all taketheir time, to enjoy each other's company.
Summer caucasians tan and enjoya bronzed indifference, pretendingit eases the longing for equality.
Ice since autumn, sun eases its edges andthe brook starts a spring conversation.
-from The Bird Catcher, 1998