Lesley Jenike

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Lesley Jenike covers much ground in The Fine Delight’s eighteenth interview: doubt, poetic tradition, Gerard Manley Hopkins, conversion, gathering individual pieces into a collection, geography, long poems, and her forthcoming book, Holy Island. Very happy to share Lesley’s thought-provoking responses!

1. In an interview with Kelcey Parker, you shared your "romantic theory" on becoming a writer: "the religious doctrine I was learning (in many ways irreconcilable with my gender), the mass’ obvious theatricality, and transubstantiation’s inherent metaphor, all helped to make me the poet I am—these things and An American in Paris, of course."

Could you talk about these poetic and spiritual tensions within the Catholic tradition?

Let me start by saying that I’m not a Catholic. My mom was a teacher at a Catholic grade school for many years, and my sister is currently teaching English at Purcell Marian High School in Cincinnati. I went to Catholic school for eight years myself when I young and very impressionable, so my sense of spirituality, ritual and community has been primarily formed and informed by Catholicism. Even as a kid, I remember feeling I was privy to a kind of secret performance of gestures and utterances that I would never be able to fully subscribe to, but that I was utterly fascinated by. I saw mass as an aesthetic experience, and as someone else’s expression of faith—not mine. As a result, I feel a tug-of-war between the desire for faith and belonging, and the knowledge that I’ll never have those things.

I’m probably making this all sound very dramatic, but I believe this tension to be central to my work as a writer. It’s an ineffable feeling I’m constantly trying to name, explain, define. In fact, it may have something to do with being an artist in general. We’re (most of us) observers. We stand on the outside of things and derive a lot of pleasure from looking, and certainly a lot of pleasure from doubt and irony too, but I bet a lot of us sometimes wish we could believe totally and truly and without self-recrimination in something other than art.

I’m particularly interested in writers who have tried converting (some successfully, some unsuccessfully) to Catholicism. I’m thinking specifically of Robert Lowell here. I know it’s probably totally uncool, but Lowell is one of my favorite writers. I’m so grateful to him for having the courage to describe his search for faith in such blistering, brilliant terms. And of course I love that other convert, Gerard Manley Hopkins. I think the physicality in both Lowell’s and Hopkins’ poetic lines suggest a yearning for a religion that is of the body, that’s muscular and musical. Maybe Lowell felt the Calvinism of his ancestors to be too abstract, face-less, and vague, and maybe he ultimately felt his conversion was trading one set of fears and prejudices for another. I don’t know. In any case, it’s the questing and the questioning I find so fascinating, and that’s what’s left to us on the page.

I believe (and I think a lot of other people do too) that conflict is central to good writing. Conflict, of course, is necessary to drama and narrative storytelling, but it can also manifest itself as the friction between form and content in a lyric poem, for example. The desire for spirituality and religious community coupled with liberal social politics and scientific rationalism is a conflict, and a really huge one at that. How can I be a woman and subscribe to Catholic doctrine, or most forms of Christianity for that matter? How can I be an artist while simultaneously achieving the kind of deep humility necessary (I believe) for spiritual advancement? I could go on and on here. Ultimately those poets who shaped my earliest notions of what poetry is and what poetry can be, were poets who seemed to be struggling with these sorts of questions: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Robert Lowell, to name just a few. 

2. In "The Last Catholic Writer in America," Paul Elie claims that a "Catholic writer who isn't Catholic" is "not as unorthodox as it might sound." He notes that "Chesterton's ideal Catholic writer was Charles Dickens."

In that vein, I love what you say about being "privy to a secret performance of gestures and utterances" that fascinated you, but you "would never be able to fully subscribe to." Is your attraction to the dense, passionate lines of Hopkins borne out of similar fascination--albeit, from a personal distance? How does the act or form of poetry help bridge the gap of faith?

I’ve always been attracted to stories about people of great faith. I say “stories” because I honestly don’t know too many of these kinds of people in my personal life. And I suppose I use that word “faith” broadly; I could mean religious faith but I could also mean faith in the transformative power of art or faith in a human capacity for goodness. As a girl in Catholic school, I was inundated with the language and music of praise so, as extension, I thought poetry was mainly written in the service of God or romantic love or the romantic love of God (which I find in poems by Donne and Dickinson, for example), so reading poetry seemed to me to be just an extension of what happened at mass or in religion class, and whether I was a believer or not didn’t seem to matter. What mattered for me was the poem.

But I think every poem is an expression of faith. I sometimes seriously wonder why I spend hours pushing words around on a page or screen. It can seem like an awfully selfish, lonely, pitiful way to spend your time. In fact I’m cringing right now just thinking about it. But it’s what I do and it’s how I make sense of my own mind; I must believe it matters, and I do. And I’m awfully glad others have had the faith to write their poems, plays, novels—even when it seemed no one would ever read their work. I think having faith in God must be something like that.

3. I like your reflection on the poetic act, including the potential selfishness of art. It's one reason why I think poets especially need to read widely, to recognize the considerations and content of others, so that the page (and life, as an extension) does not become a vacuum.

In that sense, which poets (classic and/or contemporary) open the world beyond the page for you? Who is able to make this potentially "selfish, lonely" act one that is inclusive and necessary?

I think a lot about the past and I think my imagination is bent toward it. I’m endlessly curious about historical places, people and events, and I tend to read for a better understanding of those things—mainly in an attempt to find patterns and connections (as well as dissonances) between myself and my experiences and others’ experiences. Because I teach literature classes more often than I teach creative writing workshops these days, I’m constantly reacquainting myself with older texts in an attempt to make the work new, vibrant and accessible to my students; as a result, I end up falling in love with the stuff all over again. These days I’m particularly in love with Emily Dickinson, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Henry James, W.H. Auden, E.M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf. In fact, my husband and I just recently listened to A Passage to India on the car ride to Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, and somehow it all totally made sense.

Of course these folks aren’t all poets, but it’s awfully hard to say Virginia Woolf isn’t a poet, right? And I’m a bit ashamed to say they’re all products of the Anglo-American tradition, but it’s my tradition too (for better or worse), and maybe what makes their work so compelling is its evidenced struggle against the limitations of their respective times and cultures.

And it’s thrilling when students fall in love too. I have a student who’s now a Coleridge fanatic and another who’s recently delved into Woolf’s correspondence with Vita Sackville-West. When these kinds of phenomena happen, I feel utterly connected to the past, which is comforting to a young(ish) woman of negligible heritage living in Middle America. I see these writers as a kind of family, and all the pettiness of contemporary “po-biz” seems, well, petty, when I’m reading them, discussing them with students, and bringing them (so to speak) into my own work.

This is not to say, of course, that I don’t love contemporary writing! Reading Northern Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey, for example, has taught me a lot about her country and life there since “The Troubles,” and Kathleen Graber’s extraordinary long, rich, dense lines have better acquainted me with Walter Benjamin’s ideas about material culture and how they might apply to the Jersey Shore. 

4. Nice to see poetry talked of as being organic, in the temporal sense. Now let's talk about Holy Island, your new book of poems forthcoming in 2014 from Gold Wake Press.

Could you discuss the composition and collection of this manuscript? I've noticed that poems from the collection have appeared in wonderful journals--Poetry, Gettysburg Review, The Journal, The Southern Review, among others. Did you always view it as a single collection?

Holy Island is a collection of poems I culled from other, earlier manuscripts but it also includes newer poems I wrote with its recurring themes and ideas in mind. It’s funny, I kind of think of myself as more of a project-based writer with lots of big, ambitious ideas for book-length manuscripts, but in reality I end up with what someone might consider to be more traditional collections of unrelated poems. Sure, some of the poems definitely are linked in respect to time and place of composition or form or theme, but I think that Holy Island is ultimately going to end up feeling more like a “gathering” of poems rather than a totally unified project. What generally happens is, I have a grand idea, then it breaks down or I abandon it after a while and move on to something else. The “something else” may be tangentially related to the initial project, but usually my second impulse (to simplify and make personal) is the correct one. And this whole process takes a bit of time because I never really seem to learn from my mistakes. I’m jealous of those people who can churn out whole manuscripts in relatively short spurts.

I think the lynchpin for Holy Island was a trip I took with my husband to a little island ten miles off the coast of Maine called Monhegan. It’s a wild and beautiful place—mainly populated by lobster fishermen, artists and souls who seem to have selected their own societies. Anyway, I started thinking about islands, then about iconic “islands” from art and literature, and of course about islands as bodies and bodies as islands, etc. The title itself is another name for an island off the northeast coast of England called Lindisfarne where saints Aidan and Cuthbert served as bishops. 

5. "Gathering" is a nice way to think about a collection--makes it feel far less pointed than a "project."

"Men Build Where No House Can Bar Loneliness" is an excellent poem in the collection, and an "island" piece. It's also a poem about God, or god (you've got a malleable approach toward that concept here):

We’ve come to unleash the Pentecost, god’s oeuvre

yet around us, yet stumped in the Meadow’s ooze,

yet bundled like tinder in Cathedral Woods:

the sort of loneliness we know is god, and yes,

there’s plenty of Him.

How do you conceive of God as a concept or person in this and your other poems? Is it a conception that has evolved, that changes from piece to piece?

In this poem, I was thinking of those people who for some reason or another seem called to seek out their God(s) in the wilderness. In particular I was thinking of the British film Black Narcissus in which a group of nuns attempt to create a convent out of an old harem in the mountains of Tibet. I originally had a poem that addressed that film more directly; I ended up cutting it, but I really feel as though Black Narcissus continues to permeate the book. I suppose I’m a romantic, and I think it’s possible to get better in touch with my spiritual life if I were to extradite myself to the high and lonely places. But as a good postmodernist, I instinctively want to question why I feel that way, where that impulse comes from, and what sort of god I’m creating if he/she can only be found by living ascetically and painfully. Of course I never could and never would, but I wonder why I’m so fascinated by people who do (or did).

So throughout the book you’ll find poems that reference monks, Shakers, prophets, certain artists, etc.—the kinds of people who operate in extremes. I’m not sure, ultimately, what this means about my personal sense of what God is; I’ll leave that up to the readers. 

6. Your poems that contain those extreme personas are complimented by pieces like "These Lambs, These Clouds," which speak to the breadth of the collection. Here's the first stanza:

It’s lambing season and the scene’s so thick

with young, from a pace you’d think milkweed blossom—

downy, tender, meant to drift over dung-

stippled pasture away on air.

It's a poem that feels in the mimetic but transformative tradition of Hopkins, particularly his comma-controlled sonnets. It also makes me think of Hopkins the eco-poet, who sang the praises of the "wild" world. Other poems in Holy Island are concerned with revealing place, with geographic boundaries, intimated by the islands you mention earlier. Do you think of poetry as a spatial art? Is it suited toward representation of place in a way that is different than prose?

I love writing about place. I love trying to find my way into a place’s particular history and personality then trying to represent my experience of it as best I can with language. Of course I’m well aware of my limitations as an outsider, voyeur, tourist and traveller and I try to expose those limitations in the poems one way or another, usually by bringing the description(s) back to me—my own shortcomings, my own needs, and my own imagination and personal history that operate as a kind of overlay. And whether I succeed or not—I don’t know, but I know it’s my job to try. I also don’t know whether poetry is better at expressing place, but—and here I’m thinking of the Psalms: “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land”— there’s something about a “song” in praise of or in mourning for a “lost” place, whether literal or figurative, that somehow more effectively illuminates that loss. So I guess I’m saying that every place I describe in Holy Island is already lost to me, or I never truly had it in the first place.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank my husband, Josh, for ferrying me around since I have little to no sense of direction, and for being the world’s best travel companion. He made delicious sandwiches for our hikes in the Lake District last summer, so “These Lambs, These Clouds” is dedicated to him. 

7. Holy Island contains a few longer poems, verses that stretch beyond a single page: "As from a Great Height," "Fire," "Water," "Gray Face Wet with Cloud," "Seed Erratum and the Divine Hen's Eggy Cipher," "A Book of Mirrors," and the titular poem, to name a few. They create an excellent scaffolding for your collection, and make me wonder: do you feel like a different poet when you stretch narratives to this length? Does your process shift?

There seems to me nothing quite so satisfying as a long poem, except maybe a very short poem. I think the older I get, the more verbose I get, or the more I try to pack into a single poem—as if I’m making a raft of stuff and ideas to surf on as long as I can, usually until the wave breaks. I could say it’s the American in me. I very much enjoyed reading and studying longer poems like The Bridge, Paterson, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, etc., but longer poems always seemed so masculine; I like the idea that women can play with length too. I particularly enjoy what poets like C.D. Wright and Cole Swensen have done, but I wanted to attempt longer poems that are connected, at least tangentially, to more traditional forms. The terza rima, in particular, has incredible generative properties. When I’m inside that form, I’m flying. I may be terrible at it, but I adore the sensation.

I also love living with a long poem for weeks or months, and I actually feel bereft when it seems finished. When I work on a long poem, I get the sense I’m building a more complex structure and that takes time and energy, which in turn makes me feel industrious and good. Undertaking a long poem project is an adventure; when I sit down to work, I may begin with an idea about where I’d like the poem to go, but it very rarely follows my original blueprint.

8. What have you been writing post- Holy Island?

In order to generate new material, I usually just open one Word document and try to add to it every day, or every other day, or at least every weekend for a few months. What goes in may be snippets of prose, snippets of poetry, favorite quotes, my responses to books I’ve been reading, movies I’ve seen, conversations I’ve had, etc. After a certain amount of time, I go back and see what I’ve got and try to make something out of the raw material. I usually extract chunks of text I think could become separate poems or pieces and give them their own Word files.

Lately I’ve been thinking that this writing may end up as prose poetry or mini-essays, so I’ve been working on my sentences rather than my line breaks. As a matter of fact, I’m currently a resident at the Vermont Studio Center and I’ve been using my time here to sort out what I have, what I want to extend or expand upon, and what form this work will take—with books like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, Fanny Howe’s The Winter Sun (among others) as helpmates. 

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Lesley Jenike is Associate Professor of English at the Columbus College of Art and Design and where she is currently serving as Head of the English and Philosophy Department. She received her M.F.A. from The Ohio State University in 2003 and a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati in 2008. Her poems have appeared or will appear soon in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Sou'wester, Rattle, POOL, The Birmingham Poetry Review, and other journals. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, The Ohio Arts Council, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her second full-length collection of poems HOLY ISLAND will be published by Gold Wake Press in 2014.

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