Would you ever call an essay a calliope, a birthmark, or a pupil? Could an essay be, a la Joan Mitchell, a “good-bye door” and a haunted house (if we change tracks and look to Shirley Jackson for some clues) built beside a city of toys? An essay could be “the teaching emotion” Edward Albee describes in The Zoo Story or the bear who famously pursues Antigonus’s exit in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Maybe an essay really is “The Moribund, or Salacious Fragments of a Rather Regular Life Made of Weather and Stuff and Walks and Tasks.”
All of these are options in Lesley Jenike’s newly released collection of essays City of Toys, the most recent addition to Mad Creek Books’s 21st Century Essays series. In Jenike’s worlds, these objects, references, and works of art are both the subject and the means of expression. In her essay “The Pupil,” Jenike dilates on Charlotte and Emily Bronte’s juvenilia, eyeglasses and short-sightedness, and the historical inventions of the kaleidoscope and the essay form. She builds to this moment of personal recollection from her childhood:
I like to write. I’ve written some stories, but the letter to my mother is my first essay. It’s an essay in the sense that I’m asking my persistence of vision to link a series of disparate items: my mother, me, the distance between us, and it does, if imperfectly. And it is also fiction in the sense that I appear happy when I know, in reality, I am not. And it is also true in the sense that I couldn’t see, and now I can.
A “persistence of vision” linked to “a series of disparate items” defines Jenike as an essayist, and the constellations she builds reveal a story-shape through the wit, ponderousness, and rhythmic pacing of her prose. I’ve known Jenike for over 10 years, and I’ve experienced how effortlessly she can move from discussing W.H. Auden to Nick Cave to the personalities of horses we’ve known, back to that horse scratching its backside in “Musée des Beaux Artes.” Riffing and play are words that could come to mind when reading Jenike’s associational essays, yet I’d rather say this collection witnesses to her observer’s disposition and her capacity for attention along both the horizon line of analogy and the plumb line of contemplation. Together, these forces create a grid across which she and the reader can essay, meander and wander, into (to borrow Emily Dickinson’s language) a “formal feeling.”
As a Professor of English at Columbus College of Art and Design and in her previous poetry collections Ghost of Fashion, Holy Island, How We Came Ashore, and Punctum: formal awareness and inventiveness are on display, but the essay’s formal possibilities hit home, literally, after Jenike gave birth to her first child. When we talked over Zoom in March, Jenike explained her turn to the essay as a turn away from the strictures and imposed rules of genre. “Having gone through childbirth [I realized] nothing else really matters and I should stop worrying so much about other people’s expectations about genre and form,” she says.
Though caring for young children — for any children — requires an enormous output of time and attention, Jenike found the essay a welcome form at precisely this time, when short-form poetry may have seemed the logical choice for a writer with limited time. She says about the essay, “I think I liked the idea that I had some big, longer project that I could return to. I felt like it was a friend to get back to when I felt overwhelmed by parenthood.”
For Jenike, “writing follows thought,” she says. And since the essays that comprise City of Toys were written and revised over ten years, from her children’s infancy through early childhood, the thoughts she follows touch on motherhood and childhood. Sometimes, this happens in ways we might expect, with essays that play with stuffed animals, puppets, and make believe. Often, Jenike showcases childhood’s absurdities, antics and vulnerabilities via Shakespeare’s daughters, breast pumps, Spielberg’s A.I., and the eponymous city of toys, an actual ghost town in Consonno, Italy, the one-time folly of Count Mario Bagno. Always, she sends these fine but strong threads through the needle’s eye of her own experiences as a mother and as a child.
Never do these associations feel heavy-handed, contrived, or flimsily knitted together. I ask Jenike about her revision process, trying to understand how these seemingly disparate points come into such close contact. She says, “The trick to it is getting the beginning right and getting the voice right. Once I feel like I’ve got the voice, it’ll help dictate the form. But sometimes it takes a while to get there.” When I ask about this sense of voice and its relationship to form, Jenike moves away from the classification of this collection as “lyric essay” and instead points to her basic investment in “sound, rhythm, attention to language.”
Jenike attended a performing arts high school in Cincinnati and studied performance and writing at Emerson College in Boston. One story of her childhood is song, performance, and the musical theater community. She says, “Those two languages [of music and words] have always been kind of wedded in my mind and so I could never kind of separate rhythm, the sound of language, from the matter that I’m discussing.” Her essays, “Maybe It’s Just Show Biz” and “Enter Time, the Chorus” are two of the more direct expressions of her own experiences in theater, theater as a site of memory, love, and exploitation, and the sonority of language.
They are also just two examples of Jenike’s admitted devotion to the Big S’s of the stage: Shakespeare and Sondheim. In the essay “Maybe It’s Just Show Biz,” she writes about her adolescent imaginings of being the best mourner and eulogizer at Stephen Sondheim’s funeral: “Not that we wanted him to die, but we were so obsessed with him that we dreamt of theatrically mourning him . . . we were given priority over Bernadette Peters.” Jenike reflects on, “how much of a role [Sondheim] played in what I think good writing is.”
She says, “One of the things that I so appreciate about theater and about music is that it’s an art form that gets passed along and passed down. Imagine a teenager singing “Children Will Listen” again just in their living room, there’s something really beautiful about the fact that this amazing piece of art, [Sondheim] gifted that to us, and he gifted it to some random high schooler who’s singing it and appreciating the sentiment in that song for the first time and that will continue for generations-there’s something so magnificent in that.”
Translated and magnificent sonority.
The placement of artistic endeavor and experience in the living room and the high chair, as well as the theater and the gallery.
These are the gifts of music and theater: sound and matter. Jenike hopes to “emulate them in some way,” she says.
A reader hears this aspiration and shares in the exploration of it throughout this collection, but especially in the penultimate essay, “The Moribund, or Salacious Fragments of a Rather Regular Life Made of Weather and Stuff and Walks and Tasks.” This essay, too, is an homage. This time, to the Howe sisters — Susan and Fanny — and to her son:
I put down my work to focus on my son. He isn’t quite walking yet, but soon. The sun seems fuller in October, brighter, brightest at noon. My son, he isn’t quite walking yet. He dazzles like the sun at noon. In October, I put down my son to focus on my work, which isn’t quite walking yet, but soon. My son, he’d sooner crawl. By noon—sooner!—he’ll walk. The son is dazzling. I put down my sun and work toward my son; he’d sooner crawl, like dark under a table, toward a runaway ball.
Here is the play of language that leads to ambivalence. Sons and suns, working and walking, they sound so much alike. Jenike tells me that it’s the ambivalence in Sondheim and Shakespeare and all art that fascinates her. She says, “Whatever that is, it attracted me from a very, very young age and really informed how I see everything as totally ambivalent.”
Talking of embodied performance and the generous transmissions of tradition gets us onto a familiar topic in our conversations: faith and religion, especially the Catholicism that I can’t let go of and that she can’t grasp onto. Jenike attended Catholic grade schools before the performing arts high school, and she writes about monks, nuns, and religious texts of various traditions in City of Toys.
In her essay “Be Whole In Me Now Here,” Jenike describes a moment in grade school when she received the consecrated Host during Mass, even though she hadn’t received the necessary sacraments. She writes in that essay, “I’d been, for all intents and purposes, an outsider suddenly inside, trying to remember something there is, in fact, no way to remember.”
We talk about the peculiar draw of the Roman Catholic liturgy and also the way it can repulse and keep some people away. “I very much wanted to be a part of it but then also couldn’t help but be skeptical, of course, and it’s that ambivalence again. I would love to have faith, I think that would be wonderful, but I just can’t do it or I can’t do it in any kind of conventional way,” she says.
To borrow another of Jenike’s essay titles, we are all in “the positioning field,” inside one world while completely outside others. The ambivalence of the observer, her essays into what is real and what appears to be so, make art out of distance and contradiction. And this process often requires an ethic. For Jenike, “If there’s any takeaway from the collection—or something I had to kind of figure out, or work through, or think about as I was writing—is that we are all responsible for children . . . We’re responsible for each other.”
