Lesle Lewis, John’s Table: poems

 

Lake

Doctors say you have only weeks yet.

You go early to bed and draw meadows.

One day remembers a better one as she crawls out of consciousness.

Whatever happens happens now.

Red painted monuments bloom.

It’s a messy, wild-growing grief.

One child ventures out, the child, lovely and bespeckled, the child, a powerhouse, the child grown up, a person capable and remarkable.

Then the ocean comes for the land.

Drought is causing the reappearance of the canyon.

And of the split level house on a lake.

The latest from Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany’s recently-founded publishing enterprise, Piżama Press, “an independent press dedicated to showcasing and uplifting the voices of the strange, the uncanny, the absurd, and the surreal,” is John’s Table: poems (2026) by American poet Lesle Lewis. Self-described as a poet who “lives in the rough New Hampshire woods with the rest of the trees,” Lewis is the author of five prior full-length poetry collections: Small Boat (winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize), Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006), lie down too (Alice James Books, 2011), A Boot’s a Boot (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014) and Rainy Days on the Farm (Hudson NY: Fence Books, 2020), winner of The Ottoline Prize [see my review of such here]. Lewis, therefore, is not merely an experienced writer, but one who moves with the quiet confidence of a master, attending the intimate, the small, almost working a tone and tenor, a slow unfolding of a dense and lyric narrative, comparable to the prose details of American writer and translator Lydia Davis. “I’m always working.” begins the poem “Braver,” “I should pause more often. // But to think about not sleeping is not to sleep. // And sleeping takes too long.”

Each poem throughout Lewis’ John’s Table hold single-word titles, hinting at the precision to come, despite whatever broad sweeps and strokes lines might take; each poem simultaneously a kind of moment, singularly caught, as well as a meditation on and around the poem’s subject, much of which is offered through those single-word titles. “I ask myself to give myself.” Lewis writes, to close the poem “Need.” “My intention is to work but the work has no intention. // You photograph the photograph and then photoshop it. // You go to the paint store, the drug store, the cannabis dispensary and buy what you need.” Her poems revel in what appear to be small motions that hold turns and twists and turns, accumulating lines that offer straight lines of narrative but somehow bend and dodge as they continue. There is such incredible density and lightness, such nimble patter within the short spaces of these poems. The graceful assemblage of John’s Table offer sleek poems that defy expectation, articulating a book-length suite of fleeting moments of mortality (a thread throughout that begins to form around illness and the body, however subtle), all of which she holds in conceptual space; fleeting moments, all the more sweet for their brevity.

Pioneers

I’m sorry that I can’t give you more goodness.

The little I have, I need to keep for myself.

And I still live in this situation of my body.

The horizon stretches across all the body.

The solar panels are in their upright winter position.

The red pipe cleaner, our central theme, the other pipe cleaners wrap around.

Pieces of the old truths in the new spiritual lands are tree stumps around the cabins of the pioneers.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lesle Lewis

Lesle Lewis’ books include Small Boat, Landscapes I & II, lie down too, A Boot’s a Boot, and her newest book Rainy Days on the Farm.  She lives in New Hampshire.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Notification from University of Iowa Press about Small Boat winning the Iowa Poetry Prize was a giant thrill.  I remember the call well.  It was a real boost, but it didn’t change my life.  I was writing a lot and I kept writing a lot.  I’m not sure I know how my more recent work differs from earlier work, but I have more faith in the process, the constant and slow and necessary process of learning what a poem wants to teach me.  

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
As a kid I wrote wacky stories, but now more and more I feel suspicious of fiction, at least mainstream fiction that tells a story.  There are always many stories, so telling one story feels limited to me.  I guess I just don’t think in stories.  Fiction writing (and even fiction reading) is just not in my nature though I’ve written a few stories over the years.  Some nonfiction interests me, especially good memoirs of interesting lives written self-consciously and well.  I occasionally write an essay.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I make notes all the time.  Once a week I study my notes and gather the notes that might want to be in a poem.  I move the notes around.  I change and change and change them.  First drafts go through twenty of more drafts over a period of days, weeks, months, sometimes years.  Most final drafts look nothing like first drafts.  

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
A poem begins with a collection of notes.  Depending on how long I collect for, the poem could be short or long.  There’s a bit of arbitrariness to this,  but I’ve come to mostly trust when a poem is done.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don’t love doing readings. I’m not a public person.  But once the reading gets underway I can let the poems do their work.  I like knowing there’s an audience, something you never know when you are writing.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I have lots of ongoing questions!   What can poetry do?  How can we include everything?  How do we live with mortality?   What’s our relationship with nature?  With consciousness? How does art help us live?  Why do people want meaning and sense and reasons and understanding when that’s not what the world has to offer us?  What does it “mean” to love?   What is the self?   What do dreams tell us?  What is my duty to the world?  What can we do with our  moods?   How do we account for cruelty and the suffering of others?   Why do I love and need light so badly?  How do we preserve the goodness of children?   What’s most important about education?   How do short poems work differently than long poems?  How can I best live?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Writing can also be about listening to multiplicity, ambiguities, diversities, inclusivity.  Putting this thing next to this thing can be socially, politically, morally useful.  We need art to help us think differently.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I like feedback.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I once did a weekend workshop with Russell Edson and he prescribed more time for writing.  More and more and more time.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
My sweet husband brings me my coffee in bed and I stay in bed and read and write for a couple of hours to start my day.  When I was teaching, this meant starting around 5 am.  This is the best part of my day.  On a good day, I spend at least a few more hours in the morning or after lunch or in the evening doing more reading and writing time.  Reading and writing always go together.  Walking is also vital.  

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I’m lucky.  I don’t get stalled.  I can always turn to my journal notes.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Woodsmoke.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Books, the woods, the pond, fields, music, visual arts, dreams, my dog, my friends, my family, anything.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Books that have been most influential: William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, Van Gogh’s letters, John Ashbery’s Flow Chart, everything by Virginia Woolf.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I just want to keep living and writing, see some new places, think some new thoughts, take some new walks.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I’d love to be a painter.  I’m finally letting myself try painting.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I need to write because I get so easily overwhelmed by the largeness, wonderousness, and horribleness of the world.  I need to write to process and to cope.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
A few that come to mind: Knausgaard’s My Struggle (what memoir can do), Ingeborg Bachmann stories (what fiction can do), the film, Malick’s Tree of Life.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working to put together a new book composed of three long poems, an accumulation of work from the last five years or so.  

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Lesle Lewis, Rainy Days on the Farm

Meanwhile

It looks easy to write for love, water, and love.

This happens and then this and then things stop.

That’s the plot.

Our placentas detach.

Our placebos have side effects.

We are brothers and sisters with conflicting theories.

Do we contradict the given?

Frequently sacrifice the comprehensible to the unfathomable?

To the suffering of centuries?

Is earth to hold the plants?

I’m working my way through New Hampshire poet Lesle Lewis’s fifth full-length poetry collection, Rainy Days on the Farm (Hudson NY: Fence Books, 2020), winner of The Ottoline Prize. Author of the prior collections Small Boat (winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize), Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006), lie down too (Alice James Books, 2011) and A Boot’s a Boot (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014), as well as the chapbook It’s Rothko in Winter or Belgium (Factory Hollow Press, 2012), I am equally surprised and disappointed to have not known of her work until now (although this does provide the opportunity to pick up some of her prior collections). Rainy Days on the Farm is a collection of very sharp meditative sketches; poems that play with fragment and narrative, poems that re-order and shift expectation, and allow the collision of subject and thought to reveal what might not have been otherwise possible. Lewis’ poems might appear straightforward, but they are anything but, and twist and turn in remarkably subtle ways. One good example is this sentence-stanza that sits in the poem “Mania breaks.,” that reads: “Fragment plus fragment equals fragmentation and we can work harder with what we have left of what we have lost or what we have left of what we never had.” There is such a lovely disassemblage and reassemblage to Lewis’ poems, one that rewards careful reading. As part of a recent interview on the new collection, conducted by Benjamin Niespodziany for Neon Pajamas (posted September 21, 2020), Lewis responds:

The poems in this books were written over about five or six years, so there’s a pretty wide range of concerns here, but I think it’s not all that different from my previous books.  I’m always and still concerned with consciousness and the natural world. 

I can’t really be objective enough to say what’s changed in my writing over the years, but I know that I feel more and more faith in my process, that is trusting a poem to teach me where it means to go. And I may be more more patient with the revising process, how a poem becomes itself with time, sometimes years.  

Of course I have lots of doubts along the way too. I guess doubt is also part of the process. 

I’m curious about how Lewis refers to the poems within the collection as prose poems; while I wouldn’t specifically argue against any of that, these are poems that focus less on the prose-poem-stanza than on the sentence itself, something she might just have in common with Canadian poets Lisa Robertson and Daphne Marlatt: very much poets of sentences, and their accumulation. “If there is a couple.” she writes, to open “An Open Easy Door.” “If there is not. // One will die before the other. // If your little life. // A pentimento. // If you loved a banjo. // If you skipped the night. // If this is a post virtual reality crash. // If the text meanders.” Arguably, her blend of the fragment and farm-considerations also includes a resonance to Robertson’s notion of the “pastoral,” and Lewis’ poems allow for a landscape of cows, green woods, rain, horses and birds as both foreground and background, providing backdrop for something else, something equally, if not more important, going on underneath. These are remarkable poems.

The Cows

Assertions in the humongous much you call “complex psychiatric conditions” and I call breezes.

It’s like determining market value or lining up for something stupid.

Is it not enough that on top of nothing there is everything?

No information comes or goes.

When I can’t think what else to say, I say “Thank you.”

Cars pass each other on the highway and that’s all.

Seven, then ten, then twelve cows surround me and their cicle gets tighter.

Their hovering sharpens the light, and I judge the light’s movements, like the cows’, by the freshness of the manure.