Gillian Conoley reads and discusses Lorine Niedecker’s “Swedenborg (from “Tradition”)”
Swedenborg (from “Tradition”)
Well he saw man created according to the motion of the elements. He located the soul: in the blood. Retired at last––to a house where he paid window-tax (for increasing the light!). Lived simply. Gardened. Saw visions. Nothing for supper but tea. Now he saw the soul from his “Pray, what is matter” leave for the touchy ––heavens!––blue rose kind of thing. Strange––he did grow a blue rose, you know. * I lost you to water, summer when the young girls swim, to the hot shore to little peet-tweet- pert girls. Now it’s cold your bright knock ––Orion’s with his dog after him–– at my door, boy on a winter wave ride. * I married in the world’s black night for warmth if not repose. At the close–– someone. I hid with him from the long range guns. We lay leg in the cupboard, head in closet. A slit of light at no bird dawn–– Untaught I thought he drank too much. I say I married and lived unburied. I thought–– * You see here the influence of inference Moon on rippled stream “Except as and unless” * Your erudition the elegant flower of which my blue chicory at scrub end of ditch illuminates * Alone a still state hard as sard then again whisper-talk preserved in chalk At last no (TV) gun no more coats than one no hair lightener Sweethearts of the whiter walls * Why can’t I be happy in my sorrow my drinking man today my quiet tomorrow * And what you liked or did–– no matter once the moon dipped down and fish rose from under * Cleaned all surfaces and behind all solids and righted leaning things Considered then, becurtained the metaphysics of flight from housecleanings * Young in Fall I said: the birds are at their highest thoughts of leaving Middle life said nothing–– grounded to a livelihood Old age––a high gabbling gathering before goodbye of all we know
—Lorine Niedecker
Rights & Access
Lorine Niedecker, “Swedenborg (from “Tradition”)” from Collected Works. Copyright © 2004 by Lorine Niedecker. University of California Press.
Reprinted by permission of Bob Arnold, literary executor.
Commentary
Lorine Niedecker was born on May 12, 1903, and died on December 31, 1970. She lived most of her life in a rural landscape on Black Hawk Island near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. It wouldn’t be out of line to say that she had two homes in her life: the one by water (“The Brontës had their moors, I have my marshes,” she once wrote), and the avant-garde poetry scene birthed in 1931 in the Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine, which she read. Almost immediately thereafter Niedecker began a correspondence with Louis Zukofsky that was to last the rest of her life. At this point in her writing she veered away from earlier influences of the Imagists and Surrealists. She began sending her work to Poetry, where it was accepted. Eventually she became a central member of the Objectivists, the only female poet in the group.
Letters were a crucial companion, and no doubt sustaining to her art, and to the art of those she wrote. Among her epistolary friends were Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Cid Corman, and Clayton Eshelman.
She wrote ground-breaking work, addressing subject matters of gender, work, sexual politics, social politics, marriage, and domesticity long before others. She developed a lyric that was both clear and complicated, ever-alive to eccentricities and shifts of American vernacular, sounding vowels and consonants alongside the intricate movements of the natural world. She never quite left Surrealism in that there was an ever-abiding interest in the subconscious. While her experimentation was cosmopolitan, and her range of reference global and century-spanning, her idiom was of the folk.
I’ll read an excerpt from her poem “Tradition,” written in 1965. This section of the poem is subtitled “Swedenborg,” referring to the 18th century Swedish scientist, philosopher and mystic.
Commentator's Poem
The Long Marriage
If it is true that I, you, don’t exist but we are in it for the eternity, for the once in the pink-orange blazing dawn I put on your black underwear. Doing there, in my drawer, stunned/pleased at the hip-fit, years to a bus you jumped out of in your duct-taped boots (there was snow), you were so happy to be coming to see me I saw you from the window’s vectored frost, a brown feathery hen, here to roost, though you were the male. Now the white birch drifts a thousand motes back into the house to eat off our dust and fly. We sire and wench, harmony and ash until conversation, consumption, interrogation, and the small back of the sweet talk become so paradisical, primitive, warped I fall into the lace of your gutter, pretty nice there, and we have to wire prose into the talk to get the poem, to get the rope that runs long and free out the cave. Mastodon-like to crawl on all fours to birth some intelligibles. Got a grease fire in the kitchen for a long time coming. Couples forming a rustling seriality up city hall’s granite steps’ nightlong cormorant moon, 20 pairs of black underwear in a superbag be-lit with break of dawn’s exalt as when media hyper-glosses our lives but not as bad as your mom and dad, and we think of our dreams with their heterodoxy and did I tell you mine or dream it the lava-like tar congealing into blue-black bubbles in asphalt we could pop with each step. Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen in the movie of our first date both so young all they could do was kick thoughtlessly at the dirt and kill everyone in their wake but us. Spacek’s short shorts her child-like, almost woman-like legs. Sheen’s cigarette pack folded back into the sleeve of his T-shirt, we rose/stumble/found each other’s hands up the aisle pitch dark and stood before the turn lights turning jade green water. If anoit is a drop of oil on our foreheads, if one by one alteration finds, we toss our hair down a tower for longer arousal. We want to be seen in the eyes of the government. If marriage is Empire’s locket we get in bed like students to its sheets though we hate the acquisition and the light moves. How many instances of unity feel more like bicycles attached to cars. But that was your dream. I get on the bus going nowhere in particular, sit in sun for the warm. The bus heaves sideways before lurching down our street crowded (it is Wednesday) with the Episcopalian’s AA meeting’s cars, each shining, obediently parked. Luck, its inexact clarity. Soft as tracing paper the house lay loose linoleum, carpet, tile and oak for surfaces to pace, parse, backtrack. If this is the hallway where a lumbering tiger with stitches mends itself and runs. We cannot occupy it absolutely, ion, eon. If this is the vertigo of another. One song alone, one spinet, many breezes, firmament, and water. The psalm and plasm in the particulars of the jungle where we walk to see it snow. If we are so angry. If we are so happy. If no eye contact. The wind tears hard at it.
—Gillian Conoley
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Gillian Conoley
Gillian Conoley (1955- ) was born in Taylor, Texas. She attended Southern Methodist University and earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has written several poetry collections, including Peace (2014), Profane Halo (2005), and Tall Stranger (1991), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other honors include the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize, a Fund for Poetry Award, and the Academy of American Poets Award, and several Pushcart Prize publications. She is currently a professor and poet-in-residence at Sonoma State University. Photo credit: Domenic Stansberry.
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Lorine Niedecker
Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970) was born in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, where she lived for most of her life in isolation from much of the writing community. She wrote often about her natural surroundings and abstract concepts, and was the only female writer associated with the Objectivist poets. Her works of poetry include North Central (1968), My Friend Tree (1961), New Goose (1946), and many others, as well as three volumes that were published posthumously. Photo courtesy of Bob Arnold, literary executor, and Hoard Historical Museum.
Related Resources
- “Peace” by Gillian Conoley (catalog record)
- “The plot genie” by Gillian Conoley (catalog record)
- Gillian Conoley External link (Wave Books site)
- Lorine Niedecker External link (official website)
Rights & Access
Reprinted by permission of the author.