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

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

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

  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.

• 

  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)