Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Favourite Lines from Niedecker

 

there is a dee round silence

in the sound

 

‘Mourning Dove’

 

this going without tea holds a hope of tasting it

 

‘Promise of Brilliant Funerals’

 

But that was before the library burned

 

‘Progression (I)’

 

As one Somnambulist to another

our sleep could be more perfect

 

(II)

 

opera is an oversight

on the part of the Milky Way

 

(III)

 

Last lines being sentimental

 

I must possess myself, get back to pure duration

 

Stop quietly in print the one available weather

 

(IV)

 

A touch of moon?

 

Gaspaciousness enmillions

dread-centric introspectres

(V)

 

and nothing

less to lift plants from the habits of their whorls

 

Someone has said: rapid lighted pimperly advanced

 

Memory is blue in the head?

 

Move on from brown laterals of the same day, ascertain oneself

center of climatic being

 

dusking the nounal

 

(VI)

 

I must have been washed in listenably across the landscape

 

For the emotion of fall has its seat in the acoustic gland

 

It’s what comes of looking way back on the upper right

shelf of the lower left cupboard

 

(VII)

 

To jesticulate in the rainacular or novembrood

in the sunconscious

 

They pop practical in a greyfold, bibbler and dub –

one atmosnoric pressure for the thick of us

 

(VIII)

3 comments:

walrus said...

Niedecker, yes. Don't know much about her. I picked up the Selected recently: The Granite Pail, ed by Cid Corman, and I'm impressed.

She seems to have lived most of her life in a small cabin. I had no idea about the LZ connection/liaison.

I've been listening to a lot of Ezra Pound reading his own work, esp. the Cantos, from the 1930s, 50s and 60s. I can't get enough of it. I'm oddly addicted. The voice is mesmerising.

Walrus

belgianwaffle said...

Cid Corman seems to be a name popping up in all sorts of different contexts for me at the moment. I've ordered a volume of his poems but would also like to get hold of some of his writings on poetry (these seem to be out of print or v. expensive).

I'm no expert on LN - just piecing together shreds in the Introduction & bits & pieces elsewhere. Bunting made massive claims for her & I can see why.

I get the sense that she's a key figure for a certain type of US poet I'm encountering via Blogs - you work well away from the Big City, take menial jobs (if at all - and certainly not academic), evolve an Oriental/folk/nature-inflected minimal form, publish your own work in exquisite yet modest volumes. Jess Mynes is one.

I find it very appealing - ironic given my love of the sassy New York brigade. Maybe its the Quaker legacy in my bones ...

I agree abot Pound. That voice sounds as though it is coming from Somewhere Else (which, I suppose, it was). However, who was it that claimed that when pressed a lot of Pound's statements crumbled to bits (he didn't know his Classics so well etc.)? Bunting? Davenport? Kenner? Someone. I wonder if the voice is a bit like that too - a Stage voice, of sorts.

The C.

walrus said...

Yes, it could be accused of being melodramatic -- I wonder if perhaps a result of his contact with Yeats? -- but once you get past that (which I did, very quickly) there is a lot to enjoy.

Listening to the Cantos is a very different experience to reading them, I've found, and perhaps a better way in.

I'm not sure a poet should worry too much about misusing sources. Listening to him I realised how much more interesting his oriental worldview is from, say, late Eliot. I find all that "a leaf in the current" stuff very attractive. And, of course, poignant after his wartime experiences.

W.

April Fool?