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:
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
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.
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.
Post a Comment