The Books: “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry” – Lorine Niedecker

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 2: Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair

I had not heard of Lorine Niedecker, until this past January, when I took the Norton Anthology out to Block Island with me, in the hopes that it would help me get back to reading again. Something big and varied, that wouldn’t require a ton of concentration. Flip through it from time to time, read the poems, read the intros … It did help me get back to reading. And it was fun to re-read things like “The Waste Land” and some of Pound’s Cantos, things I know well – but haven’t read in their entirety in a long time. And somehow, I came across Lorine Niedecker, who is anthologized. There is a brief introductory note for her – not a long one, since she lived in the same place her entire life – not many “events” to speak of – but her poems are incredible.

I am so glad I encountered her. She was born in 1903 in Wisconsin and spent her whole life on Black Hawk Island. She lived with her parents, and took care of them when they became elderly. She went to college briefly. She had many jobs, some menial, some not. Somewhere along in here, she started writing poetry. In 1931, she read Louis Zukofsky’s “Objectivist” issue of Poetry magazine, and traveled to New York to meet him. They ended up carrying on a long correspondence. The “Objectivists” wanted to create poems that were not sentimental, or ornamental – simple, clean, clear. Lorine Niedecker is a classic example of an Objectivist poet. Her poems have no “needless words”, they almost feel like haikus: miniature little sketches – and the way she used indentation and spaces makes them unmistakably hers.

She was obviously a well-read curious intellectual woman, and her poems are not about the flowers, and the leaves, and her emotions. She wrote poems about Darwin, the Chinese poet Li Po, the North American explorers – and in this way, she is an heir of Ezra Pound, whose poems have a collage effect, full of references to existing material.

While I was out on Block Island, I read all of her work anthologized – the first one being her long poem on Thomas Jefferson (bestill my heart) – and now I’m a fan forever. She’s also not for dummies. She expects people to be familiar with the events of his life (or Darwin’s life, or whoever), and the references come fast and furious. She doesn’t slow down for morons. There are footnotes in the Norton Anthology, and with Niedecker, at times, you really need them. But don’t let them slow you down. Keep going. Niedecker waits for no one.

Niedecker uses quotes and fragments from the letters of Thomas Jefferson in order to create the poem (if you’ve read his letters, you’ll recognize a lot of this).

I think it’s an extraordinary poem.

Thomas Jefferson

I
My wife is ill!
And I sit
waiting
for a quorum

II
Fast ride
his horse collapsed
Now he saddled walked

Borrowed a farmer’€™s
unbroken colt
To Richmond

Richmond How stop
Arnold’s redcoats
there

III
Elk Hill destroyed—
Cornwallis
carried off 30 slaves

Jefferson:
Were it to give them freedom
he’d have done right

IV
Latin and Greek
my tools
to understand
humanity

I rode horse
away from a monarch
to an enchanting
philosophy

V
The South of France

Roman temple
€œsimple and sublime

Maria Cosway
harpist
on his mind

white column
and arch

VI
To daughter Patsy: Read—
read Livy

No person full of work
was ever hysterical

Know music, history
dancing

(I calculate 14 to 1
in marriage
she will draw
a blockhead)

Science also
Patsy

VII
Agreed with Adams:
send spermaceti oil to Portugal
for their church candles

(light enough to banish mysteries?:
three are one and one is three
and yet the one not three
and the three not one)

and send slat fish
U.S. salt fish preferred
above all other

VIII
Jefferson of Patrick Henry
backwoods fiddler statesman:

“He spoke as Homer wrote”
Henry eyed our minister at Paris—

the Bill of Rights hassle—
he remembers . . .

in splendor and dissipation
he thinks yet of bills of rights”

IX
True, French frills and lace
for Jefferson, sword and belt

but follow the Court to Fontainebleau
he could not

house rent would have left him
nothing to eat

. . .

He bowed to everyone he met
and talked with arms folded

He could be trimmed
by a two-month migraine

and yet
stand up

X
Dear Polly:
I said No no frost

in Virginia—the strawberries
were safe

I’d have heard €”I’m in that kind
of correspondence

with a young daughter
if they were not

Now I must retract
I shrink from it

XI
Political honors
“splendid torments”
“If one could establish
an absolute power
of silence over oneself”

When I set out for Monticello
(my grandchildren
will they know me?)

How are my young
chestnut trees—

XII
Hamilton and the bankers
would make my country Carthage

I am abandoning the rich—
their dinner parties—

I shall eat my simlins
with the class of science

or not at all
Next year the last of labors

among conflicting parties
Then my family

we shall sow our cabbages
together

XIII
Delicious flower
of the acacia

or rather

Mimosa Nilotica
from Mr. Lomax

XIV
Polly Jefferson, 8, had crossed
to father and sister in Paris

by way of London—Abigail
embraced her—Adams said

“in all my life I never saw
more charming child”

Death of Polly, 25,
Monticello

XV
My harpsichord
my alabaster vase
and bridle bit
bound for Alexandria
Virginia

The good sea weather
of retirement
The drift and suck
and die-down of life
but there is land

XVI
These were my passions:
Monticello and the villa-temples
I passed on to carpenters
bricklayers what I knew

and to an Italian sculptor
how to turn a volute
on a pillar

You may approach the campus rotunda
from lower to upper terrace
Cicero had levels

XVII
John Adams’ eyes
dimming
Tom Jefferson’s rheumatism
cantering

XVIII
Ah soon must Monticello be lost
to debts
and Jefferson himself
to death

XIX
Mind leaving, let body leave
Let dome live, spherical dome
and colonnade

Martha (Patsy) stay
The Committee of Safety
must be warned€

Stay youth—Anne and Ellen
all my books, the bantams
and the seeds of the senega root