Lorine Niedecker

 

.

There's a better shine
on the pendulum
than is on my hair
and many times

. . . .

I've seen it there.

Lorine Niedecker

In October of 1964, having no other book prospects on the near horizon, Lorine Neidecker took action and assembled her own—a book of thirty poems written into the pages of a dime-store sketch pad, whose front and back she covered in wrapping paper. She carefully handwrote the small poems in blue-inked cursive, placing each one on its own unnumbered sheet of paper. She then sent the book, with the wry title Homemade Poems inscribed on the cover, to her friend, the poet and editor Cid Corman, who was living in Japan at the time. This Lost & Found chapbook presents a simple facsimile edition of Homemade Poems that is congruent to the original book in all fundamental ways. Thus readers now have a chance to read Niedecker’s handwriting and move through and around the book according to the same chief physical features, spaces, and tempos she originally built into it. The chapbook also includes an afterword, “Usable Dimensions,” which is included as a pamphlet insert.

Lorine Niedecker

 

PHOTOGRAPH BY JENNY PENBERTHY

[Mr. Van Ess bought 14 washcloths?]

Mr. Van Ess bought 14 washcloths?

Fourteen washrags, Ed Van Ess?

Must be going to give em

to the church, I guess.

He drinks, you know. The day we moved

he came into the kitchen stewed,

mixed things up for my sister Grace—

put the spices in the wrong place

George Oppen

 

Psalm

Veritas sequitur ...
In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down-
That they are there!
Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass
The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.
Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun
The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.

Kenneth Koch

 “Write poetry as if you were in love. If you are always in love you will not always write the same poem, but if you are never in love you may.” ~ Kenneth Koch

“And, with a shout, collecting coat-hangers 
Dour rebus, conch, hip 
Ham, the autumn day, oh how genuine! 
Literary frog, catch-all boxer, O 
Real! The magistrate, say “group,' bower, undies 
Disk, poop, “Timon of Athens.” When 
The bugle shimmies, how glove towns! 
It's merrimac, bends, and pure gymnasium 
Impy keels! The earth desks, madmen 
Impose a shy (oops) broken tube's child--- 
Land! Why are your bandleaders troops 
Or is? Honk, can the mailed rose 
Gesticulate? Arm the paper arm! 
Bind up the chow in its lintel of sniff. 
Rush the pilgrims, destroy tobacco, pool 
The dirty beautiful jingling pyjamas, at 
Last beside the stove-drum-preventing oyster, 
The “Caesar” of tower dins, the cold's “I'm 
A dear.” O bed, at which I used to sneer at. 
Bringing cloth. O song, “Dusted hoops!” He gave 
A dish of. The bear, that sound of pins. O French 
Ice-cream! balconies of deserted snuff! The hills are 
very underwear, and near “to be” 
An angel is shouting, “Wilder baskets!” 

Kenneth Koch 
1st stanza of When the Sun Tries to Go On 

John Ashbery

1954: John Ashbery and Jane Freilicher in Cornwall, Connecticut.

FROM JOHN ASHBERY’S PRIVATE COLLECTIONS COPYRIGHT © 2017 JOHN ASHBERY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED BY ARRANGEMENT WITH GEOR

Soonest Mended

Barely tolerated, living on the margin

In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued   

On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso

Before it was time to start all over again.

There would be thunder in the bushes, a rustling of coils,   

And Angelica, in the Ingres painting, was considering

The colorful but small monster near her toe, as though wondering whether forgetting

The whole thing might not, in the end, be the only solution.   

And then there always came a time when

Happy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile

Came plowing down the course, just to make sure everything was O.K.,   

Only by that time we were in another chapter and confused   

About how to receive this latest piece of information.   

Was it information? Weren’t we rather acting this out   

For someone else’s benefit, thoughts in a mind

With room enough and to spare for our little problems (so they began to seem),

Our daily quandary about food and the rent and bills to be paid?   

To reduce all this to a small variant,

To step free at last, minuscule on the gigantic plateau—

This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.   

Alas, the summer’s energy wanes quickly,

A moment and it is gone. And no longer

May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.   

Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.   

Now there is no question even of that, but only

Of holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown off,   

With an occasional dream, a vision: a robin flies across   

The upper corner of the window, you brush your hair away

And cannot quite see, or a wound will flash

Against the sweet faces of the others, something like:   

This is what you wanted to hear, so why

Did you think of listening to something else? We are all talkers   

It is true, but underneath the talk lies

The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose

Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor.

These then were some hazards of the course,

Yet though we knew the course was hazards and nothing else   

It was still a shock when, almost a quarter of a century later,   

The clarity of the rules dawned on you for the first time.   

They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game   

Were merely spectators, though subject to its vicissitudes

And moving with it out of the tearful stadium, borne on shoulders, at last.

Night after night this message returns, repeated

In the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us,   

Yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth,   

The being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them,   

Not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes   

To be without, alone and desperate.

But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting

Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal. These were moments, years,   

Solid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts,   

But like the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression

Not too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day   

When it had been outgrown. Better, you said, to stay cowering   

Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning   

Is a delusion, and I agreed, adding that

Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned,   

That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint

None of us ever graduates from college,

For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up   

Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.

And you see, both of us were right, though nothing

Has somehow come to nothing; the avatars

Of our conforming to the rules and living

Around the home have made—well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us,   

Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept

The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out,

For this is action, this not being sure, this careless

Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,

Making ready to forget, and always coming back

To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

John Ashbery

Farm Implements And Rutabagas In A Landscape

The first of the undecoded messages read: "Popeye sits 
in thunder, 
Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment, 
From livid curtain's hue, a tangram emerges: a country." 
Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: "How 
pleasant 
To spend one's vacation en la casa de Popeye," she 
scratched 
Her cleft chin's solitary hair. She remembered spinach 

And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach. 
"M'love," he intercepted, "the plains are decked out 
in thunder 
Today, and it shall be as you wish." He scratched 
The part of his head under his hat. The apartment 
Seemed to grow smaller. "But what if no pleasant 
Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my 
country." 

Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country. 
Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach 
When the door opened and Swee'pea crept in. "How pleasant!" 
But Swee'pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib. 
"Thunder 
And tears are unavailing," it read. "Henceforth shall 
Popeye's apartment 
Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or 
scratched." 

Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched 
Her long thigh. "I have news!" she gasped. "Popeye, forced as 
you know to flee the country 
One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, 
duplicate father, jealous of the apartment 
And all that it contains, myself and spinach 
In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder 
At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant 

Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant 
Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the 
scratched 
Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and 
thunder." 
She grabbed Swee'pea. "I'm taking the brat to the country." 
"But you can't do that--he hasn't even finished his spinach," 
Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment. 

But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment 
Succumbed to a strange new hush. "Actually it's quite pleasant 
Here," thought the Sea Hag. "If this is all we need fear from 
spinach 
Then I don't mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon 
over"--she scratched 
One dug pensively--"but Wimpy is such a country 
Bumpkin, always burping like that." Minute at first, the thunder 

Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder, 
The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched 
His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country. 

John Ashbery

Frank Norris

 

As Robert D. Lundy explains in "The Polk Street Background of McTeague" (Norton Critical Edition pp. 257-262), Norris used many observed details of actual San Francisco places in the novel. One was the spectacular Cliff House to which McTeague and Marcus walk in Chapter 4. The third version of the Cliff House, pictured to the right, was built in 1896 and burned down in 1907.

Frank Norris

 

The Octopus (excerpt)

Dyke reached the Post Office in Bonneville toward eleven o'clock, but he did not at once go to Ruggles's office. It was seldom he got into town, and when he did he permitted himself the luxury of enjoying his evident popularity. He met friends everywhere, in the Post Office, in the drug store, in the barber shop and around the court-house.

At the drug store, his eye was caught by a "transparent slate," a child's toy. "Now, there's an idea, Jim," he observed to the boy behind the soda-water fountain; "I know a little tad that would just about jump out of her skin for that. Think I'll have to take it with me. Smartest little tad in all Tulare County, and more fun! A regular whole show in herself."

"And the hops?" inquired the other.

"Great!" declared Dyke, with the good-natured man's readiness to talk of his private affairs to anyone who would listen. "Perfect. I'm dead sure of a bonanza crop by now. The rain came just right. I actually don't know as I can store the crop in those barns I built, it's going to be so big. That foreman of mine was a daisy. Jim, I'm going to make money in that deal. You know the crop is contracted for already. Sure, the foreman managed that. He's a daisy. Chap in San Francisco will take it all and at the advanced price. I wanted to hang on, to see if it wouldn't go to six cents, but the foreman said, 'No, that's good enough.' So I signed. Ain't it just great?"

"I suppose you'll stay right by hops now?"

"Right you are. I know a good thing when I see it. There's plenty others going into hops next season. I set 'em the example. Wouldn't be surprised if it came to be a regular industry hereabouts. I'm planning ahead for next year already. I can let the foreman go, now that I've learned the game myself, and I think I'll buy a piece of land off Quien Sabe and get a bigger crop, and build a couple more barns, and, by George, in about five years’ time I'll have things humming. I'm going to make money, Jim."

At Ruggles's office, which was the freight as well as the land office of the P. and S. W. Railroad, Dyke was surprised to see a familiar figure in conference with Ruggles himself, by a desk inside the railing.

The figure was that of a middle-aged man, fat, with a great stomach, which he stroked from time to time. As he turned about, addressing a remark to the clerk, Dyke recognized S. Behrman, banker, railroad agent, and political manipulator.

"I'll be wanting some cars of you people before the summer is out," observed Dyke to the clerk as he folded up and put away the order that the other had handed him. He remembered perfectly well that he had arranged the matter of transporting his crop some months before, but he liked to busy himself again and again with the details of his undertaking.

(Continued)

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