There’s something potent about Neidecker’s control, her far reach, her sadness with dignity, her seeking peace, her eye for beauty and self-comfort in reconciling impossibles of loss when she is found in nature…p. 268, Paean to Place,
O my floating life
Do not save love
for things
Throw things
to the flood
ruined
by the flood
Leave the new unbought –
all one in the end –
water
I probably misrepresent by excerpt like that. That’s the movie trailer clip version. She’s more mellow than dramatic. Part of her power is the slow build, the sense of lack of wasted word or sound. She has an intensity of being in blinders, a sort of ping-pong game. There are specifics of other people or buildings, large notions, specific memories but it all is secondary to the two character scene which is only her and the land.
I stripped my voice reading Lorine Neidecker’s Paean to Place, and Wintergreen Ridge in North Central in her Collected. [Each is only 10 pages. I really should go to an throat specialist.]
She has a very specific attention, yet sweeps back across various points in time, filling in context, yet not cluttering or with the sense of I’m-about-to-explain-this-backstory-to-you-now-in-case-you-lack-it. Instead it’s a synthetizing, cross-connecting of places and times, to express a unity. She travels a lot of ground of subject in one poem but she doesn’t leap except where wordplay give her permission to segue.
She references nature but with the sense that she is not making shit up, but being a field biolgist as part of her responsibility to accurately chronicle what she lives, with a page describing how the pitcher plant eats, p. 250
secretes a sticky
clear liquid
the better to eat you
my dear
digests cartilage
and yet before long, she encorporates into the biology ruminations on her mom’s psychology (p. 252) when she overhears a sound in the forest, animal cry or mother’s cry?
my mother’s
where the light
pissed past
the pistillate cone
how she loved
closed gentians
she herself
so closed
She puzzles around for sense. There’s something rather piteous room in the heart that she fetches things from and yet she has also a pride and a roar to her as well.
In Wintergreen ridge, p. 249-250
flowering ridge
the second one back
from the lighthouse
Who saved it? –
Women
of good wild stock
stood solid
before machines
They stopped bulldozers
flower
Women saved
a pretty thing: Truth
Her punctuation is interesting. Her capitalization changes the focus and intent.
To make Women the proper noun, in pages about nature which remains all uniform lower case, makes the spin of the piece even more boldly feminist.
Nature, flowers + Women (+ referenced action as savior) = Truth, not mere truths. The plants, and their lack of erasure from the landscape and development of farming or of a built environment permit a longevity. What was can still speak in natural forms giving its communication in nonverbal ways that express a broader truth than culture does.
The idea of ecological protection as sentimental is refuted to say, the plants are something bigger than their petals and what use their beauty is to us. It isn’t a paying forward to protect out Environment. It is a dignity and purity that is worth keeping for its own sake. It has underlying the idea of Man, as human influence, and in this case even the masculine sense of man as a destructive force to be stopped. At the same time there’s the sense of poles in conflict that humans are essential stewards, higher than nature, and humans are uppity, a broken species, lower and more transitory than the permanent Nature.
Later in Wintergreen Ridge p. 255-256
as we drive
towards cities
the change
in church architecture –
now it’s either a hood
for a roof
pulled down the ground
and below
or a factory-long body
crawled out from a rise
of a black dinosau-necked
blower-beaked
smokestack-
steeple
Murder in the Cathedral’s
proportions
Do we go to church
No use
discussing heaven
Hj’s father long ago
pronounced human affairs
gone to hell
It’s almost impossible to stop a quote as each stanza deftly hooks, twists, with enjambment pivots. It is paced steadily and yet pulls ahead.
The selective capitalizations run as a meta-poem. The last nature section of poem rising to a climax of Scent. Then in the section quoted above, the tone and gaze change, the sort of acrostic of upper case reading across three pages Do Murder Cathedral’s Do No Great God then as the tone becomes more hopeful, scene shifting from urban core to peripheral of city back to countryside we have a transition in popped out caps, to educate College Avenue, Ambrosia Ahead
Her opinion is clear, her comparisons and change of sound sharp from when she was describing the ideal pastoral life. She condemns the church and its emblems. The notion of god and industry are dinosaurs. SHe finger-points, or more shakes her verbal fist at their roles in exacerbating conflicts. The low smoking factories of church can also suggest humans destroying each other as well.
It buys into and sells the idea repackaged of woman as nurturer, the subtext idea that if only women were in charge of government, there would be no more war. [Which is nonsense to my mind as women are every bit as brutal.]
But for the thinking of the time, with her 40 plus years of writing anti-war appeals, males were prevalently the vocal agents of invasion, incursion, erasure of tranquility as the land was being pitted by bombs and trenches and unsettling social change. Her perspective is idealist yet are effective oratory of the feelings, invoking, provoking and coming out the genuine frustration of the times.
That is a sort of self-defeating blame game even as it is a call to action. It distracts from and overlooks the females in factories, those calling for war, those not barring the sons, fathers, husbands from entering the nationalistic idea of winning by violence.
Women were complicit as any male pacificist in the time. It is is an oversimplified reduction.
That is not to say I think it didactic or poor poetry in any way. It is no poetic exercise of words but a social communication on explicit and implicit levels of things that matter to the heart. To reconcile with head and to write with the exception and asterisks is to dilute the argument. Using a them is effective for persuasion, although a little ironic given the the binary notion of us vs. them is the root of war and conflict. What else can one do to persuade people to think of what is compassionate, rather than what is good for business, do what people say god says, or the justifications put in the mouth of god.
Without a sense of competition, only sitting in meadows, appreciating the air, how do we perceive without the opposite? How do we build a sustainable culture of balanced distribution of good so that we aren’t feeling a need to hoard, sit complacent, bored and blind, nor feel under constant threat of eroding chance for life. War is simple. Building new is simple. Erasure is simple. reconciling the complexities of what is, renovating, remembering all the different views of history, as history mounds up, that is far more complex.
p. 263 in Paean to Place,
Knew what lay /under leaf decay/and on pickerel weeds,
Pointedly at that line I realized how the specific is abstract if the writer and reader don’t share the common referent. If there is no shared tangible experience, all there is is vague notions and phonemes to carry the weight of meaning. It doesn’t matter how specific or broad you speak if there is no entry point for the readers from their lives.
Pickerel weed would be an exact sensation, shape, association with resonance from one could infer the climate and lay of land and season, unless one doesn’t have that lived experience. In that case it’s glossed over.
Without canoeing or lakeshore walks, it makes as much sense as a literal camel thru the eye of pin to an Inuk in 1800 Canada.
There is no reaching across some gaps by the connotation, denotation, association of words, only the visceral of shape of pause, the very vowels, the only chance to directly reach, short of expecting a reader to look up and research and go try to find the original experience. The physicality of words becomes key because their visible shape and their interpretation into phonemes is the extent of the idea conveyed.
The groundwork of understanding can start with words and proceed to experience.
If the first understanding is the experience, why would one need the words? It would be a reminiscing, a living for the past, perhaps, creating a phatic sort of connection of common points of reference. But it doesn’t furnish any new hooks for understanding. Does it seek to? Does it avoid startling with new hooks to hang understanding from? Is that a dynamic which is not taken into account as the writer writes to self and the other reader is to come to the open palm of poem some years later to pluck what they will or move on?
If reader and writer already completely understand each other, providing new new insight, puzzle piece, twist or word, what purpose does it serve? It may polish understanding, provide a new angle but is a sort of speaking to converted. If we both understand, reader and writer, the same thing, the same way, our exchange is only redundancies.
What good is that which does not push forward? It makes for a resting place. It makes for a lulling place, which is useful as a refuge in chaos. It provides a kinship especially useful if one is an isolate, were it not for the words that shows there is more humanity with the same or comparable vantage point. It allows one to close one’s eyes without being on guard for excitement, good or bad.
If she wishes to communicate her intent with device of rhythm and sound and connoted meaning, any of those can trip up the reader and block the message. If there is too much slant in bias and too little slant in rhyme, if there is meaning but the interlacing of sound is slack, or if there is a vice control to the extent that it fails to play or fails to relent in the lecture or is too constant, or inconstant, there can be a block. If the sense of sound is soft but the subtext is sharp, they can balance each other like sweetness to acid. If the sound is harsh and the meaning is vague, we would feel pushed away without understanding why we are not drawn. Unless that is to taste.
thanks much
thanks much, bro