Comments on Lorine Niedecker Poems

We asked for comments on two poems by Lorine Niedecker for our first issue. The responses to "Club 26" were interesting,informative, sometimes downright brilliant, and we share them on the right. If you'd like to add to the comments here, please do! Just email us, editors (at) versewisconsin (dot) org, and we will continue to post responses to the poems, as well as to the comments on them.

Paul

when the leaves

fall

from their stems

that lie thick

on the walk

in the light

of the full note

the moon

playing

to leaves

when they leave

the little

thin things

Paul

Club 26

Our talk, our books
riled the shore like bullheads
at the roots of the luscious
large water lily

Then we entered the lily
built white on a red carpet

the circular quiet
cool bar

glass stems to caress

We stayed till the stamens trembled

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I absolutely love the poem "Club 26." It is a sexy, and most personal read. I was amazed at the beauty of her words, and the ease with which she opened up to the reader. That's the best way for me to describe her style.

—Lisa Zimmerman
(Lisa Zimmerman is an antiques dealer, book collector, and poet. She lives and writes in the Northwoods.)

I cannot pretend to really understand Lorine's poetry, but I get impressions from each poem. They are a part of the world I live in, and she died at exactly my age now, so I'm starting to feel more of what she felt.

I knew Lorine fleeingly as a quiet lady who walked often in Fort Atkinson where I was also walking from 1965-1969. I can remember speaking with her only once at Miss Grunner's Bookstore that was located on the Rock River at the side of the Main Street bridge.

CLUB 26—A Red carpet entry up the cement stairway, big-book menu, a curved bar with lighting around the complete curve. It was a comfortable place of refuge for an older crowd. Large windows in the dining room overlooked a green back lawn with mature trees and a park-like view. It was a friendly place we went for special occasions.

—Janice Redford, Cambridge, WI
(Redford is a Madison native and always loved being by water, as Lake Mendota was in the back yard view (across the marsh). Lorine spoke/wrote to her love of nature. She currently lives on high ground above the Koshkonong Creek Valley.)

Before the reader knows any better, Niedecker's poems can appear spare, almost too simple, as though there are not enough words to even qualify as poetry; yet, it's not long before the reader is convinced that the words do constitute, by their wit, their intelligence, and their sound, a certain poetry, and that this is no thin soup, but rich, condensed stock. "I learned / to sit at desk / and condense" as Niedecker writes elsewhere.

Sometimes a line is a little sing-song ("Paul when the leaves fall" is one example) though this is an infrequent complaint. More often there's pleasure and surprise, as in "Club 26," where Niedecker's sound-labor loads the first lines with liquid ''l''s, the middle of the poem with many hard "k" sounds, the end with a texture of "t"s and "st"s. An interesting progression, I'm not certain what it adds to the meaning of the poem, but it's certainly interesting to the ear and hard to ignore.

I find little to comment upon in 'Paul' except for the wonderful slight-of-hand swap of moon and whole note. However, this tendency toward the surreal literally blossoms in the other poem, 'Club 26,' where poets are first bullheads, and then some kind of pollinator. Certainly Niedecker seems to have been aware of water lilies cloistering their pollinators by closing their blooms after midnight. I admire both bullheads and water lilies, and to have them together in a single poem is a delight, and to have them made vehicles for a literary visit, for staying up late, and for sex, well, that's even better. And all this riled water, the pure lily rising out of it, reminds me, happily, of Pablo Neruda's call for an impure poetry.

—Scott King
(Scott King is the founder and editor of Red Dragonfly Press, press-in-residence at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota, as well as a poet and translator.)

These days, when I teach poetry, one of my goals is to get students to read it for structure. With that in mind, I sat down with "Club 26" the other night and jotted down the following:

Reading Lorine Niedecker’s poem “Club 26,” I’m reminded again of the descriptive-meditative poetic structure in all its simplicity and beauty.

The poem’s trigger is a description of the barest of scenes—“Our talk, our books/ riled the shore”—that turns quickly, via metaphor, to a stunning, erotic interiority: “like bullheads /at the roots of the luscious / large water lily.”

From here, the poem’s meditation charts a transforming imagination, merging the poem’s interiority (“Then we entered the lily”) with a glamorous exterior (“built white on a red carpet / the circular quite / the cool bar”). It is a scene of cool sophistication, and it reminds us, in case we’ve forgotten, that for all her Midwestern rootedness, Lorine Neidecker was a language-poetry diva ahead of her time.

The surprise this poem’s structure generates is revealed in how Niedecker so thoroughly and seamlessly disjoints time, entering from the shore into the metaphor of the bullheads at the roots of the lily, then stepping from there to the red carpet. The sheer will and invention of this gesture should shock us. This meditation-via-metaphor drives the poem through its time-warp with an irresolute quality, imbuing the experience with a powerful ambiguity. Surely these are the sentiments of a love poem, yet it is decidedly un-sentimental.

In the tradition of the descriptive-meditative structure, the poem’s ambiguity is made significantly more intense as it re-describes a new scene: the doubling of “glass stems” and “stamens” (what a beautiful echoing of language) with that last word: “trembled.” Here, we come to understand finally what it is the poem has enacted: the “trembled” act of coupling the imagination and memory, and the “trembled” meaning of that remembering. This intense discourse between form and content reminds me that Lorine Neidecker still has much to teach us about how a poem works.

—Matthew Guenette
(author of Sudden Anthem, winner of the 2007 American Poetry Journal Book Prize from Dream Horse Press)

I’m fascinated by Niedecker’s use of sound married to image in these poems, and her masterful command of sound and diction to convey meaning. Both poems describe sounds—leaves falling in “Paul” and the sounds of conversation, the shore, and bar noise in “Club 26.” As Scott King notes, there’s a progression from “l” and “k” to “t” and “st” sounds in the poem. But also note the sudden, hushed “s” sounds on entering the lily at both the beginning and at the ends of the words: “circular,” “glass,” “caress.” The sounds themselves enact the very movement she describes: from the clattery noise that “riled the shore” to that “circular quiet” which culminates in trembling. The progression of a conversation or of sex or of poetry? perhaps “Club 26” is describing all three.

I’m also fascinated by Niedecker’s diction in these two poems—the predominance of single-syllable words, almost exclusive in “Paul,” and very self-consciously in “Club 26,” where carefully chosen Latinate words “luscious,” “circular,” “entered,” “caress,” “stamen,” and “trembled” work together to convey the sexual connotations of the poem—try replacing them in your mind with short, Anglo-Saxon words, and think of how that would change the meaning of the poem! The brilliant pairing of stayed/stamen at the end of the poem is an amazing way to draw our attention to the deliberate back and forth between the Anglo-Saxon and Latinate registers of the poem. Note as well how the end sound of “trembled” takes us back to “bull” in “bullhead” at the poem’s beginning. Both poems are incredible examples of poetic craft.

—Wendy Vardaman,
(co-editor, Verse Wisconsin)