The Marsh
I have been immensely influenced. And yet, this way of writing, the floaty suspended action of a phrase or word, took me a long time to arrive at. I've been reading Lorine Niedecker for twenty years. Methodologically I've been influenced — by her deep research and work with citation, the way poetry becomes a place one thinks through and with history's garbled record. And, thematically or topologically there's overlap, a folk or country metaphysics. Maybe it comes from our biographies. I was born and raised in south central Wisconsin, too. My grandfather read Hoard's Dairyman during the years — and long after — Niedecker worked as a copyeditor and proofreader there. She wasn't that much older than my grandparents, in fact. My great uncles and aunts. But, perhaps for these reasons I didn't feel she was important — to poetry, yes, to my reading and enjoyment of it, and the idea that I, though I came from nowhere, could still join a tradition. But, for a long time I didn't think she was there, in my writing. Yet I'm enormously influenced. Above all, by a kind of behavior — not the surface effects but her attitudes toward the making of poems are what I move toward and try to get next to and understand. In a letter to a friend, she writes: "The basis is direct and clear — what has been seen or heard—but something gets in, overlays all that to make a state of consciousness . . . . "1
What LN has taught me, through the decades of our acquaintance, is how necessary to poetry is the stubborn, sedulous wait for that "something" to arise and get in.
Just ising with the floral pattern in a westerly window here
Black fronds on the deepening blue our forward motion
into loss of course misrepresents gain
And selfish oh the picture is there
Absorbing that Which is the deepest chord
Funneling it away that's what it's for
Then in a clearish, peeish dribble—
Which is the deepest chord
Most worth upon our touching for?
Heading straight into the dry part of the spell
Without hurting anyone I have a mood disorder
and my dog helps me The burning agony
of childhood, adolescence
I was lost at sea and my dog found me
The simple agony of aging and death
The irritating personal flaws
or menace inherent in certain invitations
I was sad my dog ignored me
Noisy buzzy night with your crotchets it has been
It has been forever since I wanted anything
experimental
When
You're 90, 95 and living in the woods
Where fate waits
It's never been solved
When a person in the middle
Of knowledge, isms, supper
Assembles their proclivities
Moving from shelter to shelter, apologizing
There's snow on the ground, a caper across the blend
When I speak of themes lodged at the foot
In the bank, on the rocks—
And I think of the work
What I thought it might one day "do"
I think when did I think that?
Now I've lost some time in the early 2010s
Its heroic background stained with info, stars, water, and greed
Philosophical parables about going to the store
"I have exposed myself to the judgement of others"
Pools of wax within time's picture
Don't fucking tell me what to do
When considering an Aristotelian telos to life
I was a child at the lip of the canyon
When reason counsels something like—stay close to your defect
My friend fell from a tree, into soft mud
She was received
These concepts are emotional
Do not be afraid
And when this vexes our ambition
Attempt attempt attempt
Different zones of your mind offer resources, have you ever
Been offered a resource? That you need
It's fantastic
The alibis and asterisks, a little bit of screen
Prosperities and privileges and want
In that droplet when we were alive
Keep going + believe = "advice"
Take a seat at the waltz
Tend to the vulnerable and be consistent
Pull the scapula down your back
You have wings that you need to open
It's a muscular effort but good for you
And for the many who ask will suffering ever end
In the Italian way you can say me I mine
A saint might call the long stretches
Habit or god or error
The veins
Of "the body" I put my nose in it
Into the sensitive essay of nerves
When everyone wants to deliver utopian energies
At the top of the driveway the author is given a halo
Medula oblongata
The pubes
To write of the dream having been to the place
The mortals who live on busy routes behind the golf course
Specifics, specifics
No substitute for the internet
The constellations scoring all our regard
Grids and rings beyond the encircling
This sick rock the maven crooned
I feel like geniuses advancing their explanations
Deliver strong deceptions
Imitating the worldly scramble
Is this happening for a reason?
When teenagers are energized by thoughts of their enemies
When today is the day to organize the liberal poem of life
I like the humanness of my feeble mind, the inclusiveness
Its weakness leant
Gizmos of man to remind us folly is real
And allowed to wind down, to waste the day
The crappy light
In that extra hour unsocial and getting wasted
Allowed to be
"A theorist of the personality"
When a child tore at their face
An adult was getting their shit together
When I saw an orchard, I saw a dog
We had shifted to the aftermath
With some cold gutted guttering feature
And a stack of notebooks
There's always some weird way to divest
Hannah Brooks-Motl is the author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), and Earth (2019). Her poems and essays have appeared in the Best American Experimental Writing, the Cambridge Literary Review, the Chicago Review, Modernism/modernity, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other places. She lives in western Massachusetts.
- Letter to Gail Roub, 1967, quoted in Margot Peters, Lorine Niedecker: A Poet's Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 219.[⤒]
