The Marsh
There's material in Niedecker's body of work from which anybody could learn: concision, close observation, humility before objects of study — people — who change, and surprise us, and let us down, and sometimes abuse us, and sometimes love us, and sometimes — to our befuddlement — do all those things at once — the way the snow protects the leaves before they go. I'd like to learn more from her (and from Ursula K. Le Guin, too) about patience, about humility, about letting the process be the process and following up on it rather than forcing things. I'd like to yell (though she never yells) about her to people who neglect the Upper Midwest or to people who don't understand why the poetry world needs poetry reviewers who read all the slush that comes in the door. (Sometimes I tell skeptics that the next Ezra Pound will surely promote himself: a reviewer's job is to find the next Niedecker — and by the way, it's Allan Peterson). That said, if you want to know what I as a poetry writer (not a reviewer or critic) have learned most from Niedecker, it's probably rhyme. How to rhyme. When to rhyme. And how to make rhyme something braided into the language of a poem, not an overlay or a squared-off requirement. It's something she's into most often in New Goose. But it keeps on, now and then, throughout her work. I hope I've got some of that rhyme in restraint, that sonorous unpredictability, in "The Taking Trees," as in other poems from my last two books. But of course I don't know: about your own poems you never know. Hers I know.
Horoscope
New Hope, PA, July 2020
The goats we named (of course)
for teenage superheroes
couldn't control themselves.
Roberto, his nose raised, wet,
protruding between the slats
of the bulging, aging fence,
just wanted to eat his fill.
All Capricorns are stubborn,
addicted to following rules.
Dani would rein him in,
or would have, if she could,
but she wore a collar herself,
stitched red, orange and a faded
copper to match her ears.
Aquarius carries water
for all her friends. You can trust her.
Sam, the tallest by far,
white-blond around the horns,
with his asymmetrical smile,
kept his chin so far up
he couldn't help butting heads
(the way goats do) with the posts
or with the heels of our hands,
extended to feed him oats.
Scorpio won't be tamed
and always tells the truth.
Illyana, the smallest, held back.
The black-and-white ovals laid out
across her bony back
were armor; were bold star-signs
in which no one believed—
no one except for her.
You too, they seemed to say,
will trust your horoscope,
until it brings bad news.
Outside—far, far outside—
we had masks, but no vaccine,
and nowhere we wanted to go.
Flat clouds slid overhead,
delivering welcome shade
to Lambertville, Belvidere,
the Delaware Water Gap.
We gave the other three,
who stuck together, treats
like bits of cheese, French fries
and bread with mayonnaise,
brought out in a plastic urn.
Illyana chewed her blade
of bottlebrush grass, and watched
us gather at the fence,
almost ready to take her turn.
The Taking Trees
Like poplars they crack dramatically open when frozen
They burn to renew
like the sharp-scented pine
They send their asymmetrical
spinning seeds
into the blackening furrows of open fields
tire grooves hoofprints the gradual edges of streams
Like maples they shade
the next generation like oaks they thrive in shade
Unlike us they give their arrant children
to each according to their needs
Their rootlets hold one another in line
No martyrs they send us out into scrub to build
Or gather renewable materials
Daily for almost a century they
say without knowing it's true
We too will do fine
Tiamat
You don't know the whole story.
When the dirt-scored red Honda Accord
pulled out of its spot in front of us,
its hatchback was a chasm, a rectangle
of negative space,
an open-jawed dragon's mouth flapping, enough
to swallow the cares of the world. And yet the driver
saw nothing odd, and veered
into the stop-and-go traffic of Fellsway West.
We honked, and we honked, and then nothing
and then something: the driver, long skirt wrapping
around her, bent against the nighttime rain,
got out and slammed the hatch and got back in.
The halo of rain ahead
turned yellow, then red,
by which time the dude in the Budget Rental truck
careening up behind her, displacing
acres of puddles at speed, had stopped just short.
"You're blocking the intersection! Learn to drive,
fucker!" I think he really had no idea.
I wanted to get out and yell, I imagined myself
banging at his closing window, soaked, distraught
but righteous, and that wouldn't do anything
except get me hit by the next car along
once the light changed, but that's
what poetry is: you don't know the whole story,
though the dragon has something to communicate,
something terribly urgent and silly
about the fate of the visible world, about rain
and how it was all a misunderstanding:
new heaven and earth could arise, right under your feet,
your brake and gas pedals, your wet resilient wheels
and wings and fins and spurs and everything,
and somebody tries to tell you, and you roll away.
Stephanie Burt (@accommodatingly) is Professor of English at Harvard University and the author of several previous books of poetry and literary criticism, among them Advice from the Lights, Belmont and Close Calls with Nonsense, as well as The Poem Is You.
