LORINE NIEDECKER FESTIVAL 2015 ~

NEW! LORINE NIEDECKER ~

A Cooking Book

  Lorine Niedecker

Longhouse 2015

72 pages, perfect bound, 5.5 x 6.25 inches

ISBN 978-1-929048-29-8 

This booklet was sent as a Christmas Gift from

Lorine Niedecker to Maude Hartel in December 1964.

It was in Gail Roub's possession as of August 1991.

In 1992 Lorine Niedecker's then Literary Executor Cid Corman

passed the manuscript over to Longhouse who published

A Cooking Book for the Winter Solstice of that same year.

For Winter Solstice 2014 Longhouse refurbished & reprinted

A Cooking Book in a brand new edition with the original edition

now out of print. These poems were not included in the

Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works (University of California)

 edited by Jenny Penberthy.

Longhouse is more than happy to keep this little gem available for

new & old readers.

_____________________

$15

U.S. addresses ~ order here through Paypal
shipping is free

International shipping: $10

http://longhousepoetryandpublishers.blogspot.com/2015/01/new-cid-corman-of-volume-4-5.html

SWITCHBOARD GIRL ~ Lorine Niedecker

Lorine and Henry Niedecker

SWITCHBOARD GIRL

I divined this comedy, Dante, before I went in. But I had to have a job. "Like one who has imperfect vision, we the things which are remote from us." O brother, we saw tho the eyes were shot. We had light if not love. We had business.

Nystagmus ("The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling"), the searching movement, combined with 80% vision. You'll have to use a magnifying glass, we can't give you glasses to reach print. Good-bye to proof reading. Good-bye to a living. No! That low, rangy, glass-walled office and plant in the Frank Lloyd Wright setting, clean-mowed acres, tulips, petunias, evergreens—I would apply there. Not literature but light fixtures and pressure cookers. Out of daylight into Wade Light.

I was the September dandelion—forty, female—seeking a place among the young fluorescent petunias. I keep cropping up in the world's backyards while here in America, on all sides they shear civilization back to the seventeen-year-old girl, not yet young shall we say.

I entered the window-walled office of personnel. Or was it a corner of a little theatre? What would the director be like? A properly placed man may expand his influence over the whole of your sight. We met ideally, as strangers do, without prejudice, without violence . . . courteous before the guessed-at depth. All art between us. Will he help me? He is not usual. He moves as in a dance to be considerate. As if to speak, against the room's outdoor backdrop, of Renoir? Of Einstein? Is he the master economist with a sense of the relative value of things? The artist with a sense of needing fewer things? The political observer with a knowledge of electronics? What does he know really, sweetly, by touch?

He said, "You read."

Beethoven: "It is impossible to say to people, "I am deaf." But I said it: I have an eye handicap.

"I wonder if you should . . . we have a switchboard opening. You might try it."

I went in. Lights, polished glass, blond satin finished desks, glossy haired and bald-headed efficiency. Shine. Lamps to be produced. Lamps to be sold. The antique sweatshop base with a new shine. You'll never have to polish this brass, a lacquering process, won't tarnish. This is the lust that will never rust.

The shade by the door, the grey parchment face, cracked in a half smile. Shall I appear alive or let myself be carried along? I suppose man is, the most sensitive physical part of him, an electrical apparatus, switches, wires, etc. . . .How much do I give to Wade lamps? It takes 1028 human bodies to build a star. Purely business.

The girl at the switchboard shouted, "Come in—if you can—it's my birthday, you know. Once a year and at Christmas this happens—nylons, table lamps, candy, help yourself. The bosses, the old honeypots, must like me a little bit, anyhow. Sit down. Let me tell you what goes. They're all good enough guys, family men, church, golf, they're after the business, they'll lay on you, of course."

You see in a place of this kind, she said, the switchboard girl is one of their outlets. They do a great deal of their sweating thru you. You'll make the contact and in haste, also they relax thru you. You're a part of it when their bags are full and you jazz 'em when they're down.

"Get me the Howard Hotel, a single."

"Good, I like to sleep close."

That was Mendau, the burnt-out fuse in the beautiful suit who still thinks he's got something to sell.

"Give me Philadelphia." Give me Europe. I'm waiting, operator, for the Paris pick-up. I'm on wartime Montparnasse, gas mask, phosphorescent heels, illuminated brooch. "What's that?" What does it look like? There they call it what it is.

The Japs: We had neither hens nor eggs. We went requisitioning. A miserable village. On the way back we began to look for Chinese girls.

They don't make 'em as sensitive as geiger counters.

"Goddamit what the hell happened to that call to Lethal Steel? Sleeping at the switchboard?"

"I reported to you, sir, that Dan Blaine will talk."

"Christ if you can't get anybody but Dead-End Daniel—"

"What was the name they wanted?" Somebody by the name of Christ.

Please pass the blood. Human materiel is obsolescing.

As for the work itself, she plays an intricate chess. You gamble with the red and the white and the green, without benefit of spa.

I lost. "No natural aptitude."

Dante? Yes, go ahead.

        END

__________________

from ND 13
New Directions in Prose & Poetry
edited by James Laughlin
1951

Lorine Niedecker

http://www.lorineniedecker.org/


http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/lorine-niedecker

WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND ~

We used to call them "Woodburners"
 meaning not to burn (hardly)

 but burn with & within and stay warm by. . .

like sugar maple, beech, oak, yellow birch, ash


BOOKS! MUSIC! FILM!
 

________________________________________

Clifford Burke. Dream Confluence, Love Poems for Gibi 

 Desert Rose Press

John Currin

Gagosian Gallery

Dancing Around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp

edited by Basualdo and Battle

Yale

 

Lydia Davis and Eliot Weinberger, Two American Scenes

New Directions 

Susan Howe, Sorting Facts: Or, 19 Ways of Looking at Maker, 

New Directions Poetry Pamphlet # 3

A Thousand Thousand Fireflies Never Equal Zero
George Kalamaras, Omowale-Ketu Oladuwa, Michael F. Patterson

Midnight Lamp Records

Sylvia Legris, Pneumatic Antiphonal

New Directions

Rebecca Lepkoff photographs, Life on the Lower East Side. 1937-1950. 

Peter E. Dans and Suzanne Wasserman

Bernadette Mayer. The Helens of Troy, NY. 

New Directions 

Lorine Niedecker, Lake Superior 

 Lorine Niedecker’s Poem and Journal, Along with Other Sources, Documents and Readings Wave Books 

Octavio Paz, The Poems of Octavio Paz

 Edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger

 New Directions

once in vermont films

film © bob arnold

CHEERS! ~

Lorine Niedecker

from The Granite Pail
(Gnomon Books; North Point Press)

Back Road Chalkie

photo © bob arnold

LORINE NIEDECKER ~

It's ready!



"The idea for this chapbook, a facsimile edition of the handmade book Lorine Niedecker sent to Cid Corman in 1964, cropped up several years ago."



Homemade PoemsLorine Niedecker
John Harkey, Editor
Series 3, Number 2, Spring 2012
The Center for the Humanities
The Graduate Center
The City University of New York

Limited edition.

Use Paypal? Total including s/h for U.S. orders $33.95

Or, this may be purchased from Longhouse
inquire here ~

poetry@sover.net



Visit my previous "Homemade Poems" posting & film





Lorine with her father Henry Niedecker

HOMEMADE POEMS ~

LORINE NIEDECKER

"In 1963, Lorine Niedecker married Al Millen, a house painter. The marriage surprised several of her friends, but it gave Niedecker steady companionship from day to day and allowed her to leave her cleaning job at the hospital and devote herself more fully to writing. In October of 1964, having no book prospects on the horizon for the poems she'd written during the first year of her marriage, Niedecker took action and assembled her own—a book of thirty poems inscribed into the pages of a dime-store sketch pad, whose front and back she had 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 and her name inscribed on the cover, to her friend (Cid) Corman, who was living in Japan at the time. A few months later, she constructed two more renditions of the book, which she sent to poet Louis Zukofsky in New York and Jonathan Williams, founder of the seminal Jargon Press. The titles of these latter two books were transformed from Homemade Poems to Handmade Poems.


By turns, the small poems in this three-edition self-publication move through a sprawling array of modes. Niedecker makes room here for — to name only the several categories that spring to mind — deft, vivid details from daily life; excerpts of intimate colloquial speech; sober evocations of global violence; abstracted sound-mosaics; spare "portraits" of historical figures; and found poems pulled from friends' letters (Ian Hamilton Finlay and Louis Zukofsky, "LZ")."


. . .


"My zeal for textual knowledge in this case drove me to seek out Homemade Poems in the New York Public Library's Berg Collection of English and American Literature, where the book is held as part of Cid Corman's papers. Encountering the book that day — spending time reading its poems in just the form Niedecker had so deliberately inscribed and arranged then — immediately stirred in me a conviction that the textural production itself, in some form or version, deserved a much wider readership, a life outside of the archive."


. . .


"As editor for this project, my central objective has been to create an accurate, commensurate reading edition of Homemade Poems that allows the work to be experienced roughly as Niedecker first gave to it. However well poetry is designed and printed, anthologies of all kinds necessarily have a way of superseding or drowning out the sort of reading experience described above. The very job of any massive, unified anthology is to subsume the smaller, heterogeneous works that are fed into it. In a case like Homemade Poems, this effect is even more pronounced: its singular materiality and text-deployment set it utterly apart from any sort of printed, standardized, mass-produced version."

sharing excerpts from the editor John Harkey's "Usable Dimensions: An Afterword", a pamphlet insert to Homemade Poems.

Some time soon Homemade Poems will be available from
"The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative"
The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10016-4309.



And from us here at Longhouse


Longhouse has also published: Lorine Niedecker, A Cooking Book
another of Lorine Niedecker's rare handmade books
coordinated and prepared by Cid Corman & Bob Arnold ~

link to our Lorine Niedecker publications here

film © susan & bob arnold

LORINE ~

University of Wisconsin Press
uwpress.wisc.edu

"My concern for and with LN will be as long as my life. Her style was neat, unaggressive without being timid or diffident. She knew what she felt and what she wanted, but she would not impose either feeling or desire on others.

Her poems are often "literary"; that is, related to her reading — but they never are merely intellectual or abstract. You can feel her delight in the experience of others and especially the language in which experience have been couched and realized. She has an exquisite ear for detail. Every word is lived. You can feel her in them. She culls them. This is provender.

She had ample cause to be selfpitying and bitter, but her letters to me show no trace of either qualification. Her complaints, when they occur, and only rarely do they occur, are clearly hard wrung and never in excess of provocation. She is unusually well-balanced in her judgements and perspicacious and particular. She is both unpredictable and characteristic. She has learned from others, but projects her own music and her own realizations. There is no sense of complacency.

She is utterly without moralizing. She is never petty. Her warmth of relation to living and dead is pervasive. It is impossible not to love her. I never saw her handwriting — with its immaculate clear modest script — without at once feeling a twinge of pleasure — at whatever she has to say. I always anticipated some shared delight, or pain — which is never unalloyed. She didn't oversimplify, but she never merely decorated. Her haiku-like brief poems are as fine as any short poems of our or any time. . . .

She is never mystical and yet one feels a certain awe at times, a profound giveness to the mysteries. Most often she reverts to some natural relation, to water or work or plants or animals or acquaintances, books and news, the sense of locality.

It aches me yet — her absence. . . .Poetry was her life and her life remains for us as poetry — thanks to her magnanimous gift."

~ from a letter, Cid Corman to Gail Roub

Lorine at the door

Once one becomes one with the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, there are no comparisons — no Emily Dickinson, no Marianne Moore, no H.D. Poets don't like to be compared. And it's becoming rather silly having to tolerate Lorine gaining an audience by forever comparing her to Emily Dickinson. In fact, the power of both was their greater unknown during their lifetimes and just watching a public come to their doors and be overwhelmed.


Poetry is all about being overwhelmed. When you are, go with it. Trust it.


Margot Peters' moving biography of Lorine Niedecker is a tremendous boost to the glory of Lorine Niedecker. There will be quibbles about the portrait from some, and that's okay and in some cases justified — Niedecker research is still a widely exploratory search into the background and earth of this poet. A poet who unlike most poets didn't grow out of an academic background and following, or even out of strictly being a poet. Like Thoreau, and here the comparison I believe is ideal, it was "to live at home like a traveler" as HDT professed and which they both did, about a century apart in time. Like Thoreau and unlike most poets, Lorine Niedecker grew out of the earth of her own private reading and the earth itself — that river swum shoreline of Blackhawk Island in Wisconsin, and except for a cereal bowl of poets as her close readers (and what poets! : Williams, Zukofsky, Bunting, Rakosi, Finlay, Creeley, Corman, J. Williams) she was almost forever alone and unknown.


The Peters' biography doesn't even begin to scratch the rural hardship and life of where Lorine Niedecker was raised, and this will be crucial one day for someone to delve into and come up good and sweet smelly; instead the portrait glides along as a proper introduction through the various stages of the poet's life and writing. And on the sticky subject and background of one Louis Zukofsky, Peters does quite well. The obstacles for privacy in the Zukofsky family tree can be daunting.


Although when you read Cid Corman's words above — and no one knew Lorine Niedecker as so alive as poet and person than Corman (he was the only one with the moxie to get her to record her poems onto a homemade tape) — I was stunned when I read Cid's letter (above) on page 257-258 of the biography, only to be followed by Peters' personal announcement on page 258: "Appreciators though they were, Corman, Bunting, and Jonathan Williams tended to underestimate her poems as subtle, frail blossoms. Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams knew better." Better? Corman and Jonathan Williams staked decades of their personal lives (probably not a penny earned) broadcasting Niedecker's poems to the four winds with the utmost care. They personally Johnny Appleseeded this poet's life, work and legacy while she was alive and long after she was gone (1970); and on top of that, they nurtured a whole next generation of poets and readers into her arms. And she was ready for them. You can make up your own minds just how much of a saint Mr. Zukofsky was to Lorine Niedecker. She loved him, and I prefer Lorine Niedecker to speak for herself.


I can imagine a poet someday coming to Lorine Niedecker the same way Genevieve Taggard held Emily Dickinson when she wrote her singular biography. As if she had the ability to speak before, during, and after the life of the poet. A haunting and forgotten book.


By page 250 and 251 of Margot Peters' biography of Lorine Niedecker I had tears in my eyes. Not saccharine, just the truth. Partly due to the aviation skills of the biographer bringing this bird depth flight of a poet down for a landing, and of course the bird herself.

~BA


If I could float my tentacles / through the deep . . . / pulsate an invisible glow







&


http://www.lorineniedecker.org/index.cfm





poetryfoundation.org

100,000 POETS, PLUS 4 ~

celebrating with poets world wide an oral presentation with and for others, or even a river

Once In Vermont
film © bob arnold

LORINE NIEDECKER ~ PAINTINGS

We lost Lorine Faith Niedecker just shy of 40 years ago today
(May 12, 1903-Dec 31, 1970).

She was struck by a cerebral hemorrhage. Her last words may have been, "Al I don't know what's the matter." Two weeks earlier she had written her close friend, publisher, and literary executor Cid Corman, "I think lines of poetry that I might use-all day long and even in the night."

Everyone knows, but maybe not you, that Lorine was born on Black Hawk Island in Wisconsin and spent a great deal of her life there; and if you don't know about any of this, be-welcome into the life of an extremely gifted American poet, daughter, wife, and good neighbor.

Lorine Niedecker's first book of poems was titled New Goose, published right after WW2. And the last sighting we have of Lorine was sometime in the early 70s when her second husband, Al Millen (married 1963) after her death, was burning her papers because she asked him to.

Fortunately a good deal had already been collected and saved by all sorts of guardian angels over the years like Cid Corman, Jonathan Williams, Ian Hamilton Finlay and a wondrous Gail Roub. Roub preserved and donated a good many LN treasures to the Hoard Historical Museum in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin and this is where I've drawn these three paintings of Lorine's, through the kind hands of both Kori Oberle, Director of the Hoard Museum and Ann Engelman, President of the Friends of Lorine Niedecker,
who simply continue the love affair (it is!) for Lorine.

Lorine Niedecker is a rootin-tootin' stand by herself independent wonder from the American soil. In her twenties she changed the spelling of her name from the family original "Neidecker", to Niedecker, and she's been changing things ever since.



Anything with the name Niedecker attached is a pleasure to read.



New wayfarers just coming in may wish to start here:


Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works, ed Jenny Penberthy. (U Cal). not quite a "collected" - it misses, just for starters, the little book we published at Longhouse of one of Lorine's private notebooks, A Cooking Book. But nobody's perfect. This collection remains a gemstone.


A crystallized Niedecker selected poems by Cid Corman (ed.): The Granite Pail (Gnomon).


A Cooking Book (Longhouse), basically 'conversations' (poems/recipes) with husband Al from Lorine poem-to-poem about what she is cookin' up in the house and home. It also shows a fine example of the small and intimate notebook style books Lorine handcrafted herself and gave away to friends.


Between Your House and Mine, the letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman 1960-1970 (Duke).


Origin, Fourth Series No. 16, featuring Lorine Niedecker (Origin 1981).


The reprint of New Goose (Rumor Books ), sparkling in the hand.


Elizabeth Willis (ed.) Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Politics of Place


Gloria Frym: Lorine Niedecker's Plain (Language), Jacket 38


The biography in-the-works by Margot Peters!


Cathy Cook's film: Immortal Cupboard, In Search of Lorine Niedecker


Origin, sixth series (complete) ed. Bob Arnold on CD, 1700 pages
including work by Niedecker, Corman, Penberthy, Frym & many more

The Hoard Historical Museum
www.hoardmuseum.org

The Dwight Foster Public Library

http://www.fortlibrary.org/


The Friends of Lorine Niedecker / The Solitary Plover
newsletter@lorineniedecker.org.

SEE Lorine Niedecker Titles at Longhouse

The three paintings by Lorine Niedecker shown here are almost all new to the world ~



(please click onto each to make larger)
















Perhaps the paintings were all done in 1965 or thereabouts. It's pleasing to think of LN painting in her early 60s.
Don't you just want to get into that little red boat?