letters

old pieces, from an old piece of work, found and uncovered...


dear elle,
you told me a secret. you took your hat off. ask me.


dear elle,
i enjoy cheesy love songs. particularly those from 1979. to someone i mentioned your state of affairs. i sleep teal. it has been called a hard habit. the stucco in your voice signals a spot of closure. the end of a sentence. your knee covering spit. i tell you cover me up. history is not accurate. tame your wild vocals.


dear elle,
syntactical illusion. carry on a cup of wasting over into. push over a useless vocabulary. tell me, do you do the dew? in what state as of moment? the last sparks are dim and flaring lost. dead animals caught and choking into skeleton. overheard intimate language.

pound – zukofsky – niedecker… a reading

niedecker:

My friend tree
I sawed you down
but I must attend
an older friend
the sun


pound:
1. direct treatment of the thing
2. to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation
3. to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase

pound:
an ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time

niedecker:

Well, spring overflows the land,
floods floor, pump, wash machine
of the woman moored to this low shore by deafness.
…
pound:
it is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works

pound:
use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something


niedecker:
…
you water my worms
you patch my boot
with your mending kit
nothing in it
but my hand
pound:
do in fear of abstractions

pound:
use no ornament or good ornament

niedecker:
…
I worked the print shop
right down among em
the folk from whom all poetry flows
and dreadfully much else
…
What would they say if they knew
I sit for two months on six lines
of poetry?

pound:
there is in the best verse a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer

pound:
the experimental demonstrations of one man may save the time of many

niedecker:

Hear
where her snow-grave is
the You
ah you
of mourning doves

pound:
it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. we will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it. I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither

niedecker:

How white the gulls
in grey weather
Soon April
the little
yellows

zukofsky:
the lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus
that which is aimed at
desire for what is objectively perfect
inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars

niedecker:

Popcorn-can cover
screwed to the wall
over a hole
so the cold
can’t mouse in

zukofsky:
that historic and contemporary particulars may mean a thing or things as well as an event or a chain of events

niedecker:

Lights, lifts
parts nicely opposed
this white
lice lithe
pink bird

zukofsky:
this rested totality may be called objectification


niedecker:

July, waxwings
on the berries
have dyed red
the dead
branch

zukofsky:
the implications are that a critic began as a poet, and that as a poet he had implicitly to be a critic

niedecker:

I’ve been away from poetry
many months

and now I must rake leaves
with nothing blowing

between your house
and mine

zukofsky:
a poem as an object…experienced…perfect rest…theologically perhaps… like the ineffable…the context…dealing with a world outside, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars…desire for what is objectively perfect…context based on a world…this object in process…the poem as a job…

niedecker:

My life is hung up
in the flood
a wave-blurred
portrait

Don’t fall in love
with this face—
it no longer exists
in water
we cannot fish

zukofsky:
a context associated with ‘musical’ shape

niedecker:

Now in one year
a book published
and plumbing—
took a lifetime
to weep
a deep
trickle

zukofsky:
intention must be distinguished from accomplishment which resolves the complexity of detail into a single object

niedecker:
…
We stayed till the stamens trembled

zukofsky:
(quotes contemporary American poet) a machine made of words


niedecker:
…
Leave me the land
Scratch out: the land

May prose and property both die out
and leave me peace




sources:
Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect”
Louis Zukofsky, “An Objective” and “A Statement for Poetry”
Lorine Niedecker, The Granite Pail, Ed. Cid Corman, 1996