Waxing Poetic: Lorine Niedecker

     "The Brontes had their moors, I have my marshes," Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970) wrote of flood-prone Black Hawk Island in Wisconsin where she lived for most of her life.  With the exception of a brief time in New York City in her youth and a move to Milwaukee toward the end of her life, Niedecker spent her days living, working, and writing along the banks of her native fishing community.  She chose to remain there, supporting herself at times as a proofreader, a cleaning woman, and a librarian, living on the edge of poverty and writing poetry when she could.

     Her life by the water couldn't have been farther from the world of avant-garde poetry in which she also moved.  Niedecker is one of the most important poets of her generation and an essential member of the Objectivist circle.  Her work attracted high praise from her peers such as William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, and she exchanged letters with them.  Like the school of Objectivism, Niedecker treated the poem as an object all to itself, a structure which, in whole, could communicate with precision.

     I had never read any of her poetry until recently.  This brief untitled poem caught my attention.  It say so little and so much at the same time.

I knew a clean man
but he was not for me.
Now I sew green aprons
over covered seats.  He

wades the muddy water fishing,
falls in, dries his last pay check
in the sun, smooths it out
in Leaves of Grass.  He's
the one for me.