Here’s a spur-of-the-moment post with a few links that I’ve been saving up since I last did one of these little round-ups. I thought I’d keep this one fairly focused: small portions are best, no?
A grad school friend of mine, Caryl Pagel, recently gave a talk on Lorine Niedecker at the Hoard Historical Museum in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin (Niedecker’s home town). Several people who knew Niedecker personally were in the audience and had stories to share, so if you’re into her poetry this is something worth making time for. The event was filmed by PBS Wisconsin and can be found here. You can also read an article about the talk in the Daily Jefferson County Union. A quote from Caryl that I found interesting: “I think what made me go a little deeper was when I started to read her letters and studied her life, and I just realized how funny she was. I think that changed my reading of a lot of her work.” I like how this belies the myth that the “proper” way to read and respond to a poem, as New Criticism would suggest, is without the context of the poet’s biography. While that kind of “scientific” reading may have its place, especially in certain scholarly discussions, and leaning on the poet’s biography to make sense of a poem can often be misleading (the poet does not equal the narrator), much of the time better knowledge of the poet will lead to a richer reading of the poem. Poems are social acts that are enhanced by taking into account who’s writing them.
If you’re not familiar with Niedecker, I’d certainly recommend her work: I discovered her relatively late, and that’s regretful. You can find overviews here and here. What’s most interesting to me are the poems she wrote on her daily calendar. With a quick search I can’t find a site that goes into these in-depth, so I just recommend browsing the links that come up when you look for “niedecker calendar poems.” You could also seek out her Collected Works, which includes them. I’d definitely recommend the physical copy here, which I know preserves how the writing on the opposite side of the calendar page faintly shows through, which for me was a lovely detail in these poems.
This talk of Caryl’s reminded me of a video poem of hers that’s nice to think about in connection. The note in the video description will be helpful. (And for literary magazine nerds, The Windfall Room, which published this piece, is a great example of a publication embracing the reality of new media.)
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