“The women hold jobs--/ clean house, cook, raise children, bowl/ and go to church./ What would they say if they knew/ I sit for two months on six lines/ of poetry?” (143).

“O Tannenbaum/ the children sing/ round and round/ one child sings out:/ atom bomb” (141).

Lorine Niedecker’s pomes are crafty little things, though too often sing in amplitudes the size
of music boxes and you are left
with decoration for your shelf.

————————————————-
Of course some of the poems are just so nice and crafty I want to carry them in my pocket! And her death was definitely a loss for poetry - she was getting onto something with her biographies (William Morris and Darwin).

I wrote about LN, Gertrude Stein, and Harryette Mullen for an independent study thesis in college. And EP bought me this book for my birthday that year so I could quit renewing all her books at the library!

truly incredible collection of poetry. i wasn’t particularly interested in her early surrealist experiments, but once she gets into her more modernist-inflected work reflecting on the marshes of Wisconsin she is incomparably good.