Rather than go somewhere to watch a basketball game today, which I didn't really want to do, I stayed home and read about Lorine Niedecker, a midwestern poet and miniaturist reminiscent of W.C.W. and Emily Dickinson.

I appreciate her quiet beauty and the feeling of home she transmits through her writing. There is something stable
and reliable and down-to-earth about her.

At the same time, the mischievious little elf inside of me wants to rebel against that kind of quaint, melancholic
mode of living. Where's the spontaneity? The break away from the mundanity of daily chores and so-called "woman's work."

I wonder what Lorine Niedecker would think of Patti Smith or Beth Gibbons of Portishead or PJ Harvey or Tori Amos or Bjork? She would probably like Bjork, but what in the world would she make of David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust days?

Maybe she'd be more like Aunt Julia in New York--cool, yet reserved, with a touch of Diane Keaton from the Annie Hall days, and a touch of Glen Close from Dangerous Liasons, and a pinch of Annie Oakley, and a sprinkling of Mary Cassatt. If Lorine Niedecker had developed more of an appreciation for the wilder elements of society she might have had more fun. Though more danger, too.

It occurs to me that one way of retaining her innocence and "purity" was to hide in the woods away from the big cities. But that's lonely.

I wonder if she even liked the Beatles.

It is dusk in Ann Arbor as I write this and I have been drinking peach/ginger tea all day long. Soon I will go to the People's Food Market for some nice big oranges and
whichever Mazzy Star album they happen to be playing over the loudspeakers.


from Lorine Niedecker's Selected Poems:


Thomas Jefferson Inside


Winter when no flower

The Congress away from home

Love is the great good use
one person makes of another
(Daughter Polly of the strawberry
letter)

Frogs sing--then of a sudden
all their lights go out

The country moves toward violets
and aconites