November, 2021: Julie and I have a zoom-call, speaking face-to-face for the first time. Is she at her university office? Her pair of wrist braces. We’d decided on a conversation to touch base, now that we’ve achieved ten poems each; to see where we’re at, and what we’ve accomplished so far. On both sides of the screen, a week spent sifting through the assembled poems as a singular unit, and not in piecemeal; as a staggered, staccato dual-thread.
Julie speaks of the physicality of the poems we’ve been working, and of the echoes of water, landscape, and environmental concerns that emerge. She mentions Lorine Niedecker, an echo of whom might just sit at the foundation of what it is we’re doing. There is something of Niedecker’s cadence and attention to stone, to landscape, to water, that we’re seeing through our work-in-progress, ten poems each into what we’ve decided should certainly continue. Julie mentions a poem-as-correspondence Niedecker wrote, handwritten, to Cid Corman, that just happens to be something within reaching distance on my end, her HOMEMADE POEMS.
Originally composed as handwritten book she sent to Corman in 1964, a facsimile edition of the handwritten poems was produced in 2012 through Lost and Found (Series 3, Number 2), a reclamation project through CUNY. What was the line in here that grabbed Julie’s attention? Niedecker’s handwriting is sometimes difficult to read, and certainly, difficult to read quickly, which might truly be the point. It does seem a counterpoint to my relationship to reading her poems typeset—a quickness, jagged-edged and fast-paced physical description—especially of something such as “Lake Superior.” Whereas Julie encountered the “Homemade Poems” originally through Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works (2012), a book I’m admittedly surprised I don’t own, I encounter them here, instead, the scrawl of one side of a conversation between friends, poets, contemporaries. Were these poems offered to Corman or precisely directed? And how did Corman, I wonder, respond?
All of which, simply, returns me to “Lake Superior,” from the critical edition produced in 2013. As the opening of the poem writes:
In ever part of every living thing
is stuff that once was rock
In blood the minerals
of the rock