Reading, Researching, and Pulling Weeds

Sweet Pea glances up at me this afternoon as I write my blog entry.
The nest I found on the ground as I was pulling weeds in my flower garden this morning. Finding the nest made me think of Lorine Niedecker's life and poems.

I'm sitting at my computer after a morning of pulling weeds in my flower garden. Sweet Pea is in her basket at my feet. She's been romping with Buddha all morning, and she's very content to be still. Soon, she'll be sleeping.

The flower garden was far gone. It's a simple garden of hardy perennials, which explains why there was anything in the garden left worth saving. It'd been neglected for two years: 2005 because of the Ohio River float and 2006 because of some family health issues. Allen and I have a swinging bench overlooking the garden. We sit and have our coffee there most days.

I've been embarrassed to look out over the garden. Its sorry state makes me feel neglectful and inept. So this morning, I finally went out there and started hoeing and pulling. Yesterday was cool and beautiful: why didn't I do it yesterday? Today, heat is churning up from Texas (I'd been warned about this by the weatherman yesterday) and it wasn't long before I was sweating, although I was doing the work during the cool of the day and while the garden was in shade.

Most of the weeds were easy to pull. There's a kind of sticky weed that gets all over everything that put hitchers all over my pants, some thistle, field daisies.

I got a start when I yanked a canopy of brush and weeds and saw a beautiful little bird's nest. What kind of bird builds its nest on the ground--does anybody out there know?

This is how it works for me: my mind gets in a groove, a rut. It's the kind of mindset that says that weeds are bad and I'm a lazy woman. Then something seemingly small leads me to epiphany. It happened during a walk in Southern Ohio a few years ago. I was hot and my hip ached. I sat on a cool rock to rest and noticed tiny sedum growing on the rock's surface. Touching the sedum gave me strength and made me feel connected to life.

This morning, I gasped when I saw the nest, and then I felt my whole body relax. Although, I felt like an intruder on something intimate and sacred, I felt awakened and alive to that intimacy, to that sacredness.

The experience made me think of some reading and research I'd been doing last night. I'd been reading about Lorine Niedecker. I'll be teaching her work in the class on Modern Poetry in the fall. Anyone who has ever studied Modern Poetry knows it's dominated by men, very powerful men: Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Jeffers, Wallace Stevens and the likes of them. (These men are worthy of study!)

There are a few women whose names everyone knows, like Moore and Millay. Anthologies sometimes boast of adding more women poets to the mix, but women are still not well represented in any anthology. (I read that Hugh Kenner, a scholar in the field who was hard of hearing, and a critic I greatly admire, used to turn off his hearing aid when women complained that he neglected women writers.)

Unlike Moore and Millay, Lorine Niedecker is not well known and her work is seldom read. She lived a solitary life in Wisconsin, in a rustic cabin that often flooded. In one of her poems she wrote about how little possessions meant to her, saying that she was willing to give her things to the flood. She wrote about things she saw every day, short poems of great beauty and power. She had an affair with Louis Zukofsky whose poetry is better known than hers and whom--if you can believe what you read--she never really got over.

I've read Zukofsky's work and--on a personal level--much prefer Niedecker's.

She did editing work for a time, but when her eyesight became poor, she made a living scrubbing hospital floors. The people who lived near Lorine Niedecker didn't even know until after her death that she was a poet. She thought if they knew, they'd hold her at a distance and hide all the aspects of themselves that she loved observing.

This is one of my--so far--favorite poems of hers:

Wilderness

You are the man

You are my other country

and I find it hard going
You are the prickly pear

You are the sudden violent storm
the torrent to raise the river

to float the wounded doe

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I don't know that I'd have the courage to live as she did, geographically and socially isolated, without amenities that make life so easy and nice. But when I found the bird's nest, I felt Niedecker's wilderness in an instant. I saw that nature is my other country.

And I thought of Lorine Niedecker, living alone, writing of the things I ignore on a daily basis, writing of the great sacred things I miss because my mind is in a groove, on a selfish and boring plane.