#objectivist poetry

Lorine Niedecker, Next Year or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous (1934)

It is handwritten on small pieces of paper pasted into a 27-page pocket calendar, 4½ x 3¾", two weeks per page, the hole-punched pages held together by a red velvet ribbon tied in a bow. Niedecker's pastings obscure "The Favorite Sunlit Road Calendar's" own text, platitudes such as these-January 13-26: "True bravery is/shown by performing/without witness what/one might be capable/of doing before all the/world"; Sept. 22-Oct. 5: "To reach the port/of heaven, we must/sometimes sail with/the wind and some-/times against it-but/we must sail and not/drift, nor lie at anchor." The original text is just legible when held to the light. Her spirited title inverts rather than pastes over the calendar's title page. The poem makes no explicit reference to the pasted-over homilies but the aleatoric nature of the palimpsest exudes parody. — Jenny Penberthy, “Editor’s Note,” Sulfur 41, 1997 (x)

Failure, worse failure, nothing seen From prominence, Too much seen in the ditch.

Those who will not look Tho they feel on their skins Are not pierced;

One cannot count them Tho they are present.

It is entirely wild, wildest Where there is traffic And populace.

‘Thought leaps on us’ because we are here. That is the fact of the matter. Soul-searchings, these prescriptions,

Are a medical faddism, an attempt to escape, To lose oneself in the self.

The self is no mystery, the mystery is That there is something for us to stand on.

We want to be here.

The act of be being, the act of being More than oneself.

1 Likely as not a ruined head gasket Spitting at every power stroke, if not a crank shaft Bearing knocking at the roots of the thing like a pile-driver:   A machine involved with itself, a concentrated Hot lump of a machine Geared in the loose mechanics of the world with the valves jumping And the heavy frenzy of the pistons. When the thing stops,   Is stopped, with the last slow cough In the manifold, the flywheel blundering Against compression, stopping, finally Stopped, compression leaking From the idle cylinders will one imagine Then because he can imagine That squeezed from the cooling steel There hovers in that moment, wraith-like and like a plume of steam, an aftermath, A still and quiet angel of knowledge and of comprehension. 2 Endlessly, endlessly, The definition of mortality The image of the engine That stops. We cannot live on that. I know that no one would live out Thirty years, fifty years if the world were ending   With his life. The machine stares out, Stares out With all its eyes Thru the glass With the ripple in it, past the sill Which is dusty—If there is someone In the garden! Outside, and so beautiful. 3 What ends Is that.          Even companionship   Ending. ‘I want to ask if you remember When we were happy! As tho all travels Ended untold, all embarkations   Foundered. 4 On that water Grey with morning The gull will fold its wings   And sit. And with its two eyes   There as much as anything Can watch a ship and all its hallways And all companions sink. 5 Also he has set the world In their hearts. From lumps, chunks, We are locked out: like children, seeking love At last among each other. With their first full strength   The young go search for it, Native in the native air. But even the beautiful bony children Who arise in the morning have left behind   Them worn and squalid toys in the trash Which is a grimy death of love. The lost Glitter of the stores!   The streets of stores! Crossed by the streets of stores And every crevice of the city leaking Rubble: concrete, conduit, pipe, a crumbling Rubble of our roots                            But they will find In flood, storm, ultimate mishap:   Earth, water, the tremendous Surface, the heart thundering Absolute desire.