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- This Week: It's Okay to Not Like Lorine Niedecker
This Week: It's Okay to Not Like Lorine Niedecker
I like poetry and I don’t care who knows it. I like the short little lines, and the spaces they sometimes put between them. I like how they often have titles like A Flower I Once Saw or Woman in the Red Hat or Montana. I like it when the words rhyme. Even when they don’t, I like that too.
Maybe this comes as a surprise, but I’ve never written about poetry before. It’s harder than it looks. There’s something approachable about visual art that invites opinions to pop out of nowhere, but poems take more patient thinking. It’s hard to keep both the head and tail of a poem in view, even a short one, so you need to give the whole thing time to sink in. Plus, there’s the worry that the poet is a better writer than you are, which can grate on the old self-esteem.
BUT A PROSE IS A PROSE IS A PROSE
When I say I like poetry, what I mean is that I like about 2% of all poetry. That’s just how it is, I’m not sure why. A poem either hits you or it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, making that connection becomes a chore. It’s like music in that way. We all have our own taste and agree there’s no use trying to justify it to our Skrillex-loving friend. As it happens, my taste in poetry is desperately uncool. And not so-uncool-it’s-acutally-cool. I like Emily Dickinson. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Rainer Maria Rilke. I’m writing out the full names because I think they give a good sense of their complete lack of appeal to modern readers. If you think Rainer is a cool name, bear in mind he looked like this:  This is him after “now do a silly one” My taste in poetry is totally at odds with the visual art I tend to connect with. If my favorite poem looks like the man in the photo above, then my favorite painting is--gosh, something like the Hamburglar. I guess I want visual art to be fun, or at least funny, a determined scamp who will stop at nothing to steal your lunch, but who fails every time. I don’t know what I mean by that, but it feels true. While it’s fine for each of us to enjoy our own taste, it’s kind of a problem for me, specifically. There’s not a poet in Milwaukee I don’t want to be pals with, but the fact is, most of their work just doesn’t do much for me. This was my challenge when trying to write about the first Episode of the Woodland Pattern Radio Hour. It’s sacrilegious in Milwaukee, but I just don’t like Lorine Niedecker. I think she’s cynical about human beings, but loves to stick them in the middle of her nature poems anyway, if only for something to complain about. From the opening lines of Flora Coker’s (inspired, energetic) reading of The Evening Automobiles, shared on the first WPRH, which aired last month: Men from work shot silently through green lights. Encased motors give men the swift, shining precision that his mind, as he drives, can’t give him. Like—alright, Lorine. Sorry I didn’t look intellectual enough while driving home from my 1950s factory job. Sorry for blocking the view of whatever sand-crested morning piper you’d been admiring for the past forty-five minutes. This just sounds to me like the lazy social criticism of a recluse who hasn’t tested her ideas against people in the flesh. I’m not cherry-picking either. You can find the same misanthropy all through The Evening Automobiles, and throughout her catalog of work an uncomplicated disdain for towns and cities, for marriage, for society in general, and the poor, deluded, non-poem-writing citizenry. I’m being unfair, which is sort of the point of this little essay. Because, to be totally clear, I’m not judging Lorine on the basis of talent or quality. I’m not trying to convince you to not like her, or even justify my own opinion. I think I’ll even go out on a limb and say I’m probably wrong about her work, and that if I gave it a little more time, I’d probably hate it fractionally less. But isn’t it fun to vent? In fact, it’s more than fun. I think it can be a good way to unpack our feelings for art. Being bored by a poem is one thing, but hating it is another entirely. We like to make excuses for hating something, maybe even deny the fact that we hate altogether. But we do hate, even if just for a few seconds at a time, and paying attention to those feelings can be a good way to discover where they come from. What art do you hate, and what do you think it says about you as a person?  Regardless of your taste in poetry, the Woodland Pattern Radio Hour is for you. It’s a show born out of 50 years of programming at Riverwest’s (and Milwaukee’s) most vital literary institution. But also out of Woodland Pattern’s curatorial ethos, which is alive and well today, but dates back to its founding. See these few lines offered in the late 1970s by poet and Woodland Pattern co-founder Karl Gartung: No single esthetic. No single strand of poetry or art to be examined minutely and conformed to. No room at all for Kings of small ponds. THESE GREAT LAKES. Whole, living, not wholly comprehensible. These were the lines Chuck Stebleton led with in episode one, leading into a scrapbook collage of poets, readers, live sax and music box performances, strung together with Chuck’s pitch-perfect radio voice. It’s a voice you can trust even if the first few readings aren’t quite to your taste, or even if you’re not sure if you’re up to the task of poetry. Try putting it on first thing in the morning, before you’ve even gotten out of bed. It’s also live on 104.1, Fridays 4-5 PM, if you’re within Riverwest Radio’s reach. | SaturdayTuesday Thursday |
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