Here, Lorine Niedecker writes to Cid Corman, a fellow poet as well as the founder and editor of the journal, Origin. She thanks him for sending his book of poems, titled for instance, published by Origin Press in 1962. She commends him for “[throwing] the shackles off the sentence,” and places his book in her “immortal cupboard,” which she reserves for the greats.
Fort Atkinson,
Wisconsin
Feb. 18, 1962
Dear Cid:
That lovely little book. I’ve had nothing affect me quite so much since I discovered haiku. But then you come from Japan! You now inhabit a corner of my immortal cupboard with LZ (especially the short poems), Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, John Muir, bits from Santayana, D.H. Lawrence, Dahlberg, William Carlos Williams, and haiku. These knew “when / to listen / what falls / glistens now / in the ear.”
The bug that “weighs a grass / to whose end it walks” — and morning glories and beer bottles — you are an artist. You and Jonathan Williams have thrown off the shackles of the sentence and the wide melody. For me the sentence lies in wait—all those prepositions and connectives—like an early spring flood. A good thing my follow-up feeling had always been condense, condense.
You are probably right about “Florida” and certainly about Canaveral having three a s, good that you accept the other two.
With my whole heart, thank you for for instance.
Yours
Lorine
From “Between Your House and Mine”: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960 to 1970. Niedecker, Lorine, Cid Corman, and Lisa Pater Faranda. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986.