TUESDAY POEM

Tuesday Poem this week introduces avant-garde nature poet Lorine Niedecker from the US

Editor Susan Landry from Maine, U.S., has selected Lorine because when she first discovered her work she loved her 'intimacy with nature.' 

Susan says: "Lorine Niedecker was an American poet, an avant-garde poet, a poet of nature, a poet of ordinary life, a poet who lived under the roof of the sky and beside a river. She had what people with limited imagination might call a modest life, and yet wrote imagistic, crystalline poems that convey a rich intellect and an ability to see, really see, what was around her.

"I first discovered the work of Niedecker after I wrote and submitted a poem to the bi-weekly, short-poem group I belong to, called Brevitas. I was still living in New York City, but I think buried within me, down where the words live that come out when I have a need to conjure up poetry, I had a yearning."

The poems are often untitled and - as Susan says - "light on the page like dragonflies or sprawl inside the book like stalks of dried grass, tucked away for later.." 

After you've read them, go into the sidebar and discover a wealth of other Tuesday Poems - some from nature like John Horrocks' poem Something in the Waters on the Bookseller website, or Hone Tuwhare's Sea Call, or Maria McMillan's moving poem on Helen Heath's blog; and a number this week that are avant-garde -- check out Bill Manhire's The Asterisk Machine, and Orchid Tierney's Datum and Claire Beynon's Beach Poetry.