Mandy Bloomfield

First reading of Lorine Niedecker's 'Popcorn-can cover' (3)

Mandy Bloomfield

When I first encounter a poem as object-like as this one, the impulse is to look before I read. The first thing I notice about Niedecker’s poem is the indentation of the fourth line. From there, my eye is drawn to the word “hole” in the line above, and this verbal-visual articulation leads me to understand that the indentation performs a state of perforation; its left margin isn’t sealed; the poem orients itself around a gap.

Popcorn-can cover
screwed to the wall
over a hole
so the cold
can’t mouse in
— Lorine Niedecker

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From the Jacket2 team

Publishing during the COVID-19 crisis

Jacket2

Like many of you, we are adapting to increased safety measures around COVID-19 at the University of Pennsylvania and other campuses. Our work here at Jacket2 will likely be delayed and/or interrupted; our publication schedule for both commentaries and J2 content at large will be slower than usual as we adapt to the global pandemic. Many of our editors are working remotely, and we will continue to curate Jacket2 as a space to convene and sustain a life in/through poetry during times of scarcity, stress, and shifting imagined communities. We remain committed to bringing you open access content when institutional access and travel for research become compromised and complicated.

A note from the editors and publishers of Jacket2:

Unica Zürn

Nine anagrammatic poems with notes on the process by Hans Bellmer and Pierre Joris

Jerome Rothenberg

[What follows is an attempt, once again, to cast light on the work of Unica Zürn, a fabled artist and poet, whose anagrammatic poems and automatic drawings existed on the fringe or near the center (depending on how you cut it) of post–1920s Surrealism and in close photo collaborations with German artist Hans Bellmer. The commentaries by Bellmer and poet and translator Pierre Joris, below, make a strong presentation of her principal work as a poet. (j.r.)]

IN THE DUST OF THIS LIFE

Reading weed acts

A review of Carol Watts's 'Dockfield'

Srishti Krishnamoorthy-Cavell

Broad-leaved (left) and curled (right) dock. Photos by R. A. Nonenmacher.

In many ways, the structure of this poetry is parabolic. Points of reference are plotted along a curve that eventually returns to the same site of origin — the dockfield — before continuing onward. This is reflected in the release and retraction of words and images within parts of lines as well as in the broader sweep and curve of deep, transhuman time to which the text aspires.

Carol Watts’s Dockfield opens with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson — “Like Rain it sounded till it curved.” This attention to sound and structure also informs the opening lines of the first poem:

Step through on a curve,
a grand elliptic.

I will find you. Always.

A message sent up from simple frequencies.[1]