Poet's Work

(Hotel Eden, 1945, a boxed assemblage by Joseph Cornell,
1903-1972, American artist)

“For me the sentence lies in wait — all those prepositions and connectives — like an early flood,” the poet Lorine Niedecker once wrote. “A good thing my follow-up feeling has always been condense, condense.”

POET’S WORK

Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade

I learned
to sit at desk
and condense

No layoff
from this
condensery

~ Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), American poet