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Kristin Grogan on Lorine Niedecker ("Poet's Work")
2.3k Plays1 year ago
What kind of work is the work of poetry, and how does it compare with other kinds of labor? We have the perfect pairing of poem and critic to think through that question on this episode: Kristin Grogan joins the podcast to talk about Lorine Niedecker's "Poet's Work."
Kristin is assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, where she works on poetry, poetics, modernism, American literature, modernism, gender, and sexuality. She is nearing completion of her first book, Stitch, Unstitch: Poetry, Modernism, and the World of Work. You can find Kristin's essays and articles in such journals as American Literature, Critical Quarterly, Post45, Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, and in several essay collections. With David B. Hobbs, Kristin edited a Post45 cluster on the poet Bernadette Mayer. You can find her contribution to that cluster, on Mayer and keeping a garden, here.
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Transcript
Introduction to Lorraine Niedeker and 'Poets Work'
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I'm very excited today to have Kristin Grogan on the podcast. And Kristin has come on to talk about the great poet, Lorraine Niedeker, and a poem of hers, which I think might be the shortest poem we've had on the podcast so far. I'd have to go back and check
00:00:29
Speaker
to know that for sure, but I have a good hunch it is. The poem that Kristen suggested we talk about, and I was so pleased when I heard her suggestion, is a poem called Poets Work. So, as ever, we'll make that poem available to you via a link in the episode notes. You'll be able to click on that and look at the text of the poem
00:00:55
Speaker
as we discuss it. And I recommend that you do. It sort of visually has a kind of interesting appearance on the page or on your screen and might be useful for you to be able to see that as we talk.
Kristin Grogan's Background and Book Themes
00:01:10
Speaker
Let me tell you more about Kristin though before we get going. So she is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University. And before that was a junior research fellow at St. Catharines College, Cambridge.
00:01:24
Speaker
And before that, got her default at Oxford University. That at Rutgers, Kristin works on poetry, poetics, modernism, American literature. She has interests in Marxism, in gender and sexuality, queer studies,
00:01:44
Speaker
And she's working on a book, which she tells me very excitingly is near completion. That book's title is, Kristen just made a little cheering gesture on the screen, which is great. Yeah, I'm cheering too. The title of that book is Stitch, Unstitch, Modernist Poetry and the Idea of Work.
00:02:08
Speaker
And you'll see, or maybe you'll already have noticed just by virtue of the title of the book and the title of today's poem, Poets Work, that this poem fits squarely into the argument that Kristen is making in that book, which is going to be an important one.
00:02:28
Speaker
for all kinds of readers. You can find Kristin's essays in journals like American Literature, Critical Quarterly, Post 45, which I'm going to say a word more about in a moment, a journal called Lit, Literature, Interpretation, Theory,
00:02:45
Speaker
So on that post-45, oh, and in lots of edited collections of essays and so on. So she's already published just a tremendous amount of really important stuff. In post-45, with David Hobbs, she edited a cluster on the poet Bernadette Maire.
00:03:09
Speaker
And I recommend that cluster to you for people who are interested in Bernadette Mayer. It's just hugely generative and exciting work that she's collected and put together for us there. The cluster of essays includes an essay by Kristin herself, which is about
00:03:32
Speaker
Gosh, lots of things. I mean, one thing to say about the essay is that those of you who've gotten to know me a little bit will maybe understand how I would be drawn to the method and the style of the piece, which mixes and integrates a kind of close and scholarly attention to Mayer's poetry.
Surrealism, Haiku, and Poetic Evolution
00:03:57
Speaker
and to the traditions of criticism and theory that are relevant to Kristen's interest in Mary's poetry with a kind of autobiographical writing on Kristen's own part, a kind of self-reflection, the ways in which the poems that she's
00:04:20
Speaker
attending to have helped her understand aspects of her own life and what it's like to be a person in the world right now.
00:04:30
Speaker
That essay, apart from its method, what I can say about it is that what it's about is about keeping a garden. And it's also about the way that certain kinds of poems are like keeping a garden or are interested in the same kinds of preoccupations and problems, the same kinds of
00:04:57
Speaker
challenges, but also moments of beauty that gardens can produce. Here's a line of Kristin's from that essay that struck me. It's short. So let me read it to you. Quote, raising plants is looking into a future that isn't yours.
00:05:23
Speaker
That's great. That's such a lovely and illuminating line for me. It immediately raised for me when I read it all kinds of preliminary thoughts about what that thought might have to do well with other kinds of work that we do.
00:05:50
Speaker
now in the present whose fruits, whether metaphorical or literal, we might not live to see with things like raising children, for instance, but also with writing. About Maire's writing later in the essay, Kristin writes this, her poems insist on a right to expansive reproductive possibilities that are not subject to capitalism's constraints.
00:06:19
Speaker
And it's on those terms that Kristen sees fit to teach us about Bernadette Mayer and a book of hers, a relatively recent book of hers. And I recommend that article to you. I recommend the whole cluster to you. I'm sure that Kristen Grogan is a poetry critic.
00:06:46
Speaker
whom we're all going to want to be keeping our eye on and reading in the years to come. So with that, I want to thank you, Kristin, for agreeing to appear on the podcast, and I wanted to ask you how you're doing today. You're very welcome, Ron. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.
00:07:05
Speaker
Well, it's my pleasure to have you. I said that Neetaker is, or this poem is maybe the shortest one we've had on the podcast. It also occurs to me, I wonder if this is true, that this is geographically speaking, the closest a guest has ever been to me as we've recorded.
00:07:24
Speaker
Kristin is sitting in West Philadelphia. I'm just outside of Philadelphia. We're probably a couple miles away, but communicating through the magic of the internet. And today the air is bad outside. Yeah. So if there are scratchy throats or if you can hear the ambient particulate matter through the recording. Yeah.
00:07:45
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. The air is bad. The news is worse. But we've got we've got poetry to talk about. Poetry is better. That's right. Kristin, would you mind saying just a word or two about what went into your thinking as after I invited you onto the podcast, how you arrived at, well, first, maybe need occur and then this poem or you tell the story as you as you see fit about choosing a poem for this occasion?
00:08:13
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I've been thinking with Niederke and this poem for quite a long time. She is one of the, she's in fact the last chapter in my book, but this poem is the, opens the whole thing. So the first paragraph of my book, the first few paragraphs is the kind of reading of this, which leads into some of the knots that my book tries to untangle over the course of its many
00:08:44
Speaker
pages about the relationship between poetry and labour, the deep ambivalence, the kind of enmeshment of poets in ordinary kinds of work, and also efforts to distinguish themselves from that, which we can talk about more in this poem.
00:09:02
Speaker
But how I arrived at Nidaka herself, so when I was an undergraduate and a master's student, I was the kind of student who was really into the most difficult, longest, long poems I could find. And I wanted to read. I think my undergraduate dissertation was on the late cantos.
00:09:20
Speaker
totally unforgivable, that kind of 22-year-old. Right, so for people who don't know, that's Ezra Pound, right? It's just some of the most difficult poetry that, I mean, I don't know how we measure these things, but I think most people would agree that is difficult stuff, right?
00:09:38
Speaker
Yeah, a friend of mine has a theory that the kids who work on the really difficult avant-garde thing, it's because it's the shiniest red apple they can possibly present to the teacher. There's a sort of desire for achievement there. But one of my, I can't remember who, one of my professors, I think was reading the Nideka collected and suggested that I look at her because she is so, she's entwined with a kind of poundy and
00:10:03
Speaker
images thing. We can see a lot of imagism in this poem, a lot more of the early 20th century modernism. Obviously, she's writing later. But I, you know, honestly, I struggled with her for a while because I was in this big, long, masculine modernist moment. And I didn't know how to read her yet. I didn't know what to do with verse that was aphoristic and nomic and small.
00:10:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny. In a way, it's like you're saying that it's like the inverse of a story that a person might tell. Like, oh, you know, you might imagine a person who says like, you know, I first fell in love with poetry that was accessible and, you know, welcoming and so on. And then I got to this hard stuff and I didn't know what to do with it. But in a way, you're telling the inverse story from that.
00:10:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, totally. It was like, I don't know, maybe other people were also 16 and 17 and had lines of the wasteland like scrawled on their bedroom wall. It was very that. And I think there is to be there's something almost unreadable about a lot of those long poems now for me, because I associate them so much with this early period of my development. But Nida Khatimi has proved to be somebody, because of the aphoristic, gnomic, ultra condensed quality of her work, she has had a lot more staying power for me. She sort of lodged herself
00:11:24
Speaker
I don't know, somewhere in the ribcage and her verse kind of prods at me because I've so much contained within very small spaces. That sounds both intimate and sort of uncomfortable. I imagine her sort of poking at you in your ribcage.
Niedeker's Life and Influences
00:11:40
Speaker
Yeah, and I think she is uncomfortable. I think as a figure, she's uncomfortable. I think as an individual, some of the criticism we read has, to me, emerges from a kind of discomfort, which is often the condition of writing about. So I should say that Mitaka was
00:11:55
Speaker
Do you mind if I go into like a little biography? It was going to be my next question for you, actually. So you've anticipated it. Please, please go ahead. Cool. So I'll just give you a tiny bit of critical history and then more biographical history related. Yeah. So I think that Nitika right now is having her day in the sun. I think she's being read more. I think there's a post 45 cluster coming out on her as well. More critics are reading her. She seems to be like she's
00:12:23
Speaker
you know, really having her time a part of that, I think, especially as many of her concerns and her later poems are so, you know, they're intensely environmental poems, they come out of the late 60s, they have this kind of ethos of preservation that I think speaks to a lot of people today.
00:12:41
Speaker
But really, this is a recent critical recovery. And for decades and decades, she wasn't particularly read. And part of that was because she didn't publish very much in her lifetime. So William Cullis-Williams called her the Emily Dickinson of our time. And she was very, Nita was very fond of quoting this, you know, would tell people what William Cullis was. I mean, if someone called me the Emily Dickinson of my time, I'd be delighted.
00:13:04
Speaker
I probably have to spend more time at home, more time writing poetry, but anyway. A lot of things would have to be true. A lot of things, yeah. But it's not just someone calling you that, it's William Carlos Williams calling you that. Totally. And I think as we read through, if you spend, if you, dear listener, hooked on Niedeker after this poem and read more
00:13:27
Speaker
Poetry by her, I think you could see some points of comparison and resonance with Williams for sure. So she was born in I think 1903 in Blackhawk Island, just outside of the tiny town of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, where I have never been, but one day I shall.
00:13:47
Speaker
So a very, very small town on this, actually on an island, it's very flood-prone. She writes throughout her life constantly of the floods coming in. She talks about her life by water, of living in these marshes.
00:14:00
Speaker
And she has a pretty middle class childhood that as she gets older is marked by more poverty and insecurity and insecure employment. One thing that I think is really fascinating... I'm just trying to do the math. So as she gets older, does that mean she's sort of aging as a young adult into the depression?
00:14:19
Speaker
Yes, yes. So, and in fact, in the depression, she, I think she starts her first job in 1929, maybe earlier, she'd been caring for her mother who was ill before that she works as an assistant librarian, and she loses her job because of the depression.
00:14:36
Speaker
Um, that ends her first marriage and has all sorts of repercussions in her personal life. Um, but later the following decade, she works for the WBPA, the works progress administration, um, as a researcher and writer for, uh, they have this American guides book series where every state gets a guide, um, guidebook. And she writes for the Wisconsin one. So she moves to Madison and, you know, she's part of this.
00:15:04
Speaker
a generation of writers and artists who are kept afloat by the New Deal. And what researching that gives her is more language for the folk traditions, the kind of distinctive folk lifestyles of her region in Wisconsin. And her first book is called New Goose. It's not published until after the Depression. It's 1946. But it's really a volume that emerges out of the Depression, emerges out of rural poverty,
00:15:32
Speaker
and dispossession and fear and the lack of knowledge, the kind of climate of obfuscation as well to which working people were subject.
00:15:45
Speaker
But one thing that's so that critics have sort of found difficult to work through with Nidecker is that she lives her whole life predominantly. She spends a bit of time Milwaukee later in life, but she's in this very small town in Wisconsin. But all of her closest friends, especially Louis Sokovsky, are in the metropolitan avant-garde.
00:16:05
Speaker
So they're in New York and Nidica really has this epistolary life. This is where, again, where the Emily Dickinson comparison is not just a formal one, it's a biographical one, where every week for the span of her life, she writes to Zukovsky and they trade letters and they do all sorts of work for each other. Right. How is it that, I mean,
00:16:33
Speaker
Sorry, I realize as I'm about to ask this question that it might sound like naive or something, or that I'm making an improper kind of assumption. But I'm just imagining this youngish woman living in Wisconsin. How is it that she's finding out about Zukovsky?
Renewed Interest and New Editions
00:16:55
Speaker
Do you have a sense, Kristin, of where it is that she's discovering this kind of
00:17:03
Speaker
we might think sort of avant-garde or on the sort of largest scale, relatively obscure kind of poetic production. Like, how's it getting to her?
00:17:16
Speaker
So she reads Poetry Magazine and she reads The Objectivist Issue and she writes to Zukovsky. Turns out you can make lifelong friends by just cold calling poets you like. Yeah, so she has- No to listeners. Send fan mail. Totally, maybe we will correspond over decades. She has access, she has a public, she has a library in Fort Atkinson and
00:17:41
Speaker
throughout, one of the interesting things in her letters throughout is corresponding, is tracking like what she has access to and what she's desperately trying to find. So she, by this point, she's read like, she's read Pound, she's read Wolf, she's, you know, she's read a lot of The Modernist, but yeah, really, she just cold calls Zukoski after the Objectivist issue. And she goes to New York. They have an affair, but, you know, they remain friends afterwards.
00:18:05
Speaker
And it's a very long, very generative friendship. It kind of disintegrates towards the end of their lives. They're going in different directions. Yeah. Okay. Fascinating. So that's a really helpful little biographical sketch you've given us. And also I'm really grateful for the overview you've given of her kind of re-emergence vis-a-vis the sort of critical attention she's been receiving.
00:18:35
Speaker
of late makes a lot of sense to me. I know that there's this beautiful new edition of her poems from Berkeley, from the University of California Press, that I want to get this right, that Jenny Penberthy edited.
00:18:54
Speaker
And I know from the notes, the excellent and helpful notes that Penderothe has provided in that edition, that the poem you've chosen for a poet's work, its manuscript is dated.
00:19:07
Speaker
That's helpful. Poets, you should be dating your manuscripts to help the scholars of the future. I guess you could lie to us and we'd never know, or we probably would never find out. It's dated June 8th, 1962.
00:19:25
Speaker
You said, I think, that her first book was published in 45, is that the sixth? Six, I think. Six, yeah. Okay, well, yeah, it's not the fine detail of that that I cared so much about. It's just to say that this book, I mean, this poem is written a couple decades after that, right? Yeah.
00:19:45
Speaker
And is there something we should know about the kind of evolution of her career to that point? Or is there some distinction you would draw between sort of early need occur and later need occur that is worth thinking about before we get into the poem itself?
00:20:04
Speaker
Yeah, totally. So I mean, a couple of things I want to say that one is that in her early career, so her very early career, she's really doing this kind of surrealist thing. I don't find this poem super interesting. Other people do, you know, they're a very 30s kind of.
00:20:18
Speaker
You know, early surrealist mode. In the new goose poems, what they're really, they're working with is the nursery rhyme. And we see the nursery rhyme is important for her throughout her career, but in the 50s, especially Nidaka's, what she turns to more explicitly is haiku.
00:20:39
Speaker
So she, her verse becomes more condensed, which we'll see is a key word for this. It becomes sort of littler and littler. Later in her career, we see another expanding out where she writes long poems, but made of like very short, very sharp lines, usually with the tacit. So as a reader, I would keep in mind the kind of haiku form as we're reading this. It's a great letter. The other kind of contextual thing that I want to say about this poem, this is really important in my book and my reading of Nidica,
00:21:06
Speaker
said in the 1960s, the early 60s, when she's writing this, she's working as a cleaner at the Fort Atkinson Hospital. So her eyesight is kind of gone. She's, you know, she's older, she's in poor health, and she's working a menial job. Right.
00:21:21
Speaker
And there's a lot that we can say about that maybe a little bit later about kind of invisibility, condensing, making things smaller that I think speaks to this. But in the margins of time when she's not cleaning hospitals, cleaning hospital kitchens, she is sort of writing letters to Zukovsky complaining that she can't find the right edition of Basho at the library.
00:21:43
Speaker
Oh. So it's not just that it looks like haiku, but we've got good evidence here that she's really interested and thinking about that. Absolutely. Yeah. And she develops a close friendship with a writer called Sid Korman, who's living in Kyoto. So these are the influences there, I would say.
00:22:00
Speaker
Oh, that's great. That's wonderful. All right. So, well, now I think we've wet our listeners' appetites. It's time. It's time to hear the poem. And I want to ask you, Kristen, to read it to us.
Reading and Analyzing 'Poets Work'
00:22:20
Speaker
Sure thing. Okay, poet's work. Grandfather advised me, learn a trade.
00:22:27
Speaker
I learned to sit at desk and condense no layoff from this condensary. Great. So a very extensive poem. That's great. I mean, I guess in a way you could say, you know, I was thinking back to that, to the Williams line about the Dickinson of our time or something, you know, surely part of, I mean, I feel as though in the 20th century, any time,
00:22:55
Speaker
a man, a male poet was having to say something about a female poet whom he had admired. In the American context, certainly Dickinson's name would come up, right? So there's that, the kind of dull obviousness of that. But there's also, I mean, something about the short lines.
00:23:15
Speaker
This is a nine-line long poem, and it's organized into three tercets. That's not a recognizably Dickinsonian form, but if you squint, there's something to that comparison. Yeah, it feels like there's a kind of family resemblance or something here. Yeah. Okay, so the first line of the poem
00:23:44
Speaker
I mean, I was gonna say, well, we should start at the beginning. I guess the beginning is really the title of the poem. Poets work. Yeah, poets work, but in a way that, I take it that sort of one kind of way to approach reading this poem in the interpretive sense of making sense of the poem is going to be to think about what that title might mean.
00:24:10
Speaker
or the various kinds of things that title might mean. So in a way, I feel as though, unless you feel differently, in which case I'm happy to be led by you, Kristen, I almost want to kind of defer, sort of let the title hang in the background of the whole conversation, keep referring back to it, rather than trying to kind of unpack the title all on its own and then look at the poem. Yeah, I think in the way of the Arts Poetica, the sort of art of poetry poem, the title can feel
00:24:40
Speaker
both like a summation and also like we can't really understand it until we get the theory of poetry, which comes throughout the poem. So I do like the idea of letting it hang and referring back to it. I don't think we can
00:24:51
Speaker
dig into it in quite the same way without going through what the poem is saying. Yeah. Yeah, OK. So we're on something like the same page. That's good. And I think the Ars Poetica idea is a really instructive model to have in mind. For listeners who aren't familiar with it, this tradition of poems that are sort of explicitly about the art of poetry, where a poet might sort of say, what goes into that art for them?
00:25:19
Speaker
And okay, the first line of the poem is just one word, grandfather. And I wonder what you make of that as a kind of grounding or, you know, what do you think about when you see that word and are thinking about Nidacur and where she is and what she's thinking about?
00:25:40
Speaker
maybe comparing it to what that word might mean as the first word of a poem for other kinds of poets or poets who are contemporary to her or not. I guess I'm so interested in that moment. I think maybe it's the way that you read it where you were like grandfather. I attach obviously a kind of patriarchal gravitas to the first word. To me, it's better than father.
00:26:10
Speaker
There's an immediate lineage in grandfather. That's interesting. To me, I read that and I think, okay, so this is either going to be about
00:26:25
Speaker
Maybe I'm revealing too much about my sense of lineage and inheritance, but it's either going to be about challenging something that is received, or it's going to be about failure to live up to. But I think the first word it gives me that the sense that she is going to position herself in relation to the grandfather.
Condensation in Modernist Poetry
00:26:48
Speaker
It's funny, I was thinking, I swear I didn't like plant this, and my question wasn't intended to produce the response that I'm about to give, but it just occurred to me, so I'm going to say it. You know, the Marianne Moore poem, Silence, that begins, Father Always Said.
00:27:04
Speaker
Which I mean, this isn't an episode about that poem, so we don't we surely don't need to talk about it. But my way of reading that poem is that it's sort of ironizing the authority of the father figure who has this kind of portentous lesson to give. Totally, totally. And so that's one thing that might be happening with a poem that begins grandfather. But yeah, go on. Yeah, I agree. And there's a kind of I think the sort of grandeur of grandfather
00:27:34
Speaker
father would also work, although not as metrically lovely, heightens that irony thing. I also have a more specific sense of who the grandfather is. Well, I was going to ask that too, actually. Might we learn something by knowing anything about who the grandfather is? Does that matter? In a poem by Robert Lowell, it would matter, right? Yeah, totally.
00:28:02
Speaker
So Nida, in terms of lineage, she writes a lot about her mother, partly because her mother was ill. She spent a lot of time caring for her mother. She has sort of beautiful poems that have a sort of grandfatherly energy behind them about her mother, which are kind of working through Whitman and Lincoln and all sorts of ways. But grandfathers, I'm not sure, maybe I would have to read through it. I don't know. So my theory of who the grandfather is kind of leads us to a later word. And I don't know if I want to skip ahead or like move through it,
00:28:32
Speaker
Well, I think the poem is so short that we can skip ahead and skip back and kind of move around. So if you want to, yeah, what's the word? So I think the key word for this poem is, well, two words, condense and condensary. Right. And it comes, so there are two meanings, two valences of this poem, of this word. One is extremely local, and one is a kind of signature of the global cosmopolitan avant-garde.
00:29:01
Speaker
Good. So which one do you want me to start with first? Big or small? Well, I mean, feel free to overrule me, but since you asked, I guess I would say let's start local.
00:29:13
Speaker
Let's go local. Cool. I'm, yeah, I'm happy with that. Okay. So, uh, need a cruise from Wisconsin and Wisconsin is the center of the country's dairy industry, which is the fact I sort of, um, abstractly knew because I read need a cure and I sort of thought about this. I read the entirety of the Wisconsin, a guide to the badger state in the Oxford university library. I think the only person who's ever done that, but then I moved to America and I would like be sifting through the kind of, um,
00:29:41
Speaker
lurid orange cheeses available in your standard American supermarket and was like, oh, yeah, no, this is yes, Wisconsin. I see something. Anyway, Wisconsin, we need a chorus from his dairy capital. Yeah, she spends a lot of her life working as a stenographer and a proofreader for a dairy journal. And a condensary is where condensed milk is made. In order to make condensed milk, you evaporate a significant amount of water
00:30:11
Speaker
from milk and what you're left with is something delicious and much more concentrated and powerful. So that's the local one that she is working with or that has a local valence that I don't know if you said condensary to everybody outside of that would necessarily instantly
00:30:36
Speaker
Yeah, well cards on the table. Now definitely in preparation for this poem, I looked it up because I was like, that sounds like a factory of some kind, but what kind is it? And I said, oh yeah, that makes sense, right? Yeah. Yes. So I didn't know it. Yeah, good. But Nida Kurz certainly did, and it was a word that she would have
00:30:55
Speaker
used and been familiar with and local readers might, you know, would just as well have known that word. Yeah, and there's really a, I think, you know, this is maybe a question for later, but you know, who is her readership, who is reading her? She's very secretive about the fact that she's a poet. She talks at length about this like kind of sexy, she wouldn't say sexy, but I think it's kind of sexy, secret that she writes poems and no one around her knows. So she holds it quite close to her. Anyway, so the second meaning of condensary
00:31:24
Speaker
is like a deep cut into sort of a Poundian history of poetics. So in his ABC of reading. A book by Ezra Pound. A book by Ezra Pound. Yeah. I was going to say the title kind of does what it says on the tin, I guess, but Pound never really does what he says on the tin. In his ABC of reading, Pound begins one of his chapters by quoting, by sort of describing this vignette in which another poet named Basil Bunting
00:31:55
Speaker
is looking through old dictionaries, a German-Italian dictionary, and he finds the German verb Dichten, which is the verbal version of Dichten poem, equals condensari, the Italian verb to condense.
00:32:18
Speaker
and Pound treats this as this kind of ancient proof, old proof that poetry is the most concentrated form of language of expression. It is also this signature moment where we find an American poet living in Europe, drawing on another poet's German to Italian definition of poetry. It's really far from the local language of the condensary.
00:32:44
Speaker
Right, right, or pounds own Idaho roots or whatever. Yeah, Idaho and then Philadelphia. Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Yeah. Okay, sorry, go on. Yeah. So one of the motivating tensions. Okay, so this goes back to my theory of the grandfather. To me, the person like lurking behind the aris in the first line is pound. It says for pound. I see. And this is also 1962. He's like, well, is he out by then? I feel
00:33:13
Speaker
Sorry, this is something I know. Yes, he's out. So what Kristen is referring to, this is something I've written about, so I'm happy to step in here. But Pound, among other things,
00:33:26
Speaker
was a fascist, those politics emerged in their sort of full flowering during the Second World War when Pound made pro-Mussolini, pro-axis radio broadcasts, anti-Semitic, sort of crazy sounding radio broadcasts. At the end of the Second World War, Pound was arrested by the American
00:33:56
Speaker
army and as a kind of legal maneuver meant to evade what might have been a death sentence for Pound, his lawyers argued that he was insane. They argued not that he was insane at the time of the radio broadcast, though that was sort of implied in a way. They argued that he was made insane by his detention
00:34:24
Speaker
following his arrest, and he was therefore unable to understand the charges being made against him or to participate in his defense. And a jury agreed. I think his lawyers thought that he would be sent to, rather than to a prison or to be executed, he would be sent to a hospital and quickly released once the war fever died down in the post-war period. But that turned into a long
00:34:50
Speaker
stay 13 years that founded St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington DC, where he was in a sense imprisoned in a mental hospital.
00:35:04
Speaker
And where he received visitors and people wrote about their visits to Pound, visits from poets and visits from white supremacists and all kinds of figures. So he was there from 45 to 58. So by now, yeah, he's just been released and he's gone back to Italy, I guess. Yeah, to continue doing some unrepentant fascism. Yeah. So sorry for that little...
00:35:26
Speaker
digression, but I think it's that's such an interesting idea. I hadn't thought of it. It makes perfect sense. And I want you to say more now about what it would mean to think of grandfather here as Pound. Yeah. So look sort of grandfatherly by this time, too, by the way. And he's also going by grandpa. He has that kind of like folksy nickname that his various like poet slash fascist visitors at St. Elizabeth bring to him. You know, that's his nickname at this time. So he's sort of adopting this
00:35:58
Speaker
There's a kind of both authority and also like the sort of like denuded of his crazy and power image of like the poet in his slippers shuffling around the mental asylum that is pound as grandpa. So it's both authoritative and kind of
00:36:19
Speaker
I don't know, I think of someone like Grandpa Simpson, sorry to make a pop culture reference, but the sort of hapless kind of senile figure who nevertheless has this kind of deep historical knowledge, which sometimes is really important and sort of carries a kind of authority because of that.
00:36:41
Speaker
Yeah, and I would say as well that Niederke doesn't really miss any chance to make Son of Pound. So she has a great poem written a couple years after this called Santayana's and it's a letter from, she adopts a letter from George Santayana, the philosopher to Daniel Corey Pound, when he was in Italy, kept like haranguing Santayana, like, please hang out with me, read my books, come on. And Santayana writes this letter saying, calling
00:37:08
Speaker
saying to tell Pound that like, I'm so sorry, I can't read poetry, I can't read, tells Corey that he only wishes to see people who are normal and beautiful, not abortions or eruptions like Ezra Pound. And Nidica turns us into like a little, tiny little lyric that's a sort of joke on poetic authority. But look, you know, behind that is this, this like,
00:37:30
Speaker
crazy image of Pound banging on George Santayana's theater, Italian room. That's great, that's great. But maybe say more, Kristin, about, I mean, you gave us that wonderful sort of via Basil Bunting and that whole bit about what Kondansari and Dick Chung, but maybe tell us more about
00:37:54
Speaker
from a kind of poetics point of view or poetic history point of view, like what condensation, why that would have been a virtue or what that would have meant or like what kind of, you know, sort of what view of poetry is implied by seizing upon that
00:38:14
Speaker
I don't know if etymology is quite the right word, but whatever, you know what I mean? That sort of genealogy or something of poetry. So this, I mean, I guess I'm wanting to ask you to talk about, this sounds more like early pound, like imagism or something, but say more about that. I go back to imagism. I wasn't sure if you had something earlier. Not really. I mean, I didn't really have a particular thing in mind. I'm just interested in hearing you talk about it. So imagism
00:38:39
Speaker
for readers who might not have encountered, listeners who might not have encountered that word yet is a sort of very early version of poetic modernism that comes out basically of London in the 1910s articulated by Pound, by T. Hume, early practitioners at HD and William Carlos Williams, which advocates for a tremendous clarity and precision
00:39:07
Speaker
in writing, which is driven by the image which Pound calls, you know, somewhat confusingly, an emotional and intellectual complex complex. Yeah, in an instant of time, which is kind of a tough definition to get your head around. Images poems tend to be one thing small, they tend to they tend to be a little they tend to be driven by a sort of
00:39:33
Speaker
a relation to visuality that is also playing with metaphor. And they tend to isolate a single image and I mean image here, not in the kind of complex sense, but in the in the sense of like a single thing, you know, the apparition of these faces, sort of single apparition and to dive into that. So I think Nidhika is really playing with that history. You know, one of the complicated things about that that's early pound.
00:40:03
Speaker
And of course Pound goes on to write 800 pages of the cantos. If we want to talk about poetry as condensation, condensary, one thing that I think this poem suggests is doing it, actually doing it, not saying that that's a definition of poetry and then writing 800 pages of crazy or of length, but it's this sort of
00:40:29
Speaker
It's also taking seriously the lessons of early modernism, and I think doing them better than someone like Pound himself did. That's lovely, that's lovely. So in passing, Kristin referred to this famous early poem by Pound called In A Station of the Metro.
00:40:51
Speaker
which is so short I can quote it for you here, the apparition of these faces in the crowd petals on a wet black bow. Two lines plus a title, you know, two lines joined either by a semicolon or a colon, it's different versions differ, right?
00:41:10
Speaker
the story that Pound tells about that poem and describing the ideas of imagism is itself instructive, right, where he says that he, you know, was on the Paris Metro, he had this vision, and he wrote like a 37-line long poem or something, and then he kept making— A work of second-rate intensity. Right. Something like that, he says. That's great. Right. Yeah. And then he made it shorter and shorter and shorter, and what he was left with.
00:41:38
Speaker
Right, or we can think, you know, to go back to this lovely image you gave us, or this sort of local kind of actual instance that you give us, it's as though that poem went into the condensary, right, and came out concentrated and sweet or something. But just for people who aren't as familiar with the matter of literary history, I think this really lovely kind of
00:42:04
Speaker
suggestion you just offered, I want to kind of elaborate just slightly for the benefit of listeners who don't know these dates inside and out is, you know, the idea is that moment in modernist history is from the early 20th century, from the teens, let's say. Remember, right, Niedeker's writing in the 60s here. By then, those modernists are still alive, most of them, right?
00:42:32
Speaker
They're in their old age, Elliot and Pound and Williams and so on.
00:42:36
Speaker
But Pound certainly has long since given up that kind of condensed form and is writing this sort of sprawling, epic poem, a poem including history. He says the cantos that Kristen says was like her first object of cutting her teeth against as a young scholar. Which I do not recommend, by the way. Just to be clear.
00:43:04
Speaker
It gave us the great Kristen Gogan. I mean, it's fine. So in a way, the attitude of this poem is sort of like taking a lesson from an ancestor, but turning it back on them and saying, I'm doing what you said better than you did, or more faithfully than you did, or really doing it, as you put it, really condensing.
00:43:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think I think that's, you know, the one thing I want to pick up with that is the sort of tone because there's a kind of bravura in the there's actually like quite a poundy and bravura or a modernist bravura and sort of challenging the kind of like quiet divas, one of the lines in the canto is you're sort of taking people on on their own terms. And I think, you know, nidakur is not
00:43:53
Speaker
She's not like the heroic woman shouting from the mountain, like, I'm going to take on my literary forebears and do it better than them. That's not her stance or her attitude. And I think I think that, like, especially later in the poem, you know, it it becomes very flat. There's a fall that I don't think is a sort of major fall. I think it's a sort of step down.
00:44:20
Speaker
Talk us through that. That's great. Yeah. So grandfather advised me, learn a trade. We now know that this sort of rather than a trade in the sense of something that will, you know, a specific set of skills or carry her throughout her life, she trades that in for the work of poetry. I learned to sit at desk and condense. It's a very deflationary idea of what being a poet is.
00:44:50
Speaker
I sit at desk, not my desk, not a desk. There's something even tighter in that lack of an article there or a possessive.
00:45:00
Speaker
and condensed, it's almost like she's squeezing in. Sorry, I'm making, I'm like making gestures and Cameron told me this quite still, so it's not to make a fuzzy sound. So in case there's any fuzziness, it's me like squeezing in. No layoff from this condensary. And really, you know, I think I kind of want to save that final stanza for a real discussion between the two of us because it's so ambivalent to me, especially that no layoff.
00:45:27
Speaker
But there is, you know, Niederke's images of writing poetry are always kind of minor images. She talks about, she wrote over the course of her life, she published very, very little. She wrote very slowly. This collected works is phenomenal, but there's a lot of white space, you know, it's a fairly, in some ways quite sparse. And her images for the work she does are sitting.
Women's Labor and Poetic Invisibility
00:45:52
Speaker
It's like sitting on
00:45:55
Speaker
She says in an earlier poem, she's talking about working at the Dairy Journal and she's surrounded by other women who also whack. And they have kids and they go to church and they go bowling or whatever they do. And Nidica goes home and writes poetry, which looks like doing nothing. She says, what would they say if they knew I sit for two months on three lines of poetry? Poetry is this slow process of eking something out.
00:46:20
Speaker
looks like not working. Exactly. What's interesting to me is somebody who writes about the relationship between poetry and labour, what work that looks like not working instantly speaks to me as the condition of women's labour.
00:46:32
Speaker
are working and the great insight of feminist labor studies is that women's work has not been seen as work or not been seen as legitimate work. The father goes out and works, the wife stays at home, and the mother stays at home and doesn't work. Exactly. A kind of wrong-headed person, but most people might have said or might still say,
00:46:57
Speaker
And what you're saying is that, yeah, that there's a kind of invisibility to women's work. Totally, totally. And there are, you know, that invisibility operates on many levels. It's like cultural, it's in the world of like the wage or the un-wage. Is this formalized as something that's paid or is it not? It's also, you know, Niedeker at this time is working as a cleaner, which is a kind of invisible work. It goes back to the kind of cliche of a housework that people only notice when it's not done. Right.
00:47:27
Speaker
If the work is performed, it removes things and it doesn't, it's a self-negating work. You don't see its traces. Right. Right. And presumably the hospital or wherever, I mean, I don't know, I'm just guessing here, but the hospital where she cleaned
00:47:43
Speaker
you know, what would have defined her doing her job well to them, that the hospital would have remained clean, but that they wouldn't have noticed her there either. Exactly. And there's a lot of, you know, because she cleaned the kitchen as well, there are stories of having to like physically remove, you know, this is often the condition of cleaners who are from work late at night or early in the morning, you physically remove yourself from the space like you're invisible. No one sees you there.
00:48:05
Speaker
It's as though little fairies had done it while eating or something. Yeah, totally. It's the kind of Disney version where the princess goes off to the ball and the mice pick up the whatever. I don't know.
00:48:18
Speaker
So what that immediately sort of brings up for me, Kristen, is a question about, you know, like now I'm wanting to know about modernist theories of the kind of impersonality of the poet. I mean, is there a way in which like the poet's work is also to be withdrawn from the scene of labor and invisible in some way? I mean, you were making a gendered argument, which I want you to get back to if that's what you want to talk about. And maybe these two things come together actually.
00:48:43
Speaker
I kind of want to hear you say a little bit more about impersonality, if that's okay. Can I throw that back at you? Is that cheeky? It's not cheeky, but I feel badly if I knocked you off the track that you were going on. Did you have more to say a moment ago about...
00:48:59
Speaker
Probably, but we'll get to that. OK, OK, OK. Well, I don't know. I mean, I too was noticing, for instance, I mean, there is a first person pronoun in this poem, so it's not as though the poem is entirely impersonal in that sense.
00:49:18
Speaker
I mean, just to zoom all the way out, I guess, from the point of view of literary history, again, there is this kind of talk, it mostly comes through the figure of T.S. Eliot about sort of modernist and personality, that the poem is the kind of evacuation or the evasion of the personal
00:49:40
Speaker
What I was going to say is I was noticing the thing that you commented on earlier. I learned to sit at desk, not at my desk, right? Grandfather is not my grandfather, right? It's not grandfather so and so. No, totally. So there's something kind of impersonal about that.
00:50:02
Speaker
I'm also thinking now about the essay that I talked about in the intro that you wrote about mare and gardening. This is another kind of image of what poetic labor might look like tending to a garden
Gardening, Psychoanalysis, and Poetic Identity
00:50:16
Speaker
or something.
00:50:16
Speaker
where the idea, you don't want to see the gardener in the garden, right? You want to see the garden. Maybe you do. I don't know. It depends on the gardener. I guess. My brain went lady chattel-y, totally. I see. And maybe also there's this idea that
00:50:39
Speaker
you know, the kind, the sort of, the fruits of the labor as it were in the case of poetry are meant to kind of become detached from the poet him or herself so that the poem can live on in its kind of, you know, perpetual state apart from the, you know,
00:51:06
Speaker
the kind of here and now flesh and blood contingencies of the poet's actual life or something. Yeah, I think there really is something about preservation here. If it's okay, I'm going to read another. I think it's okay because this one is even shorter. It's six lines, a very short Nida Capone. Often, and this is sort of in some ways similar to Dickinson, she doesn't title her poems. So, you know, when I write about this poem, I refer to it by its first
00:51:36
Speaker
line as its title. Okay, so for best work, you want to put forth some effort to stand in Northwoods among birch. This poem has six lines. It has a really, again, we can feel this kind of haiku resonance. It has an even weirder typography in that the central two lines are like pushed right to the right.
00:52:00
Speaker
But here, what she theorizes, effort, your best work, is standing extremely still among birch trees, you know, striated white trees. So there is this kind of self, self removal in personality.
00:52:18
Speaker
It seems to me like it's operating in a very different sense to the modernist one. Partly because of this stage, Nida Kosto's energy moves increasingly towards a kind of... Soon after this, she retires, hooray, and she and her...
00:52:33
Speaker
marries for the second time in her life and she and her husband spend a lot of time traveling around northern Wisconsin. She gets obsessed with writing long environmental poems. And so there's this sort of, I think this goes back to the essay written about the garden and also what you were just saying that things living on beyond you, this sense that what it means to create something for the future is to
00:52:55
Speaker
impose yourself only minimally upon the world. Well, so that sounds so right to me. And what I was thinking about when you read that, would you read it again, by the way? Oh yeah, totally, sorry. Vamp while you... Hang on, yeah, I just wasn't the page. Give me one second. Yeah, sure, take your time. What I was thinking of while you look is,
00:53:24
Speaker
The famous, I don't know if to call it modernist, modern poem about birches. Frost poem, birches.
00:53:32
Speaker
Which I love too. I love that poem so much. But it's just the opposite in a way. Totally. Totally. That poem is not about standing quietly and still in a, what is it, a stand of birches or a grove of birches or whatever. It's about literally riding and deforming them. A swinger. Yeah, exactly. It's about working on them in a kind of boyish, playful way so as to change them and leave them altered in one's wake.
00:54:02
Speaker
And also to change yourself, right? That's the kind of dialectical metabolism that is his moment of becoming. All sorts of masculinity going on.
00:54:19
Speaker
like the now flaccid birch or something. But Frost is like, he says, when I see birches, I like to think that a boy's been swinging on them. And then he sort of goes down that flight of fancy. And then he says, oh, I know that ice storms probably did it or something, right? But there's this idea that that kind of interaction with the world is what, and that's a way of climbing towards heaven, but returning to earth.
00:54:49
Speaker
So read the nidikura again. You have it now? I do have it now. Okay. For best work, you ought to put forth some effort to stand in Northwoods among birch. Maybe the effort is like, yeah, go on, go on. Yeah. Effort, I think, you know, the sort of silent rhyme on forth and effort, I think is really nice. Also the preposition among.
00:55:16
Speaker
You know, for Frost, and don't get me wrong, I really love that poem. It's, you know, she trades out the acting upon something for being amongst things. That's the kind of core of this.
00:55:35
Speaker
Yeah, non-imposition, I think is how I would describe it. Maybe the effort that's required is the effort of restraint. Totally, totally. Not doing the thing that you feel drawn to do, which is decline the tree or something. Oh, no, no. I'm so glad you said that because the title of this chapter that I'm, in my book, is Niedeker and the Work of Restraint.
00:55:54
Speaker
Oh, that's great. I feel like we're in a wake-up. Good, good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. So, okay, so I learned to sit at desk and condense.
00:56:07
Speaker
You know, I want to say sort of two things about that and hear what you think. So the first is that, you know, it would be one thing and it's not need occurs circumstance that this is a poet who's interested in the work of poetry and self-conscious about the way in which that work doesn't look like the work of other kinds of manual labor, especially.
00:56:33
Speaker
Nida Kerr herself, as you've described her to us, both engaged in the work of poetry and engaged in the manual labor of the sort of
00:56:45
Speaker
of that world. Sorry, I think the other thing I was going to say is I learned to sit at desk then maybe it's because the discussion we just had of the Frost poem and Niederke's relation to the, who knows if she was thinking about Frost poem, but I think it's an instructive comparison nonetheless, that maybe in that middle stanza, I learned to sit at desk and condense.
00:57:14
Speaker
is a kind of description of a discipline or of a kind of... Yeah, I mean, I guess say more than Kristin, if you would, about what discipline or restraint, you know, these kinds of... Yeah.
00:57:37
Speaker
I mean, it is very difficult to sit at a desk, I find, at least. Maybe this is my own. Yeah. I almost can't. I'm sort of I could spend about 20 minutes in one place and then I have to like move my laptop to a different seat. So not that Nida Kurt was in that particular circumstance, but, you know, what she insists on in this and in the poem I just read for best work, you have to put forth some effort to stand in North Woods.
00:58:04
Speaker
What she is insisting is difficult is not action, but is inaction, or what looks like inaction. I'm curious about the extent to which poetry is then a kind of action, the sort of condensing is, whether it is what looks like inaction or if it actually is. Maybe we can talk about that a bit more. Yeah.
00:58:34
Speaker
Yeah, but I think it's a sort of reformulating what effort means that it isn't sort of...
00:58:45
Speaker
shaping or changing things, but it is what it means to be totally still and removing. I learned to sit at desk at condense. I think one thing is interesting there is the way that that stanza, that tacit is constructed, there isn't an object after condense. I learned to sit in desk and condense my poems and condense lines, condense whatever. And there is something that- Condense life or experience or whatever. Yeah. And this is also the only stanza that has the
00:59:14
Speaker
Well, the grandfather writes me, but then we have the first person I learned to sit at desk and condense. It feels like there's a kind of self-diminishing, like she herself is condensing. Right. And if you really wanted to read those enjambance out loud, it almost sounds more kind of effortful. I learned to sit at desk and condense. I'm sort of overdoing it just to draw out the effect. The other
00:59:44
Speaker
way back at the beginning of this conversation when you said, are there two sort of senses of condense or condensary? There's a local and there's this sort of avant-garde intellectual version of it.
00:59:56
Speaker
I wasn't sure if for the second you were going to talk about Freud and you know, like, you know, because there's this tradition and in sort of psychoanalysis of thinking of condensation as a, as a kind of, um, I mean, I'm not going to describe this in any kind of expert way and please fill in if you think I'm getting it wrong or whatever, but this kind of, um, psychological phenomenon that humans can't help but perform in which
01:00:23
Speaker
And the typical example that's given is like a thing that happens in a dream, let's say, is a condensed version of some kind of set of psychological kinds of attachments or events that are happening in you. So condensed in the sense, not just that like a long story is turned into a short one, but like
01:00:47
Speaker
two things are merged into each other. I had a dream about my mother, but my mother was my school teacher, but then later I was married to her and that kind of thing that might happen in a dream.
01:01:01
Speaker
Um, not mindry. Yeah, I was like, that's the one we're going with. Um, so, so I don't know why, why might that be right? I mean, I guess sort of biographically, I want to know, like, would need a curve cared about Freud have been thinking. I mean, she's by 62, she could have been, I don't know, but just historically, but even apart from that, would it be interesting or does that, does that kind of condensation
01:01:29
Speaker
have a role to play here. I mean, my first instinct is to say, well, maybe not, because it seems like not effortful. In fact, it's sort of automatic, right? And yet,
01:01:42
Speaker
I don't know. On the other hand, I want to say, well, the kind of condensation that is in poetry is maybe like the kind of psychoanalytic version of condensation. But now you say more about this. I mean, doesn't Freud describe it as the dream work at one point? Yeah. So I have to, I actually hadn't thought of this at all, and I really love this. But, you know, I know that she was very interested in surrealism earlier on. I really haven't thought about Oediger and Freud, so I can't speak to, I can only speculate. But, you know, the two things, and this is just riffing off what you were saying that I thought about, is that
01:02:13
Speaker
condensation, the condensary that happens in your dream is a form of distortion, right? For one of the dream distortions that change your mother from just your mother to also your schoolteacher. Whatever. She's a different example. Yeah, it changes like you're an elephant to your pet cat. There's something
01:02:40
Speaker
So part of the condensary that she's talking about here, like both thickens and also clarifies, but actually there's something, I don't know, I'm curious about a condensary that distorts. I do know that there's some, I don't know the German one. Is it possible that the German that gets translated in the standard edition of Freud as condensation is related to the dictung? I don't know. I know that some people, I have this now vague memory.
01:03:10
Speaker
Gosh, this is your listeners, you're now hearing the kind of, I don't know, maybe the appeal for you, or I think the flaw of this form in which we're just sort of thinking on our feet and with a little bit of research, we would have had something more considered to say. But I feel as though I've heard people talk about, oh, a better translation for condensation that that ship has sailed would be thickening, that that better gets at what Freud is describing. And I wonder if that's because it preserves somehow this kind of,
01:03:38
Speaker
Germanic kind of root or other things. Yeah. And also the like gluing together of multiple things. But the sort of condensation of milk. The way one way that's different from psychoanalytic condensation, as I understand it anyway, is that what it's doing is removing something rather than adding to multiple things. Right. Right. And and that the effect of that is that you're doing it to sort of reduce something to its essence, to its sort of right. You're sort of removing impurity.
01:04:07
Speaker
Yeah, right. Whereas an excess things that are not required, you know, you create the more pure thicker version of the thing. Right. But then I would say the second thing I'm saying is that the kind of condensation in a psycho-analytic sense, what that requires is then.
01:04:26
Speaker
therapy, like it requires interpretation in the way that like, to me, you know, Freud is much more interested at the interpretation than the dream itself. So there's this sort of like bringing things together or they to them be able to bring them right apart. I mean, obviously, we spent like over an hour talking about this poem, but I'm curious whether the same kind of implication of
01:04:47
Speaker
interpretation is present in how she talks about that word, how she uses it. In other words, if poetry's condensation is like psychoanalytic condensation, an implication of that might be that
01:05:07
Speaker
that what the reader of a poem does is like what the psychoanalyst does, or what the person who's thinking about their own dream does, which is to sort of unpack it. Yeah, that's maybe, that's like part two of our conversation. And is that what someone does with condensed milk too? I mean, does one add water back to, I mean, is that done for commerce so that it can be shipped here or there or preserved or something, or is it a valuable ingredient in its own right,
01:05:37
Speaker
It's a valuable ingredient, condensed milk is a valuable ingredient in its own right. And it's present in a lot of desserts and a lot of things. And also as a kind of, you can have very small quantities of it because it's so sweet. So it can be quite a good, like you can add it to things that are less sweet and it's quite an economical sweetener because you really need a tiny bit.
01:05:58
Speaker
You said you wanted to spend some time on the final stanza, and it's probably time we did that, so no layoff from this condensary. I guess one could read those words, emphasizing slightly different words, or with different intonations, and could suggest different meanings, but you said you had all kinds of questions about it, or thoughts about it, and I want to hear about those.
01:06:19
Speaker
Delighted to talk this one through with you. No layoff from this condensary or from this condensary through. There's a question of it is from this one, but not the other one. You know, I suppose my question to hear here is on the surface, it seems to me like she is marking a distinction between poetic work and other kinds of labor that whereas one is, you know,
01:06:42
Speaker
You work a job, but at any point you might be laid off. Nidica was intimately familiar with what that means. Whereas if you're a poet, it's like Adam's cast in the kind of Yeats way, you know, you're a condemned toil forever, that there's no end to being a poet. But I don't, I also want to know whether there's a sort of, could we make an argument for equivalence?
01:07:10
Speaker
that the condition of working is, if you get laid off while you're getting another job, there's an endlessness there. What do you think she, what does she land on here about the status of poetry, the work of poetry, the being of the poet in this final stanza? Yeah, sorry you're asking me that. I am, yeah. Yeah, I've decided to use this occasion to ask you your thoughts. All right.
01:07:40
Speaker
I don't know that this was part of the agreement. Yeah, I was going to say, I'm never being invited back on this podcast. No, yeah. Let's see. I mean, I guess the first way I take those lines is I think in the spirit that you were suggesting a moment ago as a kind of, I mean, I don't want to put too much on this word, but as a kind of joke, like no layoff from this condensary. You work at the
01:08:04
Speaker
milk condensary in town, you might well be laid off. And you gave us the biographical background that would suggest that that would be a kind of event that Nida Kerr would have herself known and been subject to. Right. If I don't have an employer, I can't be let go.
01:08:32
Speaker
from, you know, I guess
01:08:38
Speaker
Let's see. I guess I'm interested in the work being done by the word this in the penultimate line of the poem. So if the second stanza of the poem says, I learned to sit at desk and condense, that already is suggesting OK. And the title, of course, which we said we'd come back to, is sort of preconditioning us to understand that what's being described here is this other kind of labor.
01:09:07
Speaker
presumably not the kind of labor that the grandfather was in his sage. I mean, unless the grandfather is pound, right? And I'd want to say, well, that's actually a good example of poetic condensation, right? That grandfather might be both her paternal or maternal grandfather, whatever, and also as her pound, right? As a different kind of grandfather. And there's a kind of- A scary thought. Yeah, totally. And there's a kind of irony in that, right? Because they'd be giving very different kinds of advice or that advice would
01:09:36
Speaker
would mean something different. And I love what you said earlier about how in essence, she's sort of trading that advice in for another version of it, you know, trading the sort of practical advice from the actual grandfather for the, for the poetical advice from the, from the, um, um, from Pound. Um, but, but then when we get to no layoff from this condensary,
01:10:02
Speaker
Is that this condensary referring to the activity of poetic labor or to this particular poem? That is, the poet is identifying the text we're reading as the condensary that is being
01:10:26
Speaker
What does that then mean for the no layoff? If there's no layoff from this condensary, this particular poem, what do you think that would mean? Well, I don't know. Would it mean that she's... You're right, because it's easier to know what it would mean. If it were just to mean the work of poetry, then you could say, well, so long as what you mean by being a poet or
01:10:53
Speaker
you know, writing poetry or doing that labour is that, like, if you don't mean anything about publication or success or anything like that, but, you know, you can't be kept from doing it, right? Totally. And there's also something I think in no layoff that's like, there's no laying off. Like, I can't stop this. There's a kind of compulsive
01:11:12
Speaker
This is a condition, not an activity. And if it is an activity, it is one that I can't lay off. But to come to the second part of that question you asked me a moment ago, what would it mean if we were to take this condensary as referring not to the work of poetry in general, but to this poem in particular? I guess one answer that I'm toying with here is that it returns us to that conversation we were having earlier about
01:11:42
Speaker
the status of the personal in the poem. So this poem, let me say what I mean, this poem does have an I in it. And one thing you might say is that once that I has gotten into the poem,
01:11:58
Speaker
that eye is stuck in there. It's in there now, and there's no sort of separation possible of that eye from the poem as it's been written to that point.
01:12:13
Speaker
Like having said all of that, Kristen, what I mean, what I would say is what seems to me like the primary way of making sense of that final stanza is the first reading that you began with, right? Unlike the kind of labor, the condensary that is the one that purifies milk, the condensary that
01:12:41
Speaker
is the work of poetry is something from which one cannot be relieved, as it were. I agree. I think that the emphasis here does seem to me to be on difference, but it's always a partial difference because in order to describe her poetic work, the final word returns us to that industry.
01:13:03
Speaker
She's always bound to these terms, these local, these industrial terms. The second thing, I think this is more interesting, is it's actually a question of tone in this final line. The final stance on no layoff from this condensary. Do we read that as a sort of resignation? It's kind of, again, like,
01:13:21
Speaker
The poet is resigned to endless toil. Such is the curse of being a poet. Got to clock in again forever and ever. Or is it freedom? To live without the threat of layoff is surely a good thing. To not be laid off, to not have the possibility that you might lose your job is, I mean, that's
01:13:49
Speaker
Is she celebrating? How do we read this attitude? Well, it would be a thing to celebrate if and only if one had accepted as a kind of immutable fact that one lives in a kind of capitalistic
01:14:09
Speaker
you know, society in which having a job is a necessary thing in order to provide for oneself, right? So in other words, it's a kind of good outcome in a diminished world. Right, totally. It's not a utopian vision. And I think there's a question here. Not ever being laid off. Yeah, exactly. Not ever being laid off is like way worse than never having to work your shitty job. Right.
01:14:37
Speaker
It's worse than just being able to fill your days with meaningful work that leads to self-actualization and the beautification of our commons. It's good, but it's not the best. And if that's an attitude she has not only towards the job cleaning in the hospital kitchen, but also that's somehow the attitude she has towards the work of poetry.
01:15:02
Speaker
That's interesting, right? Yeah, I think that there's a question here of what, again, what I come up against here is restraint. There's no layoff from this condensary, and yet the way that she is thinking about this is within the bounds of a world in which there could be layoff. There are layoff from other things, certainly from the job she's whacking, and the times in which she describes this are material, materially bound there, these industries.
01:15:29
Speaker
Yeah. It's also, I mean, it occurred to me in this last part of our conversation that though I think for good reason we began talking about this poem by just jumping into the kind of multiple meanings of the word condensary, including the milk one.
01:15:52
Speaker
that word doesn't appear until the final word of the poem. So that on a first reading of the poem, you get to the verb condense and unless you're someone who is already predisposed to be thinking about the dairy industry or something, you're not likely to make that
01:16:13
Speaker
I just want to clarify that I am not predisposed to thinking about the dairy industry. Of course not, but right. You know, so, you know, in you asked earlier, well, it's interesting to think about who who did need to imagine a reader to be, which is probably not the kind of question we can answer decisively. But it might be interesting to think about at this moment, too. I guess the point I was trying to make was a relatively simple one, which is just that the the pun doesn't happen until the very end.
01:16:42
Speaker
And, you know, in other words, you could imagine a version of the poem in which the word condensary happened in stanza two and the word condense happened in stanza three in which the pun was introduced earlier on. And then, you know, you know, but but it's not that way, which which with the effect of that for me is to kind of
01:17:10
Speaker
make more like the last word of the poem, the thing that can't be disposed of, the kind of the pun or the sense in which the poetic labor is like this industrial kind of labor as well.
01:17:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's really true. And I would be curious to, you know, what would happen if you did change it so that condensity was in the second sander. I think there's also something here where the pun, the loaded term, also her theory of work, arrives at the very end.
01:17:55
Speaker
And we're left there. It leaves off without further theorizing or elaborating. And to me, that draws us into the no layoff, the endlessness that she has described in that final stanza. It feels like there is something unfinished or that she's refused to finish here because it lands so heavily on that final word. No layoff from this condensary. Do you know what I mean?
01:18:24
Speaker
It's drawing us into the poem's endlessness as it stops pretty abruptly. It's a short poem. Yeah. It's bringing us to her desk, in a way, and sort of keeping us there. Yeah, absolutely. And so the title, Poets Work, what do you reckon? Yeah.
01:18:51
Speaker
Well, you know, we can think of poets' work as, we can think of the word work as being both like labor, but also production, right? You know, you think of a, I don't know, Laureen Nidaker published a work of poetry, you know, in that sense, right? A work.
01:19:19
Speaker
object rather than activity. Right, the object that is the outcome of the labor. Yeah, I think it both has the object and the verb. And the labor itself, right. Yeah. And I don't want to try to tie the abode on it, but that is itself a kind of condensation of
01:19:46
Speaker
of the object and the labor itself. And now my mind is going back to
01:19:55
Speaker
sort of other moments in this podcast history when the idea of labor and its relation to poetry have come up in connection to Yeats, for instance, and among schoolchildren. Excellent poem. Yeah, yeah. So listeners might be thinking about that as well. But right, there does seem to be something very
01:20:22
Speaker
I don't know. I come back now to the question of tone, which you'd raised earlier. There seems to be something kind of pugnacious about that, about the ending of the poem. And that maybe has to do with who she thinks she's addressing. Yeah, I can't...
01:20:47
Speaker
So I think sticking with the title for a second, sometimes I feel that poets title things in a way that are like screaming out for analysis or to put them on syllabus or for the headliner, a book, which this is for me. And poets work is so, you know, oftentimes she didn't title her poems. They tended to have much more specific titles. They were about sort of people and places and things. So poets work is so,
01:21:15
Speaker
declarative and so broad, even as then we get into this kind of familial poetic history and this very specific word, condensary, so specific. It's like a thematic or conceptual title. Yeah. Yeah.
01:21:37
Speaker
thematic or conceptual title. Yes. I mean, rather than saying, you know, like poem for Paul or something, you know. Yeah. And why isn't it called like condensary or like at desk or something, you know, or writing? I don't know. There'd be something, writing is clear, is closer to poets work, but it's, um,
01:21:55
Speaker
It does feel like she's sort of setting, you know, the title announces a kind of theory of what poetic labor is going to be. And the poem as a grocery to me is pretty deflationary. You're sitting at your desk and you're doing very little and then there's no layoff from this condensary. We get that pretty unlovely heavy word at the end with very little elaboration. So that's in me again, there's this sort of
01:22:20
Speaker
This feeling of things that are stated plainly, there's very little elaboration on them, which is both a kind of restraint. She's restraining her lines and also leads us into the boundlessness of the poet's condition, which the final stanza.
01:22:35
Speaker
Yeah, but it's so interesting that the movement is, as you said, deflationary, but also moving towards boundlessness, which sound like opposed kinds of things, just as I imagine those words spatially or something. Yeah, they shouldn't sit together. I think that that's really contained in the no-layoff. There's a kind of resignation I read there. Yeah.
01:23:05
Speaker
Yeah. And deflation might look like condensation too. I mean, they're both, right? Bringing things down, making them smaller. Taking a larger volume and making it a smaller one, yeah. Yeah. Or a kind of reduction, yeah. But right, the claim being made there is that the work is perpetual.
01:23:26
Speaker
Yes, that the work is ongoing and perpetual and, you know, we've clocked nearly an hour and a half of this nine line poem. Cameron and I started, we were talking, we were like, oh, it's pretty short. Maybe we'll talk for like 45 minutes. Yeah, maybe we'll do, maybe this will be a short Close Readings episode. Yeah, I know. And I was, I was picking up my, you know, desire to keep it short and sweet, but no. So I think that- Well, we're not poets, we're critics, right? We are, exactly. That speaks to me as well. Something about the, like,
01:23:55
Speaker
particular interpretive labor of condensed poems. They require so much teasing and pulling and they are like rich and sweet.
01:24:05
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I hope what we haven't been doing is just like adding water back to the concentrated milk, which we've received. Yeah, they're the lovely image for criticism, generally. Water to milk, the next entry in the critical. Okay, well, let's not end with diluted milk. Let's end with condensed milk. Kristin, could I ask you to read the poem again? Of course. Poets work.
01:24:33
Speaker
Grandfather advised me, learn a trade. I learned to sit at desk and condense. No layoff from this condensary. Uh, Kristen Grogan, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's been a totally enlivening, um, hour, uh, plus talking about Nidacur with you. I've learned so much and I'll bet our listeners have too. It's been a total pleasure.
01:25:02
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me. What a joy. Good. Well, come back any time. Next time, Freud. Next time. Next time. Yeah, maybe not Freud. New Frost. Batches. Let's do that. Burges. Yeah, let's talk about burges. All right. Well, when that happens, I'll let the listeners know. And in the meantime, be well, everyone.