July, waxwings
on the berries
have dyed red
the dead
branch
Hello Friends—
There's a bit of
Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" in today's untitled poem by Lorine Niedecker — another selection coming to you because of a gift given to me: a new friend Christie introduced me to the Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker (Thanks, Christie!). Niedecker's biographer calls her "America's Greatest Unknown Poet," an impossible claim. But I can say this: Niedecker's
The Granite Pail: Selected Poems may have claim to the single greatest "blurb" I have ever encountered on the back cover of a poetry collection:
"The book is a good one in the way I want books of poems to be good. It is good poetry. It is difficult and warm. It has life to it."
— WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
I'm not sure if you have to have read a lot of blurbs on the backs of poetry books, and/or a lot of William Carlos Williams, to appreciate this gem, or if it'll come across even if you just have a sense of what the blurbs on the backs of books are like more generally — you'll have to write back and let me know. I wish that Jake Adam York were alive for me to share this blurb with — he wrote a little piece for the
Kenyon Review called
"A Field Guide to North American Blurbs" and I just know that he would love it.
Happy National Poetry Month!
Ellen