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| Image from avajae.blogspot.com. |
Lorine Niedecker's "You are my friend"
You are my friend--
you bring me peaches
and the high bush cranberry
you carry
my fishpole
you water my worms
you patch my boot
with your mending kit
nothing in it
but my hand
------------------------
I'm glad I watched the video discussion! Otherwise, I would have been stuck with the macabre image of a severed hand in the boot of a car.
I loved reading the poem again. "My hand" has so many levels of meaning: Independence, the act of writing, the power to choose. I also liked how the poem turns the tables on a conventional reading like Margaret Atwood's "You Fit Into Me." She begins with gifts being given: peaches, high bush cranberry. Then moves into acts of service like carrying a fishpole, watering worms and mending a boot. The last line deliberately disorients. What I thought, initially, to be a bitter ending (well, I don't have a friend, I only have myself) can actually be read as a happy self-sufficiency and, more than that, I also liked how this self-sufficiency is also the act of writing itself.
Among the poets we've taken up, I really enjoy Niedecker's brand of thumbing her nose at convention. I guess that's why I like her.
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