Silliman’s post about Chris McCreary as a New Precisionist got me thinking about Lorine Niedecker, one of my favourite poets.

Her precision with using language extends to her surreal mode of writing (as opposed to a mere Objectivist label). The sound progression of her condensed forms (mirroring an unfolding in meaning and/or image) functions in lieu of language.

Niedecker in describing the mechanics of her surreal poetry said: it means that for me at least, certain words of a sentence,-prepositions, connectives, pronouns— belong up toward full consciousness, while strange and unused words appear only in subconscious. (It also means that for me at least this procedure is directly opposite to that of the consistent and prolonged dream— in dream the simple and familiar words like prepositions, connectives etc… are not absent, in fact, noticeably present to show illogical absurdity, discontinuity, parody of sanity.)

‘For Niedecker the subconscious is a trace or sedimentation within language, a texture resistant to syntactical order in so far as it retains a certain original density and materiality’
Rural Surreal- Peter Nicholls

Check out Niedecker’s poems and essays in EPC

                  My Life by Water
My life
  by water--
    Hear
spring's
  first frog
    or board
out on the cold
  ground
    giving
Muskrats
  gnawing
    doors
to wild green
  arts and letters
    Rabbits
raided
  my lettuce
    One boat
two--
  pointed toward
    my shore
thru birdstart
  wingdrip
    weed-drift
of the soft
  and serious--
    Water

PROMPT:

Borrowing from Niedecker’s condensed forms and the transformation of the surreal and subconscious from content into a practice of writing and a poetics, try to use sound patterning, typographical layout and syntactical discontinuity to write poems abstract and subliminal in their private workings rather than in subject matter. When being economical, try to think of sound and space as substitutes for words, and the rhythm of the poem as the disjunctive and connective between images or moments.