Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works

By Lorine Niedecker and Jenny Penberthy

"The Brontës had their moors, I have my marshes," Lorine Niedecker wrote of flood-prone Black Hawk Island in Wisconsin, where she lived most of her life. Her life by water, as she called it, could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene where she also made a home. Niedecker is one of the most important poets of her generation and an essential member of the Objectivist circle. Her work attracted high praise from her peers--Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Cid Corman, Clayton Eshleman--with whom she exchanged life-sustaining letters. Niedecker was also a major woman poet who interrogated issues of gender, domesticity, work, marriage, and sexual politics long before the modern feminist movement. Her marginal status, both geographically and as a woman, translates into a major poetry.

Niedecker's lyric voice is one of the most subtle and sensuous of the twentieth century. Her ear is constantly alive to sounds of nature, oddities of vernacular speech, textures of vowels and consonants. Often compared to Emily Dickinson, Niedecker writes a poetry of wit and emotion, cosmopolitan experimentation and down-home American speech.

This much-anticipated volume presents all of Niedecker's surviving poetry, plays, and creative prose in the sequence of their composition. It includes many poems previously unpublished in book form plus all of Niedecker's surviving 1930s surrealist work and her 1936-46 folk poetry, bringing to light the formative experimental phases of her early career. With an introduction that offers an account of the poet's life and notes that provide detailed textual information, this book will be the definitive reader's and scholar's edition of Niedecker's work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: May 23, 2002
• ISBN: 9780520935426

Lorine Niedecker

Lorine Niedecker was born in 1903 and died in 1970. Among her published work is New Goose (1946), My Friend Tree (1961), North Central (1968), T&G: Collected Poems, 1936-1966 (1969), My Life by Water: Collected Poems, 1936-1968 (1970), Blue Chicory (1976), From This Condensery (1985), and The Granite Pail (1985). Jenny Penberthy is Professor of English at Capilano College, Vancouver. She is editor of Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet (1996) and of Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931-1970 (1993).

Book preview

Lorine Niedecker Collected Works

Edited by Jenny Penberthy

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the General Endowment of the University of California Press Associates.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

All of Lorine Niedecker's work appears here by permission of her literary executor, Cid Corman.

Page i: Photographs of Lorine Niedecker (1922, 1967) courtesy of Bonnie Roub.

Pages ii, 19, and 301: Ella MacBride, Eryngium, an Arrangement, ca. 1924 (detail). Courtesy of Martin-Zambito Fine Arts, Seattle, Washington.

© 2002 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Niedecker, Lorine.

   [Works. 2002]

   Collected works / Lorine Niedecker ; edited by Jenny Penberthy.

        p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 0-520-22433-7 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-520-22434-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

    I. Penberthy, Jenny Lynn, 1953- II. Title.

    PS3527.I6 2002

    811'.54—dc21

                                                                                                        2001005376

CIP

Manufactured in the United States of America

12  11  10  09  08  07  06  05  04  03  02

10  9   8  7  6  5  4  3   2   1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z3 9.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

for Kenneth Cox

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Life and Writing

This Edition

Poems                                                                         1928-1936

Transition

Mourning Dove

SPIRALS

Promise of Brilliant Funeral

When Ecstasy is Inconvenient

PROGRESSION

Canvass

For exhibition

Tea

Beyond what

I heard

Memorial Day

Stage Directions

Synamism

Will You Write Me a Christmas Poem?

NEXT YEAR OR I FLY MY ROUNDS TEMPESTUOUS

DOMESTIC AND UNAVOIDABLE

THE PRESIDENT OF THE HOLDING COMPANY

FANCY ANOTHER DAY GONE

News

1936-1945

O let's glee glow as we go

Troubles to win

A country's economics sick

Lady in the Leopard Coat

Jim Poor's his name

Scuttle up the workshop,

There was a bridge once that said I'm going

When do we live again Ann,

Missus Dorra

No retiring summer stroke

To war they kept

Petrou his name was sorrow

The eleventh of progressional

Young girl to marry,

I spent my money

Trees over the roof

NEW GOOSE

Don't shoot the rail!

Bombings

Hop press

Ash woods, willow, close to shore,

The music, lady,

For sun and moon and radio

She had tumult of the brain

My coat threadbare

Mr. Van Ess bought 14 washcloths?

Not feeling well, my wood uncut.

Remember my little granite pail?

A lawnmower's one of the babies I'd have

My man says the wind blows from the south,

Du Bay

I'm a sharecropper

Here it gives the laws for fishing thru the ice—

On Columbus Day he set out for the north

Black Hawk held: In reason

We know him—Law and Order League—

The clothesline post is set

I said to my head, Write something.

Grampa's got his old age pension,

There's a better shine

The museum man!

That woman!—eyeing houses.

Hand Crocheted Rug

They came at a pace

I doubt I'll get silk stockings out

To see the man who took care of our stock

A monster owl

Gen. Rodimstev's story/(Stalingrad)

Birds' mating-fight

From my bed I see

Asa Gray wrote Increase Lapham:

Pioneers

Well, spring overflows the land,

Audubon

van Gogh

What a woman!—hooks men like rugs,

The brown muskrat, noiseless,

The broad-leaved Arrow-head

NEW GOOSE MANUSCRIPT

To a Maryland editor, 1943:

Summer's away, I traded my chicks for trees

She was a mourner too. Now she's gone

Seven years a charming woman wore

The land of four o'clocks is here

Just before she died

Brought the enemy down

Nothing nourishing,

The number of Britons killed

Old Hamilton hailed the man from the grocery store:

Motor cars

Allied Convoy/Reaches Russia

Depression years

Coopered at Fish Creek,

A working man appeared in the street

Woman with Umbrella

Automobile Accident

Look, the woods, the sky, our home.

Coming out of Sleep

Voyageurs

I walked/from Chicago to Big Bull Falls (Wausau),

See the girls in shorts on their bicycles

When Johnny (Chapman) Appleseed

Tell me a story about the war.

Poet Percival said: I struck a lode

Terrible things coming up,

1937

Their apples fall down

The government men said Don't plant wheat,

1945-1956

New!

(L.Z.)

Chimney Sweep

Swept snow, Li Po,

Regards to Mr. Glover

Sunday's motor-cars

Let's play a game.

Lugubre for a child

Could You Be Right

Look close

If I were a bird

High, lovely, light,

Letter from Paul

Two old men—

Paul, hello

So this was I

Am I real way out in space

On a row of cabins/next my home

In moonlight lies

The cabin door flew open

The elegant office girl

When brown folk lived a distance

FOR PAUL AND OTHER POEMS

FOR PAUL

Paul

What bird would light

Nearly landless and on the way to water

Understand me, dead is nothing

How bright you'll find young people,

If he is of constant depth

The young ones go away to school

Some have chimes

O Tannenbaum

In the great snowfall before the bomb

Not all that's heard is music. We leave

Tell me a story about the war.

Laval, Pomeret, Pétain

Thure Kumlien

Shut up in woods

Your father to me in your eighth summer:

To Paul now old enough to read:

What horror to awake at night

Sorrow moves in wide waves,

Jesse James and his brother Frank

May you have lumps in your mashed potatoes

Old Mother turns blue and from us,

I hear the weather

Dead

Can knowledge be conveyed that isn't felt?

Ten o'clock

Adirondack Summer

The slip of a girl-announcer:

Now go to the party,

Dear Paul:

My father said "I remember

You know, he said, they used to make

He built four houses

In Europe they grow a new bean while here

Paul/when the leaves

I've been away from poetry

I am sick with the Time's buying sickness.

The death of my poor father

To Aeneas who closed his piano

My friend the black and white collie

"Oh ivy green

As I shook the dust

They live a cool distance

Violin Debut

OTHER POEMS

Horse, hello

Energy glows at the lips—

Hi, Hot-and-Humid

Woman in middle life

We physicians watch the juices rise

1937

European Travel/(Nazi New Order)

Depression years

So you're married, young man,

She grew where every spring

I sit in my own house

On hearing/the wood pewee

Along the river

He moved in light

Keen and lovely man moved as in a dance

He lived—childhood summers

I rose from marsh mud,

Dear Mona, Mary and all

Don't tell me property is sacred!

Wartime

February almost March bites the cold.

People, people—

July, waxwings

Old man who seined

Mother is dead

The graves

Kepler

Bonpland

Happy New Year

1957-1959

Linnaeus in Lapland

Fog-thick morning—

Hear

Cricket-song—

Musical Toys

I fear this war

Van Gogh could see

No matter where you are

How white the gulls

Springtime's wide

White

Dusk—

Beautiful girl—

New-sawed

My friend tree

1960-1964

In Leonardo's light

You are my friend—

Come In

The men leave the car

The wild and wavy event

FLORIDA

My life is hung up

Easter

Get a load

Poet's work

Property is poverty—

Now in one year

River-marsh-drowse

Club 26

To foreclose

To my small/electric pump

T. E. Lawrence

As I paint the street

Art Center

HOMEMADE/HANDMADE POEMS

Consider at the outset:

Ah your face

Alcoholic dream

To my pres-/sure pump

Laundromat

March

Something in the water

Santayana's

If only my friend

Frog noise/suddenly stops

In the transcendence

To whom

Margaret Fuller

Watching dan-/cers on skates

Hospital Kitchen

Chicory flower/on campus

Fall (Early morning corn)

LZ's

Letter from Ian

Some float off on chocolate bars

I knew a clean man

Scythe

So he said/on radio

I visit/the graves

For best work

The obliteration

Spring

The park/a darling walk/for the mind

Who was Mary Shelley?

Wild strawberries

1965-1967

Autumn

Last night the trash barrel

The boy tossed the news

Popcorn-can cover

Truth

Lights, lifts

O late fall

CHURCHILL'S DEATH

The Badlands

A student

Bird singing

Easter Greeting

CITY TALK

As praiseworthy

They've lost their leaves

My mother saw the green tree toad

TRADITION

Autumn Night

Sky

Nothing to speak of

Swedenborg

I lost you to water, summer

I married

You see here

Your erudition

Alone

Why can't I be happy

And what you liked

Cleaned all surfaces

Young in Fall I said: the birds

NORTH CENTRAL

LAKE SUPERIOR

In every part of every living thing

Iron the common element of earth

Radisson:

(The long/canoes)

Through all this granite land

And at the blue ice superior spot

Joliet

Ruby of corundum

Wild Pigeon

Schoolcraft left the Soo—canoes

Inland then

The smooth black stone

I'm sorry to have missed

My Life by Water

TRACES OF LIVING THINGS

Museum

Far reach

TV

We are what the seas

What cause have you

Stone

The eye

For best work

Smile

Fall (We must pull)

Years

Unsurpassed in beauty

Human bean

High class human

Ah your face

Sewing a dress

I walked/on New Year's Day

J. F. Kennedy after/the Bay of Pigs

Mergansers

Shelter

WINTERGREEN RIDGE

1968-1970

PAEAN TO PLACE

Alliance

Bash

The man of law

Not all harsh sounds displease—

JEFFERSON AND ADAMS

Katharine Anne

War

HARPSICHORD & SALT FISH

THOMAS JEFFERSON

The Ballad of Basil

Wilderness

Consider

Otherwise

Nursery Rhyme

Three Americans

POEMS AT THE PORTHOLE

Blue and white

The soil is poor

Michelangelo

Wallace Stevens

SUBLIMINAL

Sleep's dream

Waded, watched, warbled

Illustrated night clock's

Honest

Night

LZ

Peace

Thomas Jefferson Inside

Foreclosure

HIS CARPETS FLOWERED

DARWIN

Prose and Radio Plays

UNCLE

1951-1952

SWITCHBOARD GIRL

The evening's automobiles…

AS I LAY DYING

from TASTE AND TENDERNESS

Notes and Contents Lists

Notes

Contents Lists That Differ from Order in This Volume

Index of Titles or First Lines

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Lorine Niedecker's work has attracted the dedication of extraordinary people, many of whom have contributed to this long-awaited book. I am deeply fortunate to have met and worked with them.

Cid Corman in Kyoto, Japan, is Niedecker's literary executor and champion. Cid has given me his trust and unstinting support throughout the long years of work on this book and others. Many many thanks to him.

Another friend of Niedecker's, Kenneth Cox, deserves my profound thanks. From London, Kenneth has read and made astute comments on my work for fifteen years. I depend upon his sharp eye and keen mind. This book is dedicated to him.

I very much regret that Gail Roub, Niedecker's friend and champion on home ground in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, did not live to see this book. Gail contributed generously to this and other books on Niedecker with his immediate, unhesitating supply of crucial information, documents, and photographs. He worked energetically to promote Niedecker's recognition both locally and further afield. Bonnie Roub and family continue that work today. Many thanks to them too for their support.

Another Fort Atkinson resident has been essential to my study of Niedecker. Marilla Fuge, voluntary archivist of the Lorine Niedecker Collection in the Dwight Foster Public Library in Fort Atkinson, has kept me informed of her ongoing and thorough research into the Niedecker and Kunz family histories, and indeed of all Niedecker-related events in the community. The information she supplies me with is essential to my understanding of Niedecker's life on Black Hawk Island. Contact with Marilla is always a pleasure.

Other members of the Niedecker committee in Fort Atkinson have shown me hospitality. I remember with pleasure Joan and Milo Jones, and Bill and Bobbie Starke.

Karl Gartung and Ann Kingsley in Milwaukee have been warm friends and dedicated inventive promoters of Niedecker's poetry. My thanks to both of them.

Many others have helped me compile this edition. Here in Vancouver, British Columbia, Peter Quartermain deserves particular thanks for his meticulous readings of the final manuscript and for spirited encouragements along the way. For their essential contributions of various kinds, I also thank Eliot Weinberger, Marjorie Perloff, Michael Davidson, Jerry Reisman, Glenna Breslin, Jonathan Williams, Tom Meyer, Harry Gilonis, Alec Finlay, Jonathan Greene, Laura Furman, Sharon Thesen, Michele Leggott, Lisa Robertson, the late Joan Hardwick, Keith Alldritt, Linda McDaniel, David Martin, Rebecca Newth, and Capilano College. Tandy Sturgeon deserves special thanks since it was she who first persuaded the University of California Press to take on the publication of this book. We initially began the project together; after she withdrew, she generously allowed me to continue to use her dissertation disk copy of the text of the poems.

Many libraries and librarians have given me access to materials and have been generous with their help. I would like to thank Cathy Henderson, Tara Wenger, and Pat Fox at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Gene Bridwell and the late Charles Watts at the Contemporary Literature Collection, W.A.C. Bennett Library at Simon Fraser University; Rodney Phillips at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library; the Dwight Foster Public Library in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin (Lorine Niedecker Collection); Special Collections at the Stanford University Libraries (Robert Creeley Papers); the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (Yale Collection of American Literature); and the Department of Special Collections at Boston University Library (Lorine Niedecker Collection).

Thanks to Clayton Eshleman, who published Next Year or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous in Sulfur 41 (Fall 1997): 42–71.

Linda Norton, my editor at the University of California Press, has been a pleasure to work with. Her enthusiasm for Niedecker's poetry and her confidence in the importance of this book have sustained me through the years. I am also indebted to senior editor Rachel Berchten and copyeditor Kathleen MacDougall for their meticulous care in managing the production of the book.

Finally, my deepest thanks go to my family—my husband, René, and our sons, Julian and Thomas—for graciously enduring the interruptions to family life caused by this project.

J. P.

LIFE AND WRITING

The Brontes had their moors, I have my marshes, Lorine Niedecker wrote of watery, flood-prone Black Hawk Island near the town of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, where she lived most of her life.¹ Although few people endured for long the seasonal hardships of life on Black Hawk Island, Niedecker's attachments to the place ran deep. Her life by water could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene where she also made herself a home.

Lorine was an only child born on May 12, 1903, to Theresa (Daisy) Kunz and Henry Niedecker. The Kunz family owned much of the island—low-lying land bounded by the Rock River and Lake Koshkonong—including the Fountain House Inn, which they operated until Daisy's marriage to Henry in 1901. As a wedding gift, the couple were given several large properties on the island including the Inn, which they ran until 1910 when they sold it on account of Daisy's illness. In the course of Lorine's birth, her mother had lost her hearing and had gradually declined into isolation and depression over the following years.

Even so, the collection of photographs from Lorine's youth depicts a congenial childhood. There are many images of large family gatherings beside the river at the Inn, everyone dressed in turn-of-the-century finery. Lorine had a close relationship with her grandparents, particularly Gottfried Kunz, a happy, outdoor grandfather who somehow, somewhere had got hold of nursery and folk rhymes to entrance me. After the sale of the Fountain House Inn, Henry divided up the Niedecker property into lots, sold some of them, and built and rented cabins on others. He turned the Inn's pleasure launches into fishing boats and with a partner operated a very successful carp-fishing business. Lorine recalled, I spent my childhood outdoors—red-winged blackbirds, willows, maples, boats, fishing (the smell of tarred nets), twittering and squawking noises from the marsh.² Her work is distinguished by its attentive use of sound, a consequence perhaps of her poor eyesight and her experience of her mother's deafness, but also of her immersion in the rich soundscape of Black Hawk Island.

When Lorine was ready to start school, Henry built a large home on Germany Street (renamed Riverside Drive) in Fort Atkinson where the family lived until she entered high school. Her parents then moved back to Black Hawk Island and Lorine billeted with Fort Atkinson friends during the school week.

After graduating from high school in 1922, she enrolled at Beloit College to pursue a degree in literature but was called home in her second year to tend her mother, whose condition was deteriorating. Henry and Daisy's marriage had long since broken down as a result of her illness and his extended affair with Gerte Runke, a Black Hawk Island neighbor referred to in several of Niedecker's poems.

In 1928, Niedecker married Frank Hartwig, a former employee of her father's, and started her job as library assistant at the Dwight Foster Public Library in Fort Atkinson. Two short poems appeared in print that year. Transition reflects her exposure to the Imagist program of Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Amy Lowell. The second poem, Mourning Dove, begins with a condensed sample of Imagist practice followed by a riposte to its confining limits. However, she did admire the extended Imagist poems of H.D.'s Heliodora (1924). According to the notes inserted into her copy of Wallace Stevens's Harmonium (1923), she was drawn to the Imagists, to the wordy ones and the strange rhythms.³

In 1930 both Niedecker and her husband lost their jobs to the Depression. Unable to pay the rent on their home in Fort Atkinson, they each returned to their parents' homes, and the marriage effectively ended. Soon after, in February 1931, Niedecker read and was enthralled by Louis Zukofsky's Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine. She wrote to him with her latest poems, one of which was "When Ecstasy is Inconvenient. Zukofsky responded with interest and referred her to the magazine's editor, Harriet Monroe. This poem, which Monroe accepted for publication, reveals Niedecker's early surrealism, a style she was exploring long before Mr. Zukofsky referred me to the surrealists for correlation."⁴ By this time, she had read the major modernist writers whose work was available to her in Fort Atkinson, principally Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, H.D., Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, D.H. Lawrence. But it was contact with the second-generation modernist Louis Zukofsky that gave her direct access to the American avant-garde.

Though it was the Objectivist issue of Poetry that had initiated her contact with Zukofsky, Niedecker would never count herself among the original Objectivists—Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and Carl Rakosi. At the time, she was drawn to its affinity with her own writing: Thank god for the Surrealist tendency running side by side with Objectivism.⁵ She admired the priority Objectivism gave both to the nonreferential, material qualities of words and to a non-expressive poetry that rejected a too-prominent stance of the poet described by Zukofsky as imperfect or predatory or sentimental.⁶ It appears that her enthusiasm for an object-based poetics was limited. Instead, she pursued abstraction. Niedecker and her Fort Atkinson friend Mary Hoard—wife of Niedecker's future employer—were fascinated by the challenge of registering experience without recourse to representational form. Poems such as the 1934 Canvass series record the linguistic content of different levels of consciousness. According to Edward Dahlberg, it was Niedecker's habit to sleep with a pencil under her pillow so as not to miss any dreams.⁷ Dream, she noted, is full of syntax: 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.⁸

Niedecker and Zukofsky debated poetic strategies, he with little interest in the abstract or in surrealism but nevertheless impressed by the energy of her experiment. For the next thirty-five years they would continue their conversation in weekly letters, at times even more frequent. An edited selection of her letters to him is available in my book Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931–1970. Early in the friendship, toward the end of 1933, she made her first visit to New York, stayed in Zukofsky's apartment, became his lover, and fell pregnant. He insisted on an abortion, and she acquiesced. But the friendship survived these difficulties. Zukofsky continued to supply her with suggestions for reading, sent her copies of magazines and books that were difficult to obtain, read drafts of her poems, made suggestions for changes, and sent them to Ezra Pound, James Laughlin, and others for publication. For her part, Niedecker provided astute critiques of Zukofsky's work, plied him with questions, typed his poems, and prepared notes on subjects of shared interest. The writing that originated in this dialogue conveys a strong sense of shared endeavor.

Both poets wrote across genres. Niedecker gave the title TWO POEMS to her play scripts THE PRESIDENT OF THE HOLDING COMPANY and FANCY ANOTHER DAY GONE, and wrote another play script called DOMESTIC AND UNAVOIDABLE, which she imagined as a series of print stills projected on a screen. In the same period, she also wrote a long semi-autobiographical prose piece, UNCLE, based on her grandparents' and parents' lives. The work of her early years has a particularly strong and varied material presence: the prose-poems, the script-poems, the trilogy of "Canvass" poems printed side-by-side in allusion to a triptych of abstract paintings, and the gift-book palimpsest, which superimposes her own holograph writings onto a conventionally printed pocket calendar. As she said in a letter to Mary Hoard, This would of course be what no one else has written—else why write?⁹

During the period 1935-1936, she made a shift from overt surrealist experiment toward a poetry attuned to political and social immediacies: Looking around in America, working I hope with a more direct consciousness than in the past….¹⁰ She had read Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and, although not a member of the Communist Party, was committed to social reform. Her writing explored folk models and, in particular, the short metrical rhymes of Mother Goose—poems of anonymous authorship, of proletarian origin, and of subtly subversive intent. Another significant shift occurred in 1938 when Niedecker began work in Madison for the federal Work Project Administration (WPA). There she was a writer and research editor with the Federal Writers' Project, helping to compile Wisconsin: A Guide to the Badger State. The job focused her attention on the local and added

Reviews for Lorine Niedecker

[drenglish-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A sort of crabbed, recalcitrant playfulness ... The poems move in fits and starts, and always seem to be searching ways to avoid song (which is not the same as being without song). Rather than being grand, there's something withholding about the lacunae that fill up these pages.

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the past, I've enjoyed Niedecker's poetry in bits and pieces, here and there as I came to it, so it took me quite some time to get around to this collection. As a whole, though, the collected works read quickly and serve as a majestic and provoking journey through her years of writing. I'm not sure how often I'll come back to many of these poems, but there are many moments here that I'll remember and revisit. And, though I've only been aware of Niedecker's poetry in the past, I truly enjoyed the other works in this collection. Her essays are historical and transporting, utterly worth the read, maybe particularly for readers interested in character sketches or writing about their own families or surroundings. The gem of the collection, however, is the radio play that Niedecker based off of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. I'm not sure how I'd feel about it if I hadn't read the novel--my guess is that I wouldn't have been anywhere near so affected by it, though I may be wrong--but as it stands, even though I haven't read Faulkner's novel in at least five years, I found this one of the most powerful pieces of writing I've read in ages. Only about twenty very small (and doublespaced pages) in the collection, the radio play is packed with power--every word counts. Absolutely amazing. If you're a fan of Faulkner, honestly, whether you like poetry or not--this collection is worth your time and energy just for her prose and radio plays.Simply? There's something for most readers here. Recommended.