Name: Jennifer K Dick
Hometown: from Minnesota, grew up in Iowa City, Iowa
Current cities: officially reside in Mulhouse, France, but I am often “on the road”, running reading events in Paris, attending readings and conferences elsewhere, or searching out new adventures during the summer months. As a Sagittarius is want to be, I am endlessly prone to travel.
Occupation: Maître de Conférences at the Université de Haute Alsace
Age : going too quickly towards 50 !
What does poetry mean to you?
Everything. What occurs first? Breath, life, light, a window onto a world even when one is in the darkest of dank, dungeon rooms, a ticking bomb of thought excursions dragging me out of myself and into/through the others linguistically, historically, socio-politically.
Who is your favorite poet?
A poet I found hard to appreciate at first, and now admire: Lorine Niedecker.
Her work seemed too easy, until I started to play around with imitations—and dug into her deceptively simple complex style. Trying to write a Niedeker-esque poem reveals their hidden complexities.
For example, her poem (online at The Paris Review website, thank you to them):
Who was Mary Shelley?
Who was Mary Shelley?
What was her name
before she married?
She eloped with this Shelley
she rode a donkey
till the donkey had to be carried.
Mary was Frankenstein's creator
his yellow eye
before her husband was to drown
Created the monster nights
after Byron, Shelley
talked the candle down.
Who was Mary Shelley?
She read Greek, Italian
She bore a child
Who died
and yet another child
who died.
For the anthology, I offer my attempt at a response to it. Here, I sought to comment within my poem on her poetry about reading and thinking about Shelley, and about my own not questioning or thinking about the things she was fascinated by:
While Reading Niedecker
by Jennifer K. Dick
Talked the candle down
Late with a dog-eared Frankenstein
Never questioning the origins of Shelley
Or each child born, died, born,
Tattered pages turning, turning in the night.
In my experience of trying to write through Lorine Niedecker’s work, I found her “dense and fixed”, unmelting into the universe I sought to recreate, staking instead her own territory. It is perhaps for this reason her work continues to appeal to so many readers, and has grown on me so that I, too, have come to a deep sense of appreciation for her work. Niedecker’s poetry carries me back to my own, Midwestern roots and times spent in Wisconsin. As for responding to her poetry, taking it into a new place, it seems to me that Niedecker herself was aware of how difficult it would be for her to be displaced, replaced in some present of my or another author’s choosing. As she wrote :
“Don’t melt too much into the universe, but be
as cold and dense and fixed as you can.”
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Jennifer K. Dick runs the Ivy Writers Paris reading series. She has 2 books forthcoming this summer: Lilith: A Novel in Verse (Corrupt Books, Luxembourg) and That Which I Touch Has No Name (Eyewear Books, London).