shaker austerity

…there is, probably unintentionally, something of the Shaker austerity in [Niedecker’s] work, what Jonathan Williams describes in this poem, circa 1959, as “a lovely sound, put together with hand-tooled pegs”:

     My friend tree
     I sawed you down
     but I must attend
     an older friend
     the sun

Niedecker’s work emphasizes proportion, line, simplicity. The spaces between words and lines, usually emphasized in the typography, lineation, and enjambments, functioned for Niedecker as a reminder of the silence from which the poems emerged, by which they were pervaded, and to which they returned.

—August Kleinzahler, Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs: Selected Prose, 2000-2018 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017)

no nails

When the materials were available, they commissioned a contractor to build a three-story mission house exactly like the one that had been destroyed by fire. In the compound, carpenters cut timbers, gouged mortises, shaped tenons, whittled scores of wooden pegs and bored holes for them, until all the parts for the house were in a neat pile; then, in three days, they put the whole thing together,...without any nails as all.

—John Hersey, Hiroshima: A new edition with a final chapter written 40 years after the explosion, (Knopf, 1985), 85.