Lorine Niedecker of Lake Koshkonong (2008)

There are two ways to look at Lorine Niedecker’s life. One is to see her as a 20th century John Clare: isolated in a primitive rural backwater, keeping body and soul together through wretched menial jobs, writing poems appreciated by a handful of admirers but otherwise completely unknown. Another way is to see her as a 20th century Tao Qian: a clear-sighted and earnest literary sophisticate who, disdaining the life of the metropolis, preferred to retire back home to the farm and send poems about the pleasures of seclusion to less fortunately-situated friends. Niedecker’s poems imply both.

The thought that there was a significant modernist poet living in Jefferson County, Wisconsin when I was growing up an hour south of there is chilling. Southern Wisconsin has its appeal—and it’s charming to read about Janesville and Glen Ellyn and Milwaukee—but I can’t forget Steve Goodman’s joke about “Beloit” being the sound a quarter makes when it falls in a toilet.

Niedecker was born on Blackhawk Island on Lake Koshkonong, where her parents rented vacation cabins. She went to high school in Fort Atkinson. In 1922 she started at Beloit College, but the next year returned home to care for her mother. Her parents lived in separate cottages, as her father pursued an affair with a neighbor. In 1928 Niedecker married and moved to Fort Atkinson, working in the Dwight Foster Public Library, and writing book reviews in the Jefferson County Union (Both still extant). Two years later she lost her job; the marriage fell apart, and she moved back to Blackhawk Island.

In 1944 Niedecker began working as stenographer and proofreader for the Fort Atkinson, Hoard’s Dairyman (Which is still being published). In the early Fifties her eyes went bad and she quit the Dairyman, and tended her ailing, separated parents. She lived in a one-and-a-half room summer cottage without plumbing. After they died she scrubbed floors for a Fort Atkinson hospital. In the Sixties she was discovered by the younger generation (preeminently Ian Hamilton Finlay in Edinburgh, and Cid Corman in Boston and Kyoto) and began to publish regularly. She married a second time. She died in 1970. Her Collected Works, edited by Niedecker scholar Jenny Penberthy, was published in 2002.

The literary event of Niedecker’s life was encountering the February 1931 issue of Poetry magazine. The “special Objectivists issue,” guest-edited by Louis Zukofsky presented poems by himself, Basil Bunting, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and seven others.

Niedecker was moved to write to Zukofsky, who became her life-long advocate, advisor and confidant, and—briefly and disasterously—her lover. Also, in his role as Ezra Pound’s designated networker in America, Zukofsky introduced Niedecker to the Bunting, Reznikoff and others who became her audience and colleagues.

It’s hard not to see the Objectivists as saints of modernism. They had working-class backgrounds and, except for Oppen, lived hand-to-mouth lives. Most lived outside or estranged from mainstream literary or cultural centers. Except for Zukofsky, none of them were professional writers, none lived literary lives: Oppen was a carpenter, Rakosi an social worker, Renzikoff, Bunting and Niedecker did some journalism among other odd jobs.

Their models from the older generation were Apollinaire, H.D., early T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Wiliam Carlos Williams. I.e. the Imagists and cubist poets. Not Yeats, not the Anglo-Catholic Eliot, not James Joyce, not (exept for Niedecker) the Dadaists or Surrealists. Their work had a beneficial influence, in turn, on the later work of Pound and Williams.

Their orientation towards the social and political issues of the day was leftist, but they disdained their era’s progressive modes of propaganda, Socialist Realism, and populism.

They all experienced long silences, either deliberate or through circumstances: 27 years separate Oppen’s first and second books. Reznikoff and Niedecker experienced 13 year gaps. For most there was a 14 year hiatus from the mid-Forties to the late Fifties.

What did Objectivism mean? Zukofksy proposed

Writing … which is in detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody.

Bunting, Oppen, Rakosi, Reznikoff and Zukofsky, shared certain caracteristics:

Descriptive. They presented “the thing in order to convey the feeling.”

Details. They composed poems of a collection of detailed images, or subtle deployments of simple words.

Local. They wrote about specific situations in specific places. The Americans were American to the point of being parochial.

Ordinariness. They adhered to ordinary situations, images, vocabulary, avoiding anything exotic, recherché, bizarre, violent, surreal. They avoided classical mythology, which is practially ubiquitous in 20th century poetry. They avoided myth and ritual to the point of sounding prosaic and trivial.

Sincerity. The writing of the poem was an encounter between the writer and the world in which authenticity was the paramount virtue. Which meant no fudging of the things, their reflection in the writer, or the totality of the situation. The form of the poem came of that encounter directly, not out of application of any a priori form.

Un-literary. They avoided references to European and Asian languages, literature, theology, and culture. (Contra Ezra Pound, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot.)

Visionary. The point of the focus on the thing and the act of perceiving the thing was was an empirical vision, a vision without anything super-natural. The poem opens the self up to the situation, attending widely and deeply.

Anti-colloquial. The poem for them was an object constructed on paper: it was not speech, not colloquial language. Both the spoken vernacular and the literary vernacular (journalism, the prose and verse of popular entertainment) were seen as obstacles to vision. Syntax was optional. Ezra Pound’s work in a widest range of dialects and languages could be seen as an attempt to demolish the authority of vernacular English. Likewise Pound and Zukofsky’s recourse to intricate antique verse forms was to avoid the vernacular.

The Objectivists were a pretty sober bunch, but somehow what Niedecker initially got out of them was the freedom to be sassy:

There’s trouble with the moon-maker’s union, the blood-maker’s union, the thought-maker’s union; but the play could be altered. (“Promise of a Brilliant Funeral,” 1931)

*

… Future studies will throw much darkness on the home-talk. (Progression V, 1933)

It was as if Dorothy Parker had collaborated with Hans Arp:

Thou hast not foreign aggression but world disillusionment dedicated to the proposition of an ice cream cone and the stars and stripes forever over the factories and hills of our country for the soldier dead (“Memorial Day,” 1934)

As the Thirties progressed, probably under the influnce of her new colleagues, her poems became sparer and sparer. In the sequence “Next Year or I Fly my Rounds Temptestuous,” written on the pages of a bi-weekly 1935 calendar, she whittled single lines or phrases, with each syllable weighed for consequence and musicality:

I can always go back to fertilization, kimonos, wrap- arounds and diatribes. …

*

English Signers— They came in sing- ing and went out walking. …

*

I talk at the top of my white resignment. …

*

All night, all night, and what is it on a post- card.

She developed the possiblities of the acidic/tender aphorism:

I spent my money by the ocean and have not any to fill a tooth. (circa 1936)

*

O Matchbox, save him, he’s the best timidity we have. (“The President of the Holding Company,” 1936)

Starting in 1938 she worked as a writer and research editor with the Federal Writers’ Project’s Wisconsin: A Guide to the Badger State (published 1941) Individual writers were not acknowledged, but the section on “Plant Life” is suspiciously tangy:

In the thinned woods and long old fencerows grow beaked hazel, chokecherry, northern gooseberry, wild black currant, and bush honeysuckle. In winter the shiny, leathery leaves of the pipsissewa and the delicate needles of the yew and juniper are green beneath the snow. …

Early in the spring the hepatica puts forth a small, enamel-like blossom, varying from bluish-lavender to pink; then come the straw-colored Clintonia and the dwarf Solomon’s seal, a mass of white flowerets. Ladyslippers, including the yellow and pink moccasin, grow widely, as do the related rein orchis and saprophytic coral root. …

Often the waxy-white golden-centered trillium and purple-striped Jack-in-the-pulpit grow here, and the showy ladyslipper, with purple hood arched over its white spur-like lip. Bellwort, Dutchman’s breeches, violet and purplish-brown ginger blossom in early May. …

Spring beauties, which close when a cloud obscures the sun, make solid sheets of pink in the hardwood copses before the trees put forth leaves.

As the ‘Thirties passed into the Forties, Niedecker’s tone darkened. Absurdity ceased being a joke. Her poems became glimpses of selfish, shattered lives, and pointless toil. The beauty of the world was a consolation, but it existed as a fact beside its pain, its stupidity, the contraction and grinding down. The poems of her 1946 collection New Goose took the form of discrete found objects: overheard speech, found texts. They often fall into terse folk-ish rhymes:

Mr. Van Ess bought 14 washcloths? Fourteen washrags, Ed Van Ess? Must be going to give em to the church, I guess.

He drinks, you know. The day we moved
he came into the kitchen stewed,
mixed things up for my sister Grace—
put the spices in the wrong place.

Photographers like Lange, Shahn and Evans of the Farm Service Administration were also at that time focusing on the squalor and waste of rural life. Not that Niedecker has any optimism about reform:

My daughters left home I was job-certified to rake leaves

in New Madrid.

Now they tell me my girls
should support me again
and they’re not out of debt
from the last time they did.

To the extent that she permited herself escape, it occurred in the in the form of nostaglia for the days of the early pioneers, admiring their tollerance:

Witnesses judged him as good as the average for humanity, honesty, peace. The court sent him home to his children, his dogs, his gun, and his geese. (“Du Bay”)

And admiring the intimacy with nature of the early naturalists:

Asa Gray wrote Increase Lapham: pay particular attention to my pets, the grasses.

*

Tried selling my pictures. In jail twice for debt. My companion a sharp, frosty gale.

In England unpacked
them with fear:
must I migrate back
to the woods unknown, strange
to all but the birds
I paint?

Dear Lucy, the servants here
move quiet
as killdeer.
(“Audubon”)

There are outburts of ominous Objectivist clear-sightedness:

A monster owl out on the fence flew away. What is it the sign of? The sign of an owl.

But she doesn’t entirely shy away from the mythic, especially when dealing with her family:

The clothesline post is set yet no totem-carvings distinguish the Niedecker tribe from the rest: every seventh day they wash: worship sun; fear rain, their neighbors’ eyes; raise their hands from ground to sky, and hang or fall by the whiteness of their all.

*

The museum man! I wish he’d taken Pa’s spitbox! I’m going to take that spitbox out and bury it in the ground and put a stone on top. Because without that stone on top it would come back.

And Europe intrudes in the form of news of the war:

The brown muskrat, noiseless, swims the white stream, streched out as if already a woman’s neck-piece.

In Red Russia the Russians
at a mile a minute
pitch back Nazi wildmen
wearing women.

*

The number of Britons killed by German bombs equals the number of lakes in Wisconsin.

But more German corpses
in Stalingrad’s ruins
than its stones.
(from the New Goose manuscript, circa 1945)

(The 1941 Guidebook reported “8,500 counted lakes.”)

She began to combine individual units into cinematographic sequences:

Well, spring overlows the land, floods floor, pump, wash machine of the woman moored to this low shore by dearness. Good-bye to lilacs by the door and all I planted for the eye. If I could hear—too much talk in the world, to much wind washing, washing good black dirt away.

Her hair is high.
Big blind ears.

I’ve wasted my whole life in water.
My man’s got nothing but leaky boats.
My daughter, writer, sits and floats.

In the ten years after the war the darkness often overwhelms. Her poems speak of the pain of loneliness and isolation:

In the great snowfall before the bomb … I worked the print shop right down among em the folk from whom all poetry flows and dreadfully much else.

… But what vitality! The women hold jobs—
clean house, cook, raise children, bowl
and go to church.

What would they say if they knew
I sit for two months on six lines
of poetry?
(circa 1950)

There are also doubts:

What horror to awake at night and in the dimness see the light. Time is white mosquitoes bit I’ve spent my life on nothing.

The thought that stings. How are you, Nothing,
sitting around with Something’s wife.
Buzz and burn
is all I learn
I’ve spent my life on nothing.

I’m pillowed and padded, pale and puffing
lifting household stuffing—
carpets, dishes
benches, fishes
I’ve spent my life in nothing.
(1951)

And there is the end:

The death of my poor father leaves debts and two small houses.

To settle this estate
a thousand fees arise—
I enrich the law.

Before my own death is certified,
recorded, final judegment
judged

taxes taxed
I shall own a book
of old Chinese poems

and binoculars
to probe the river
trees.
(1955)

But the poems also speak of the redemption of solitude, freedom, intimacy with nature:

In summer silence moves Fall pheasants’ cry: rifle-shells-in-tin-box-rattle, over us wax-leaf poplars shine and shudder as my mother, continue after the mind is blown.

*

Dead she now lay deaf to death

She could have grown a good rutabaga
in the burial ground
and how she’d have loved these woods

One of the pallbearers said I
like a dumbfool followed a deer
wanted to see her jump a fence—
never’d seen a deer jump a fence

pretty thing
the way she runs.
(1951)

*

Along the river wild sunflowers over my head the dead who gave me life give me this our relative the air floods our rich friend silt

They often take the form of letters, letters from the country. Her life was intensely local, but her poems are not overburdened with local color. She was not attempting a natural history or a guidebook. She felt too intensely about her home to think it was unique. Her specificities are not tied to Jefferson County.

During this period she also wrote rhymed stanzas. Ezra Pound’s translations of the Confucian Odes were published in 1954, and perhaps he influenced her, and she influenced him:

In moonlight lies the river passing— it’s not quiet and it’s not laughing.

I’m not young
and I’m not free
but I’ve a house of my own
by a willow tree.
(1949-55)

Around 1957, the year all biographies point to as a personal nadir (she became a hospital charwoman), Niedecker returned to a more aphoristic form, her syntax loosened up, punctuation fell away, and humour resurfaces:

Van Gogh could see twenty-seven varieties of black in cap- italism. (1958)

*

No matter where you are you are alone and in danger—well to hell with it. (1958)

And landscapes become more benign.

How white the gulls in grey weather Soon April the little yellows

*

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

(Both of which have been set to music by by Harrison Birtwistle.)

Kindness, friendship, and love appear, both present-day and historical:

Old man who seined to educate his daughter sees red Mars rise: What lies behind it?

Cold water business
now starred in Fishes
of dipnet shape
to ache
thru his arms.
(1959)

*

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.
(1960)

*

The wild and wavy event now chintz at the window

was revolution …
Adams

to Miss Abigail Smith:
You have faults

You hang your head down
like a bulrush

you read, you write, you think
but I drink Madeira

to you
and you cross your Leggs

while sitting.
(Later: )

How are the children?
If in danger run to the woods

Evergreen o evergreen
how faithful are your branches
(1961)

From 1963 to her death in 1970, she explored new scenes and forms. The poems became longer: collages of observation, reflection, overheard or found words, all juxtaposed. She wrote about married life:

I married in the world’s black night for warmth if not repose. At the close— someone.

I hid with him
from the long range guns.
We lay leg
in the cupboard, head
in closet.

A slit of light
at no bird dawn—
Untaught
I thought
he drank

too much.
I say
I married
and lived unburied.
I thought—

She wrote about city places, highways, campuses, radio voices:

Open-field blue-wheeled gone by hot noon

to revolve
earth-evolved
mind-city.
(“Chicory flower on campus,” 1964)

*

Last night the trash barrel smoked from lighted paper This morning from sun burning the frost (1965)

*

I have to fly wit Venus arms I found fishing to Greece then back to Univers of Wis where they got stront. 90 to determ if same marble as my arms (“So he said on radio”)

The poems took on more history, geology and natural history, both as a connection and a symptom of dis-connect:

In every part of every living thing is stuff that once was rock

In blood the minerals
of the rock” “Radisson:
‘a laborinth of pleasure’
this world of the Lake

Long hair, long gun

Fingernails pulled out
by Mohawks”
(“Lake Superior,” 1966-7)

*

The smooth black stone I picked up in true source park

the leaf beside it
once was stone

Why should we hurry
Home

*

Unsurpassed in beauty this autumn day

The secretary of defence
knew precisely what

the undersecretary of state
was talking about

*

Where the arrows of the road signs lead us:

Life is natural
in the evolution
of matter

Nothing supra-rock
about it
simply

butterflies
are quicker
than rock …

Nobody, nothing
ever gave me
greater thing

than time
unless light
and silence

which if intense
makes sound
Unaffected

by man
thin to nothing lichens
grind with their acid

granite to sand
These may survive
the grand blow-up
(“Wintergreen Ridge,” 1968)

After she died, Basil Bunting wrote:

Lorine Niedecker … will be remembered long and warmly in England, a country she never visted. She was, in the estimation of many, the most interesting woman poet America has yet produced. Her work was austere, free of all ornament, relying on the fundamental rhythms of concise statement, so that to many readers it must have seemed strange and bare. She was only beginning to be appreciated when she died, but I have no doubt at all that in 10 years time Wisconsin will know that she was its most considerable literary figure.