Lorine Niedecker 101

Though Lorine Niedecker remained a lesser-known figure in the story of 20th-century poetry for many years—she published relatively little and began to find notice only later in life—she wrote important, varied, and complex poems attentive to both the global and the local, the immediate, and the historical. She is often thought of as a poet of place: she lived her entire life in Wisconsin and spent many years in a cabin on an island that frequently flooded, documenting the ecological and social dimensions of that changeable landscape in vivid detail. But she was also erudite and catholic in her interests: she read widely; regularly corresponded with poets in New York, Japan, and Britain; and wrote on subjects ranging from Lawrence of Arabia to the atomic bomb. Her friendship with Louis Zukofsky and her precise, sound-driven work mean Niedecker often is regarded as an Objectivist poet. But she also experimented with surrealism, loved Chinese and Japanese verse, and for years thought of herself as a folk poet. She writes acutely about the experience of being a working-class woman—of economic insecurity, of being an outsider in the culture industry, and the triumph of making art despite it. She may be, above all, a craftsperson: she worked long and hard on often brief poems, approaching her writing, as she says in one of her best-known poems, as a “trade,” a vocation from which one could never be laid off. Ordered chronologically, this selection serves as an introduction to her “condensery” and the brilliant poems she made there.

“A monster owl”
With its spare language and short, angular lines, this early poem bears a resemblance to the work of Niedecker’s Objectivist friends and of Williams Carlos Williams, whose famous poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” is an instructive comparison. Like that modernist classic, Niedecker’s poem both perceives and reflects on the act of perception: it travels from a colloquial but editorial observation (“A monster owl”) to an attempt to see the owl as in itself and not as a “sign” or symbol of anything else. Although Niedecker by no means rejected figures such as metaphor or personification, her work consistently attends to (and is enriched by) the factuality of nonhuman life and the ecological realities of her environment, a quality that later drew much attention from ecocritics.

[Mr. Van Ess bought 14 washcloths?]
Published in 1946, New Goose was Niedecker’s first book—and for many years after, her only book. As the title suggests, the collection is a modernist rewriting of nursery rhymes, a project that grew out of Niedecker’s job with the Works Progress Administration, starting in 1938. Like William Wordsworth a century earlier, she self-consciously developed a folk poetics, seeking to write about the people she lived and worked alongside in language and forms they would recognize. This poem exemplifies the volume as a whole: its witty rhymes and brevity give the poem a sharp newness, but her writing here also feels unvarnished and intimate, like an overhead conversation between neighbors. These qualities at least partly come from the poem’s wry perspective, which neither glamorizes nor makes tragic the dramas (and gender relations) of small-town life.

[He Lived—Childhood Summers]
Niedecker intended For Paul and Other Poems, a manuscript she composed in the late 1940s and 1950s, to become her second book, but it never found its way to print. Its content may partially account for this—Louis Zukofsky, a poet with whom Niedecker had a decades-long relationship, was the father of the titular Paul and pushed Niedecker to excise more revealing passages. The “other poems” section of the manuscript also included numerous poems that were personal to Niedecker, including this elegy for her late father. Its honed quatrains are a hinge between her earlier folk stylings and her later, more confessional poems. Niedecker appears in the third person at the poem’s end, which imagines her writing as the unintended bequest of her father. Her final characterization of her “weedy speech” succinctly (and movingly) links her art to both her social class and the place she called home.

Three Poems
Brief as they often are, Niedecker’s poems frequently found their way to magazine publication in groups. Though she often composed in sequences, especially later in her career, Niedecker didn’t always arrange these published bunches by herself; she allowed editors to make selections as they saw fit. This triptych, originally published in Poetry in 1963, is nonetheless emblematic. Each poem is acutely thoughtful about the “full foamy folk” Niedecker counted herself among, but each also represents a different tendency in Niedecker’s work. The first piece looks outward, finding surprising figures for the figures she observes in a moonlit landscape. The second is more introspective, with the speaker complicating the definitions of prosperity and poverty and the conditions of spiritual fulfillment. The final poem feels like the sum of the first two: at once rueful and full of wonder, it draws attention to how hard-won Niedecker’s art was and how many years might be compressed into this “deep / trickle” of lines.

[I married]
This precise lyric comes from another manuscript that didn’t find traditional publication in Niedecker’s lifetime—in 1964, she published Homemade/Handmade Poems herself, printing a few copies of the book as gifts for friends, including the poet Cid Corman. Her reflections on her later-in-life marriage to Al Millen are clear-eyed: the “warmth” of their relationship is set alongside the practicalities of the institution, which include companionship and, especially for a working-class woman like Niedecker, economic security. Niedecker positions, as she often does, the personal within the historical: her reference to “long range guns” further hints at broader context, including the Cold War and its apocalyptic atmosphere. The poem ultimately cuts off, drawing no final conclusion about marriage, ending instead with an off-key dash that’s reminiscent of Niedecker’s important poetic predecessor, Emily Dickinson.

“Paean to Place”
This long autobiographical poem, first published in her collected poems in 1970, might be Niedecker’s magnum opus. Indeed, it borrows, more than most lyric poems, from the epic: it raises the characters and landscape of Niedecker’s life—her mother and father, their island—to the level of myth. As the title suggests, one way she achieves this is through music. Her stanzas are masterfully dynamic: sometimes they build momentum, cascading down the page, but they can also open suddenly onto white space, allowing for breath, pause, and silence. The soundscape she builds with rhyme and alliteration is as rich and varied as the setting she describes. Whether describing the sora rail’s call or the tension dividing her mother and father, Niedecker’s “sublime / slime- / song” at once grounds and moves, soars and returns us to the muck of Earth.

“Thomas Jefferson”
As in the work of Marianne Moore or Niedecker’s Objectivist friend Charles Reznikoff, this poem from Niedecker’s late manuscript Harpsichord & Salt Fish makes extensive use of quotation: it borrows fragments from Jefferson’s letters to present a rich portrait of a historical figure as a living individual. At times, it imagines the writer as a kind of curator, judiciously selecting and compressing from the archives to provide perspective, analysis, and insight. But Niedecker also effectively channels her subject, using collage to bring Jefferson’s subjectivity to life on the page. The opening section, for instance, speaks directly in his voice, evoking his feelings about his divided responsibilities.

“Darwin”
The last poem in her last manuscript, this longer biographical study marks the culmination of a lifelong fascination with natural history. Niedecker finds a fitting muse in the 19th-century scientist—Darwin’s ideas certainly shaped Niedecker’s own, especially her interest in mutability, a theme she explored again and again in poems such as “Wintergreen Ridge” and “Lake Superior.” She finds kinship in their process too: like Niedecker, Darwin was inspired by “holy / slowly / mulled over / matter” and found that “books are slow work.” But, as the poem so thoroughly demonstrates, that deliberateness yields work that stands the test of time. In vivid “jig-saw gists,” Niedecker does an astonishing job capturing the quiet enormity of Darwin’s contribution—and, in the process of doing so, she underscores the importance of her own.