Lorine Niedecker's "Paean to Place" and Its Fusion Poetics

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Early in life I looked back of our buildings to the lake and said, "I am what I am because of all this—I am what is around me—those woods have made me."

Lorine Niedecker, letter to Gail Roub, 1967

When Professor of English L. S. Dembo organized his groundbreaking recovery of the objectivist poets at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, in April and May 1968, he conducted interviews with Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl Rakosi. Dembo was a penetrating interlocutor, and the men gave interviews of record, published in Contemporary Literature in 1969.¹ This makes it all the more poignant that Lorine Niedecker, who lived only thirty-some miles down the road, near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, was not invited to participate. That is, the person in the objectivist nexus most accessible and closest to the University of Wisconsin-Madison was not brought forward either by Dembo or by Zukofsky, who was, perhaps, in a position to intervene. For a day after Zukofsky's interview on May 16, Celia and Louis Zukofsky, L. S. Dembo, and Lorine Niedecker spent time together (May 17, 1968), visiting the University of Wisconsin campus and arboretum (Niedecker, "Between Your House and Mine" 164–65; Correspondence 99, 353). However, given Niedecker's avoidance strategies when approached for a poetry reading by another University of Wisconsin branch, the one in Milwaukee, it is plausible that she would have demurred if asked for a public appearance, as she had in 1965, explaining, "I fight shy of that kind of thing" ("Between Your House and Mine" 77). "I fight shy" is a Niedecker motif. Niedecker is both shy, resistant, reluctant and what one might call "fighting shy"—aggressively, decisively, contendingly shy, both presenting her shyness and maneuvering it.² An early poem offers self-instruction: "Feign a great calm" (Collected Works 25).

In the late 1960s, Niedecker was in fact thinking seriously about objectivist poetics and about poetics in general.³ This nonevent—the noninterview of Niedecker as an objectivist or quasi-objectivist poet—coincided with her own debate (beginning around 1964, and continuing until her death in 1970) about what the term "objectivist" meant for her work. Niedecker is explicit about her intense connection with what she saw as objectivist practices (in Zukofsky and, later, in Cid Corman), yet in a 1966 letter to Kenneth Cox, she also makes clear her triple negotiation among poetic positions: "there was an influence (from transition and from surrealistes) that has always seemed to want to ride right along with the direct hard, objective kind of writing. The subconscious and the presence of the folk, always there" (Dent 36). Further, during this period, a trace of "projectivist" or Black Mountain poetics emerged in her thinking. This debate occurs in letters and is infused in the texture of "Paean to Place," written in the mid-1960s when she was in her sixties.⁴ That is, Niedecker fused or synthesized the resources of several poetics, correcting one with the other; her debates suffuse this important late poem.

What Niedecker meant by "surrealist" might be a phenomenology of consciousness (and unconsciousness) and the desire to render the movements of mind. A shorthand summary of Niedecker's long-standing interests under this rubric would include automatic writing, trance states, an interest in dreams, a sense of the absurdity of associations, consciousness and its movements, "subliminal" formations, possibly even the weirdness of everyday life—like Van Ess's washcloths (Collected Works 4, 95); there is no evidence to date that Niedecker was directly aware of "mad love" or other gendered elements in André Breton's playbook, including the display of personal obsession and fetish, nor that she evoked the sublimities of "the marvelous." Peter Nicholls has commented upon Niedecker's surrealism...