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special interest for a critique. It is not clear whether Niedecker wrote these words, whether they were based on her statements to the publisher, or whether she approved of the statements, but they are a signi¤cant datum: “She speaks and sings against all that’s predatory in ‘Mother Goose.’ Whatever in it is still to be touched or felt she recreates for people today to feel and touch in her—their—own way.” Predatory—plundering, pillaging, victimizing , destroying others for one’s own gain—all of these ideas suggest class and power relations in the “real” Mother Goose: the kings and queens, the taunted children. Indeed, New Goose proposes a number of different subjectivities; the poems are spoken by sharecropper, Stalingrad ¤ghter,¤shermen, a variety of country people (men and women), and cite approvingly Black Hawk who “held: In reason / land cannot be sold” (Niedecker 2002, 99). The poems are not all, or even mainly, written from the point of view of the artist or an observer of others.She puts the poems about writing amid the voices she has created for the people. In addition, the jacket statement says she does not prescribe a way (“her way”) to assimilate this work but equalizes and fuses “her—their—own way.” Niedecker is the woman who “sings at the top of [her] voice when folky records are being played on the phonograph”and who “must have that blues book you speak of.”10 She wrote, joshingly (to Zukofsky), “Mebbe I shdn’t ever have gone to NY to meet the real writer [i.e., Zukofsky] but shd. have stayed in my little country patch and written country ballads to be sung with a geetar!”(Niedecker 2002, 408). New Goose, she states, “is based on the folk—and a desire to get down direct speech (Williams in®uence[)] and here was my mother, daughter of the rhyming, happy grandfather mentioned above, speaking whole chunks of down-to-earth (o very earthy) magic, descendent, for sure of Mother Goose (I her daughter, sits and ®oats, you know)”(Dent 1983, 36). She is a writer whose saturation in language was initiated by her maternal grandfather, “who somehow had got hold of nursery and folk rhymes to entrance me.”If her mother is “a descendent for sure of Mother Goose,” then no reason why the child of such a mother could not be a “new goose”—enfranchised by maternal earthiness and paternal charms. The sense of descent and parenting is one that, I have shown before, is an enabling feature of the female artist, who stands in a triangular plot of nurturance that repossesses and transforms oedipalization, transposing the undervalued arts of the parents into those channels wherein they can be culturally assimilated (DuPlessis 1985). In Niedecker, however, one loses any sentimentality with which this genealogical narrative could be invested because all three “parents” are depicted as resisting her vocation. Many of Niedecker’s poems have a nursery rhyme sound: the poem beLorine Niedecker / 155 ginning “Missus Dorra / came to town” (Niedecker 2002, 88); “Petrou his name was sorrow” (Niedecker 2002, 89) or the insouciance and bitterness of Half past endive, quarter to beets, seven milks, ten cents cheese, lost, our land, forever. (Niedecker 2002, 111). Her political poem “1937” contrasts hope blooming in the Spanish republican struggle with a dim and depression-laden “Here”: Here we last, lilacs, vacant lots, taxes, no work, debts, the wind widens the grass. In the old house the clocks are dead, past dead. (Niedecker 2002, 120, 164). The diction is telegraphic Mother Goose; it criticizes the predatory. The folk origin is consciously articulated, knowing, witty: she teasingly says to Zukofsky—“time for BP [her mother] to write / me a poem” (Niedecker 1993, 159). Whether she assimilates the Goose of childhood rhymes, the native ballads, proverbs, or even the blues, Niedecker chose her literary means as a political stance. Echoes of, allusions to, appropriation of the sounds, rhythms, patterns of nursery rhymes abound in Niedecker’s work, not to speak of other kinds of allusions, such as titling a poem “Nursery Rhyme” with the dedication “As I nurse my pump” (Niedecker 2002, 285). Even more poems draw on the ballad.11 Certain elements of the ballad might have had a particular intellectual and emotional appeal to Niedecker. For one, there is little of the personally expressive “I” in them, appealing to her coolness to conventional subjectivity. Her “I” is often an observer of her/his own fate in...

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