Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place

How to Do Things with Nothing: Lorine Niedecker Sings the Blues

How to Do Things with Nothing Lorine Niedecker Sings the Blues The year 1903 marks the conventional date assigned to the birth of the blues. As W. C. Handy describes it in his memoirs, while waiting on a late-running train in Tutwiler, Mississippi, he was wakened from a fitful doze by the sound of a knife being drawn across the strings of a guitar. “The weirdest music I had ever heard,” Handy called it (74). That weirdness has persisted in the hundred years since, despite the ruthless forces of convention, imitation, and marketing. The blues can survive anything it seems. Even Eric Clapton. What accounts in part for its remarkable longevity is its deeply idiomatic resonance, its ability to do so much with almost nothing. Doing things with nothing has always been the way of the blues. It’s been the modus operandi for Lorine Niedecker as well, herself a child of 1903. Niedecker’s work offers a study in the determined persistence of a disciplined minimalism, one marked sharply by hardship as a double outsider, both as a woman and a poet, and the kinds of attention which result from such conditions of alienation. By pairing Niedecker’s birth with the entrance of the blues into mainstream American culture, I aim to do more than offer an argument of convenient coincidence. Niedecker’s stark music of abjection and exile surely derides any attempt to consign her to the role of patron saint for a certain species of precious self-effacement. Her work not only invites comparison Patrick Pritchett 92 | SOUNDING PROCESS to the blues; it is itself, I would argue, a cogent form of the blues. In its laconic use of folk speech, its sly, often subversive, humor, but above all, in its concerns with isolation and waste, marsh mud and flood water, her poems vividly figure not just the painful presence of loss, but its uncanny ability to embody a sense of intimacy inside brokenness. By taking up waste and negation for her subjects, Niedecker creates a space that affirms marginality, difference, and exile as terms of a deeper belonging. In so many of her poems a powerful sense of dispossession is transformed into a source of enjoyment through a shiver as weird as anything in a Muddy Waters guitar solo. In a word, the blues. It may sound like I’m offering a rather perverse argument here. But how else to explain the effect of this untitled poem from the sequence, For Paul and Other Poems? What horror to awake at night and in the dimness see the light. Time is white mosquitoes bite 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. (CW 147–48) The sense of internal exile in these lines is harrowing. But what does it mean —to spend your life on nothing? Or perhaps more to the point, what does it mean that, in the first stanza, “nothing” pointedly rhymes with nothing? That in the second stanza, “Nothing” rhymes internally with “Something” and then with “nothing”? That the final stanza, in a very sweet dialectical Patrick Pritchett | 93 move that might have provoked the envy and admiration of Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, “nothing” is made to rhyme with “puffing” and “stuffing ,” both figures for an ironically posed inflation that spikes the speaker’s sense of deflation. Is “nothing,” then, figural speech for a certain kind of something? There’s no doubt Niedecker was very much aware of the power of the blues. Rachel Blau DuPlessis recounts her 1966 letter to Cid Corman in which she writes that she “must have that blues book you spoke of ” (LNWP 132). And in a letter to Louis Zukofsky from 1946, Niedecker quotes with obvious approval a remark by Duke Ellington about jazz as a form of “folk music” (NCZ 135). Niedecker’s attitude toward blues and jazz and her incorporation of some of its techniques into her poetry points to a broader pattern in modernism of what critic Aldon Nielsen calls “transracial signifying practices.” For Nielsen, any thorough account of American poetics must be one capable of reading “the multitudinous ways in which black...