Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place

Who Is Sounding? Awakened View, Gaps, Silence, Cage, Niedecker

Who Is Sounding? Awakened View, Gaps, Silence, Cage, Niedecker I propose a contemplative gaze to extend a look at Lorine Niedecker’s work and encourage a discussion around view in the spiritual sense, as well as performance/orality (both public and private) and silence. I also suggest a poetic affinity between the seemingly diametrically opposed Objectivist Niedecker and Zen-ist John Cage. Right view is one of the traditional Buddhist precepts. It acknowledges impermanence, the absence of a solid eternal self, and encourages the practitioner to wake up to that indisputable fact. It also recognizes what is termed pratitya-samutpada, a Sanskrit term for the interconnected, coarising , cause-and-effect principle of all living things, Darwinian in its complexity. Performance/orality may be a method for actualizing the efficacy of insight and imagination toward other and toward this view of inter-connectedness. Private mental space—frequently a state of quietude —may be the source or background for poetry, and both Niedecker and Cage examined the noise of silence, or gap, in their work. Poetry may be considered a site where public and private soundings converge. Invoked here, also, is the practice of ti bot, of such a sounding from Asian poetics, referring specifically in the Thai tradition to the striking of a gong, and extended to include the sounding/unlocking/activating of a poem or Time is nuttn in the universe. (NCZ 134) Anne Waldman 208 | niedecker and company ritual text. The poem is not activated until it is struck. This idea relates as well to the sense of a poem being made up of seed syllables whose purpose it is to awaken the mind. Mantra is a string of such syllables sounded to protect the mind. The root “budh” of Buddhism means to be awake. Ti bot sounds in the mind, a kind of inner space as it also may sound out loud in the world. As such it provides a gap, a dis-junct, an intervention, a cutting into the sound-scape. Niedecker’s work is gnomic, koan-like. A koan (a kong-an, literally a “public case”) as practiced in Japanese Zen Buddhism is a riddle and a psychological /philosophical device, not intuited by usual logics. It is an exercise of attention, a mental posture, and a sharp nudge to perception where suddenly the mind holds myriad thoughts (sounds, images, emotions) simultaneously —not unlike the state of “negative capability.” Keats’s view of being able to hold contradictory views “without any irritable reaching after fact or reason” resembles the Buddhist flash of insight. One might think of these terms as parallel measures of discernment, albeit from very different traditions. They both suggest a way that the mind might wake up to itself and the world around itself, and play between the binaries of this or that. As a spiritual device, as a public case, haiku is intended to do this; poetry may often do this. Before my own death is certified, recorded, final judgment judged taxes taxed I shall own a book of old Chinese poems and binoculars to probe the river trees. (CW 158) Seeing, reading, listening, probing is the praxis—the view—of Lorine Niedecker’s poetics and poetry. In the poem above she equates the finality of death with Judeo-Christian judgment, the case-closed “taxes taxed” anathema of record keeping, and counters with a richer investigatory see- Anne Waldman | 209 ing life by owning a book of nonjudgmental (non-theistic) Asian poetry and a pair of binoculars. The thud of the final ed in “certified,” “recorded,” “judged,” and “taxed” is wearying compared with the open o sounds of “own,” “book of old,” “poems,” “binoculars,” and “probe.” And the rhyming of “Chinese” and “trees” lingers as one considers the “Before” and after of the poet’s decision. There is a gap between these two views. The “taxed  /  I” shifts and seems to unburden itself as the poem pivots and opens out toward a more awake view. Gap in the Buddhist tradition refers to a place between thoughts, between the places and states of mind one inhabits, between birth and death. Gap translates as bardo (in Tibetan). It is a pause before discursive mind clicks in and takes charge. Such a gap exists between Niedecker’s logopoeic lines, her sound clusters. A practice in Buddhism—tamal gyi shepa, referring to this gap or leap of mind—concerns cultivating an attitude of co-emergent...