Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place

Introduction

Where—or how—should contemporary readers place Lorine Niedecker? Is she a folk poet? A major or minor Objectivist poet? A regionalist? An eco-poet? A working-class socialist poet? An outsider poet? Her work has been described as realist, surrealist, rustic, even in the style of “the old farmland potato.” While Niedecker aspired to the production of an art as sophisticated as Nature, what did she make of her work being described in the jacket copy for T & G: The Collected Poems (1936–1966) as “as faithful and recurrent, as beautiful and homely as my favorite peony bush”? Was this an unintentional slight—or was the blend of humility and audacity implied in such a radical shift in frame precisely the point? James Laughlin’s sense that she chose not “to play the games of poetry politics” expresses an important part of the history of her work’s production and reception—yet one wonders if the repeated reinscription of Niedecker’s marginality will continue to serve her critical readership. Louis Zukofsky included her poems in A Test of Poetry under the folk category, a classification that stuck and that has suited her work to a greater extent as the term has accrued a more nuanced field of reference. The jacket copy on nearly all of Niedecker’s book publications prior to the 2002 Collected Works devotes as much attention to her working-class Wisconsin identity as to her poetics; we are told that Niedecker was isolated, washed hospital floors, lived most of her life in a small cabin, and sewed her own clothes by hand. However well-meaning, such formulations cumulatively construct a portrait of Niedecker as something of an anomalous rural savant. Still, the logic of this situation is deceptively complex; while the impulse to describe her literary work in relation to her life can seem paternalistic, it may also take its lead from the poetry itself. Niedecker was Introduction xiv | Introduction fascinated by the intersection of artists’ lives and their creative output, and her poems speak repeatedly to the constitutive impact of context on literary production—a matter explored in greater detail throughout this volume. The misperception that Niedecker worked in isolation and that her work was unmediated by cultural forces beyond the local has, of course, delayed critical recognition of some properties of her poems more than others —namely, the extent of their engagement with collage, their attention to the semantic depths of words, the international and transhistorical qualities of their address, the intricacy of their engagement with biography, biology, politics, popular culture, canonical literature, and even a critical sense of regional identity itself. Meanwhile, the compensating impulse to link Niedecker exclusively with international modernism obscures other aspects of her work. Reading Niedecker afresh in relation to this complex network of alliance, relation, and refusal, it is easier to see her work’s increasing relevance to poets of succeeding generations, many of whom are represented within this volume. Niedecker herself was rich with complications: an ambitious poet who chose to live almost entirely outside professional networks; a localist fascinated with Lawrence of Arabia; a Marxist who owned property; a folk mannerist, setting the literary within the equally complex beauty of the commonplace. Wryly celebrating the negative economy of poetic labor, her poems can be strident as well as subtly self-mocking. They often seem to move deeply and laterally at once, code-switching between politics, geology , botany, aesthetics, sociology, and literary history, through wordplay and juxtaposition. Beyond the work of her fellow Objectivists—Louis Zukofsky , Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, and George Oppen—Niedecker knew well, and sometimes referenced in her poems, the writing of William Wordsworth, Mary and Percy Shelley, W. B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and the political and domestic economy of Karl Marx, John Ruskin, William Morris , Thomas Jefferson, and John and Abigail Adams. But where are we to locate Niedecker’s original and idiosyncratic work within American letters? Niedecker traced her poetic beginnings to the discovery of the Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine, guest-edited by Louis Zukofsky and published in February 1931. She immediately wrote Introduction | xv to Zukofsky, who had been teaching at the nearby University of Wisconsin , and so began their lifelong friendship and correspondence. Soon Niedecker’s poems would appear in Poetry, and she would visit New York where she and Zukofsky would, for a time, become lovers. In 1933 Niedecker returned...