Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (review)

With this new collection of essays on Lorine Niedecker, we are beginning to move toward a much fuller appreciation of the multifaceted nature of the poet’s work and thought. To be sure, many of the contributors to Jenny Penberthy’s seminal Lorine Niedecker Woman and Poet (1996) were critical then of the temptation to present her simply as a lonely, worn-down rural figure, washer of floors by day and poet by night, though that image of Niedecker had influential currency in the UK, as Peter Middleton observes in his account of “The British Niedecker.” The dust jacket of Fulcrum’s North Central (1968), for example, gloomily and tersely informed the (presumed metropolitan) reader that the poet “Now lives isolated in Fort Atkinson, Milwaukee with her husband” (258–59). As Middleton notes, the talk of isolation fails to notice Niedecker’s visits to New York, her wide-ranging correspondence with Louis Zukofsky and Cid Corman, her friendship with Basil Bunting, and so on. It also forgets the voracity of her reading and the fascinated attention she paid not only to birds and flowers but also to historical and biographical texts, as Elizabeth Willis shows in her essay here and as Jenny Penberthy details in a fine analysis of Niedecker’s late “Lake Superior.”

The seemingly fragile poems, with their often ironic use of sound and rhyme (something nicely pointed up in Elizabeth Robinson’s essay) constantly refuse the epiphanic temptation, establishing in that refusal a certain wiry assurance that the verse has to earn by local scruple. As Michael Davidson observes, the “localized perceptions” of her work acquire their remarkable specificity by “idiosyncratic lineation, enjambment, and syntactic disjunction” (3), and Lisa Robertson further suggests that Niedecker’s attention to the sounds around her redefines acoustic receptivity, producing not “an erasure of agency” in passivity but a highly attuned “technical composing” (87). The “flooding,” “floating” cadences of these texts certainly affirm a “poetics of place” (Mary Pinard’s essay here gives an engrossing account of the actual waters that sustained our poet’s “floating”), but they also recognise that, as Niedecker put it herself in a letter to her friend Gail Roub, “I am what I am because of all this—I am what is around me” (52). This, however, is no limp transcendentalism; to quote Robertson again, “Here listening is passive in that it receives, and artful in that it complicates, transduces, the assumed binary of inner and outer, of subjective experience, and worldly economy, of reception and extension” (87). Or, perhaps, as Paul Goodman once put it, “our style is our way of living in the world.”¹

Such thoughts prime us to hear rhythms that somehow integrate world and imagination, rhythms that compel the “urgent wave of the verse,” as so vividly affirmed in Niedecker’s “Paean to Place.” Rachel Blau DuPlessis has traced that quoted phrase to Robert Duncan’s 1964 essay “Towards an Open Universe,” in which he remarks, rather like Niedecker, that “We are all the many expressions of living matter” and that we are caught up in “a dancing organization between personal and cosmic identity.”² For Duncan, these primal rhythms may “arouse in our awake (sic) minds, a spell, so that we let our awareness go in the urgent wave of the verse,” though this “letting go,” as DuPlessis adroitly shows, is a source of major ambivalence for Niedecker. DuPlessis also quotes some revealing passages from the poet’s unpublished correspondence with Clayton Eshelman in which we find her writing, for example, that “I figured after 40 years of more or less precise writing, I cd. afford to let go” (158) and, again, “I went to school to Objectivism but now I often say There is something more” (176; emphasis in original). In her sense of the various influences and possibilities available to Niedecker at this point, DuPlessis, I think, moves closer than any other critic in Willis’s volume to seeing...