Lorine Niedecker and the Matter of Life and Death

In the mid-twentieth-century rural world of Lorine Niedecker's poems, speakers long for physical comfort and for technological conveniences to ease their labor. They talk about their desire for and their relationships with handcrafted and machine-made objects. In short poems deftly arranged on the page, Niedecker conveys the significance a piece of clothing or a patched roof can make in assuring warmth, and describes a functional plumbing system with love and relief. Seemingly mundane details such as "radio" and "heat" are infused with desire and life-or-death significance. To describe the condition of financial desperation, Niedecker employs the language of frustrated love—in her poems, everyday objects and human bodies circle around each other, eluding and longing for each other, generating questions about the relations among love, money, and the body. For Niedecker, objects are instrumental in sustaining life as well as in creating, thwarting, and fulfilling desire.

Niedecker is often identified as an "Objectivist" poet. The "object" in "Objectivist" is usually in reference to the idea of poem-as-object, which involves a close attention to the visual and aural presence of the poem, and to the desire of the poets to achieve a level of objectivity in representation. The "non-human" figures prominently here, but the relation between Objectivist poetry and non-human objects has not been studied in depth. Niedecker's use of nature and natural imagery has been examined, most recently in the collection Radical Vernacular:Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, but the role of manmade objects, particularly those which are referenced throughout Niedecker's poetry, has not been thoroughly read. Several scholars have provided valuable analyses of Niedecker's objects contexualized within class, gender, political, and historical concerns: Rachel DuPlessis writes that "in both class as well as gender" (122), Niedecker "is a poet for whom material cares were palpable," and Elizabeth Willis points out that "one of the primary lines of tension running through [Niedecker's] work stems from an awareness of the shifting status of things" ("Poetics" 587).¹

These analyses are presented as brief insights within larger studies on other aspects of Niedecker's poetry, while in this essay I bring Niedecker's objects into the foreground. Most of those who have written on Niedecker and physicality use "objects," "material," and "things" interchangeably in reference to Niedecker. Because Niedecker is attentive to the natural world as well as the world of hand-made and factory-made objects, I find it useful to distinguish between different terms. I locate "material" in reference to the processes of "making": "material" as that which is to be formed into an "object." A "material," as it is typically called in craft studies, would include wood, metal, glass, and other non-"formed" (ie. not yet made by humans into art) elements. Willis notes Niedecker's "modernist attention to the processes of making" and states that "for a significant portion of [Niedecker's local] population, making one's own clothes would hardly have been at odds with making one's own poems" (Radical xvii). Although I agree that Niedecker is concerned with "making," she is also interested in the already-made. I use the general term "objects" to describe the made items strewn throughout Niedecker's mostly untitled poems; among the objects I deal with here are a new house, a coat, and a handkerchief. Niedecker's made objects circulate in and out of contact with their human owners, embodying the movement from intimacy to alienation linked with Marxist thought.

In addition to its consideration of the non-human, Niedecker's take on objects also stands out from other Objectivists in her explicit interest in the working-class body and the role objects play in assuring survival. Many of Niedecker's non-human objects are forms of bodily protection such as shelter and clothing. Niedecker also de-humanizes and objectifies the body by reducing other people's bodies to their value as heat sources. Marjorie Perloff points out that Niedecker's poetry "looks beyond the stylistic habits of her male counterparts to the specific problems of her own...