Niedecker Blue: Proofs and Poetics

Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning.

Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”

Always a high-stakes question, how we see the world has become a more urgent one as the conditions and outcomes of daily life entwine local actions in global implications that seem increasingly dire. In literary criticism, this concern has manifested itself in the turn toward ecocriticism. Dating from William Rueckert’s 1978 essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” the term ecocriticism came into widespread academic usage following Cheryll Glotfelty’s 1989 call for a shift from studying “writing about nature” to developing an ecocritical practice which “takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts language and literature.” To bring this subject into focus requires objectivity of the kind that Donna Haraway conceives, when she identifies the objective as that which “allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see” (583). And so, in addition to images that the pastoral tradition has trained us to recognize as nature, ecocriticism has been interested in the imagery of experimental language that, as Joan Retallack describes, “takes part in the recomposing of contemporary consciousness, [and] contemporary sensibilities” and can retrain us to recognize “our species’ relation to other inhabitants of the fragile and finite territory our species named, claimed, exploited, sentimentalized, and aggrandized as ‘our world’” (n. pag.). It has also made a project of recovering and identifying, from pastoral poetries whose techniques skew the paradigmatic experimentalism of urban modernism, the unconventional poetics of knowledge situated in “particular and specific embodiment” (Haraway 582).

This project has participated in the rediscovery of the poet Lorine Niedecker, marked by the publication of her Collected Works in 2002 and a collection of critical essays, Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, in 2008. Though Niedecker commanded scant critical attention during her lifetime, Kenneth Cox’s early assessment, that the “real subject [of her poetry] is not so much an incident or experience as the relation between this experience or incident and another” (171), has now been expanded upon in readings tracking a descriptive power that is mindful “less of objects than of relationships, of ecologies,” as Jonathan Skinner puts it (“Muskrat” 141). For Skinner, an architect of the ecocritical turn, the sounds of Niedecker’s “poetics place . . . human being (and human syllables) in the midst of nature rather than at one end of a microscope.” In poems that hear natural and industrial life as part of the same music, he sees Niedecker modeling “observation in space-time embodying flux at all levels: that of time, history, a changing landscape; and of space, categories, the fact what’s out there is always giving the slip to our mental construct (species).” Yet as we leave the microscope behind and scale her images of place to the spaces of contemporary life, we risk making Niedecker an index of our own critical turn without continuing to explore the particularities of her situated knowledge. Skinner’s contention, that the “embod[ied] flux” of Niedecker’s observations “looks forward to a time when ‘monumental’ concerns have everything to do with domestic water levels,” highlights the power of the interdependencies she represents for the purposes of imagining our own precarious ecological position (139). But if looking through Niedecker’s images to our own vitally interconnected world has obvious stakes from a perspective of environmental politics, emphasizing that end also overlooks certain literary and political stakes of situating her poetry in her own embodiment.

Asking how she came to see the world her poetry records, this essay connects the complex imagery that ecocritical readings of Niedecker’s work have illuminated with the class and gender dynamics of her position as a poet by offering an account of her technologies of vision. “Technologies,” as Haraway explains, “are skilled practices”:

How to see? Where to see from? What limits to vision? What to see for? Whom to see with? Who gets to have more than one point of view? Who gets blinded? Who wears blinders? Who interprets the visual field? What other sensory...