Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place

Lorine Niedecker’s “Paean to Place” and Its Reflective Fusions

Lorine Niedecker’s “Paean to Place” and Its Reflective Fusions When Professor L. S. Dembo organized his groundbreaking recovery of the Objectivist poets at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in April and May 1968, he conducted interviews with Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl Rakosi. Dembo was a penetrating interlocutor , and the men gave interviews of record which were published in Contemporary Literature in 1969.2 This makes it all the more poignant that Lorine Niedecker, who lived only thirty-some miles down the road, near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, was not invited to participate. That is, the person in the Objectivist nexus most accessible and closest to the University of Wisconsin-Madison was not brought forward either by Dembo or Zukofsky , who was, perhaps, in a position to intervene. For a day after Zukofsky ’s interview on May 16th, Celia and Louis Zukofsky, L. S. Dembo, and Lorine Niedecker spent time together (May 17, 1968), visiting the University of Wisconsin campus and arboretum (BYH 164–65; NCZ 99 and 353). That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten. —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, x Early in life I looked back of our buildings to the lake and said, ‘I am what I am because of all this—I am what is around me—those woods have made me . . . ’ —Lorine Niedecker, letter to Gail Roub,   19671 Rachel Blau DuPlessis 152 | sounding process However, given Niedecker’s own avoidance strategies when approached for a poetry reading by another University of Wisconsin branch, the one in Milwaukee, it is plausible that she would have demurred if asked for a public appearance, as she had in 1965, explaining “I fight shy of that kind of thing” (BYH 77). “I fight shy” is a Niedecker motif. Niedecker is both shy, resistant, reluctant, and what one might call “fighting shy”—aggressively, decisively, contendingly shy, both presenting her shyness and maneuvering it.3 An early poem offers self-instruction: “Feign a great calm” (CW 25). In the late 1960s, Niedecker was in fact thinking seriously about Objectivist poetics and about poetics in general.4 This non-event—the non-interview of Niedecker as an Objectivist or quasi-Objectivist poet— coincided with her own debate (beginning around 1964 and continuing until her death in 1970) about what the term objectivist meant for her work. Niedecker is explicit about her intense connection with what she saw as objectivist practices (in Zukofsky and later in Cid Corman), yet in a 1966 letter to Kenneth Cox, she also makes clear her negotiation among poetic positions, including surrealism: “there was an influence (from transition and from surrealistes that has always seemed to want to ride right along with the direct hard, objective kind of writing. The subconscious and the presence of the folk, always there” (Dent 36). Further, during this period, a trace of projectivist or Black Mountain poetics emerged in her thinking . This debate occurs in letters and is infused in the texture of “Paean to Place,” written in the mid-1960s when she was in her sixties.5 That is, Niedecker fused or synthesized the resources of several poetics, correcting one with the other; her debates are refracted in this important late poem. During 1966 through 1969, often in letters to literary young men, Niedecker articulated a suspicion of, or judgment of “Objectivism,” but she did not give one singular name to the “form of poetic thinking” that she wanted in its place (NCZ 343). She had first raised these issues in letters to Louis Zukofsky in 1964, yet did not continue this discussion with him possibly because of the increasing tensions between them concerning power and career.6 This poetic thinking is called by various names: in 1964, “metaphysical ”; in 1968, “something else”; in 1967, “something more” (NCZ 343; BYH 153; Letter to Clayton Eshleman, November 18, 1967).7 Niedecker is interested (1969) in a “subliminal reflective carry-over” (BYH 185). And she Rachel Blau DuPlessis | 153 spoke of “reflective”/“reflections” to Gail Roub as well as using the term “surrealism” in her evocative attempt to synthesize these divergent positions . But by noting the number of terms Niedecker had for this poetic move and by indicating that her commitments to surrealist tactics...