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Niedecker/Reznikoff
- University of Iowa Press
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Niedecker/Reznikoff Much, perhaps too much, has been written about Lorine Niedecker’s relations with Louis Zukofsky—her friend, colleague, lover, commiserater, and forty-year obsession—but the curious thing is that if one knew no biographical details, it would be difficult to put them together as poets. Only rarely in their writings do they resemble each other, usually in those moments when they resemble William Carlos Williams. In contrast, almost nothing has been said about Niedecker’s true kindred spirit in poetry , Charles Reznikoff. Take a blindfold test on two short poems from around 1950: (1) One of my sentinels, a tree sent spinning after me this brief secret on a leaf: the summer is over– forever. (2) Two old men– one proposed they live together take turns cooking, washing dishes Eliot Weinberger 184 | niedecker and company they were both alone. His friend: “Our way of living is so different: you spit I don’t spit.” The first is quintessential Niedecker—a tiny moment of nature communicating to a first-person narrator and at least three unexpected musical changes in six lines and twenty-one words—but the poem is by Reznikoff (Poems 62). The second is quintessential Reznikoff—the flat narration pared to the minimum necessity, the lives of ordinary people captured with a gentle humor by a bit of real speech—but the poem is by Niedecker (CW 132). Flipping through their respective collected works, this game can be played endlessly. What we know about the relationship between the two is very little, and there may well be little to know. They met in the 1930s when Niedecker was living off and on with Zukofsky in New York. Reznikoff sent Niedecker his books for thirty years. She does not appear in the very badly edited selection of his letters, but Niedecker, writing to Zukofsky in 1946, quotes his reaction to New Goose: “I picked it up when I was tired and dispirited and put it down quite refreshed by the words and music” (NCZ 138). (Niedecker notes with amusement that “good, quiet, cautious Rez” had added the word “quite” as a correction.) After her death, Reznikoff, unlike the bilious Zukofsky, contributed a short poem to Jonathan Williams’s Epitaphs for Lorine. And that is as far as the Reznikoff paper trail goes. On the Niedecker side, there is a little more. In the 1951 poem “If I were a bird,” which pays homage to her poetic contemporaries, Reznikoff appears with H.D., Williams, Moore, Stevens, Zukofsky, and cummings. In a 1959 letter to Zukofsky, she wonders who could help Reznikoff. She writes: “You get the idea he leads a lonelier life than I do but freer of trash?” And: “I have always felt he was writing my poems for me only better” (NCZ 257). In a letter to Reznikoff at the same time—she sent a copy to Zukofsky—she says, “I often find a kinship between us in the short poem. And if you are my brother-in-poetry then we have Chinese and Japanese brothers.” Also from the same letter: “Hard to write and then get it printed. I try to along [23.20.220.59] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:49 GMT) Eliot Weinberger | 185 with scrubbing floors in a hospital. Every now and again, tho, there’s a chink where a poem comes thru. Altogether life is not really too hard— I gather this is what you say too.” Niedecker tended to route all things poetical through Zukofsky, and whenever she mentions Reznikoff in passing it is always with reference to Zukofsky’s essay from the 1931 “Objectivists” issue of Poetry—an issue she largely copied out by hand—“Sincerity and Objectifica tion: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff.” (Zukofsky, characteristically , cut out all mention of Reznikoff when he reprinted the essay for the first time in the 1967 Prepositions.) That essay, the Magna Carta of Objectivism, while sharp in certain particulars , is generally vague to the point of meaninglessness, was interpreted in contradictory ways by its supposed fellow travelers, and has been largely misremembered, blurred with the Imagistic ideal of emotion expressed through concrete details. (I, for one, will never understand why Reznikoff’s one-line poem “The ceaseless weaving of the uneven water” is sincerity, not objectification, but his three-line poem on the death of Gaudier-Brzeska, “How shall we mourn you who are killed and wasted, / Sure that you would not die with your work...