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The Poetics of Affinity: Niedecker, Morris, and the Art of Work
- University of Iowa Press
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The Poetics of Affinity Niedecker, Morris, and the Art of Work Lorine Niedecker’s work is saturated with politics, with an embodied, practical intelligence conceived at the intersection of public and private lives. It’s not simply that there are unions, bosses, paychecks, and presidents in her poems or that two of her most frequently recurring nouns are “war” and “work.” It’s what lies behind her wry, undercutting perspective; her fluid sense of material and intellectual property; her awareness of the world as a site of physical and social evolution; her sense of language’s transformative power; and her drive for self-determination: “I must possess myself” (CW 28). Her poems insist that art and labor are inseparably bound; her subjects perform their identities, their ideological affinities, and their labors within a literary context that likewise considers itself as knowledge, as work, as relational system, as a product whose consumption demands even further labor. Niedecker’s trans-historical poetic research often focused on the location and processes of art, superimposing the lives of its local and international producers. While this gesture runs throughout her work, it gains priority in her late poems, particularly the poem for William Morris, “His Carpets Flowered,” on which this essay will ultimately focus.1 Niedecker’s often quoted metaphor for poetic production was the “condensery,” an echo of Pound’s call for compression but also a crossElizabeth Willis 224 | niedecker and company ing point of agriculture, manufacturing, and distribution, inflected with local meaning. Throughout her lifetime, Jefferson County, Wisconsin, was headquarters for the theory and practice of the American dairy industry. At its height, it was home to eighty-four creameries, many containing condenseries, and it continues to be the home of Hoard’s Dairyman, the industry’s publication of record, for which Niedecker at one time worked as a proofreader. The condensery was a site of concentrated collective activity where—whether due to its communal structure, its marginality, its constant work flow, or its crucial relation to everyday life—there was no chance of “lay off” (“Poet’s Work,” CW 194).2 The term aptly references Niedecker’s practice of producing highly concentrated poems intended for long-term consumption, asserting her intellectual activity as both mechanical and manual labor within the vocabulary of her local economy. It also captures the methodology with which she approached her reading. Niedecker’s poetics were influenced early on by the ambition within the Romantic worldview, its pantheistic vision of nature and its aspiration to everyday speech rather than heightened literary language. Yet more than the poetry of any of the Romantics, which was of course familiar to her, Niedecker’s work is engaged with people and things that come to us in unabashedly vernacular forms, like the “Two old men” whose social impasse amounts to: “you spit / I don’t spit” (CW 132). Her acts of recollection occur less in the context of Wordsworthian tranquility than in the conflicts of the workplace and the exhausted pleasure of the day’s end. Reverie is part of the poet’s guilty pleasure, a form of unregulated and largely uncompensated work by which she gleans the excess, value-added services of others, knowing all too well how the excesses of her own work would be read by her immediate company: “What would they say if they knew / I sit for two months on six lines /of poetry?” (CW 143). And yet what happens within these three lines of poetry conveys some idea of the level of condensing their making requires. Here, as elsewhere, we see Niedecker’s poems performing socially constructed acts of seeing: the poet assessing her surroundings, looking at herself and contextualizing her work among that of others, then imagining the returned gaze of the subjects within her poems, thinking all the way through to what they would then say about it, how it would re-enter the realm of public commentary and hearsay. In assessing Niedecker’s work, it is tempting to emphasize her relation [34.204.181.19] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:09 GMT) Elizabeth Willis | 225 to the first term of Percy Shelley’s familiar assertion that poets are “unacknowledged legislators”; in her lifetime, Niedecker was a classically underacknowledged poet. But it seems likely that she, like George Oppen, would have emphasized the second term; “legislators” are elected and thus crucially and inescapably linked to the local; they represent a constituency; their livelihood depends on their ability to listen to the voices of...