-
The British Niedecker
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The British Niedecker It ought to seem more strange than it does that over half the books Lorine Niedecker produced in her lifetime were published in Britain.1 If it doesn’t strike us as exceptional this is probably because we like to think of the New American Poets and the Objectivists as English language writers with an international audience dispersed across the world, and particularly strong in Canada and the United Kingdom. Yes, we might say to ourselves, these poets would inevitably find willing publishers and readers overseas; their work was in the vanguard of Anglophone poetry of the time, and helped articulate new aesthetic possibilities at a time when local cultures in parts of the world still rebuilding after the violence, destruction, and disorder created by World War II had not yet fully recovered the modernist vision. Or should we ask more questions about this history of overseas publication ? Niedecker’s publication in the United Kingdom was after all part of a larger eastward drift of American poetry publications to Britain between about 1962 and 1973 when a significant number of American avant-garde poets published volumes of poetry in Britain before they appeared in their own country. Was this merely a pragmatic strategy of outsourcing production to a country where this was easier to achieve than in the United States while expecting the readership to remain largely American, or was this a more exilic form of publication depending on a European audience for its initial response? Peter Middleton 248 | niedecker and company An earlier generation of American modernists had emigrated to Britain and Europe and many found publishers there ranging from Faber and Faber to Black Sun. This later cohort of poets such as Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, David Meltzer, Charles Olson, George Oppen, Jerome Rothenberg, and Gary Snyder all had reputations in the United States, and remained primarily resident there, yet all of them published in the United Kingdom during this period of the 1960s and early 1970s. Despite their growing reputations, they had varying degrees of difficulty obtaining book contracts in a relatively conservative U.S. marketplace. In some cases, the problem was that the most salient publisher of modernist writing, New Directions, would not take their work (or would not reprint early material or risk a large collected poems); in others, small presses were too undercapitalized to manage larger books and print runs. Jargon kept some poets in print, including Niedecker, but it was not until the advent of Black Sparrow Press, and the expansion of the activity of New Directions, that the situation radically changed. It is easy to forget how few presses sustain major poetry movements (Language Writing has been primarily made available by just three presses: Roof, Sun and Moon, and The Figures). Eastward migration of poetry was not just driven by the trade cycles of a north Atlantic poetry turbine any more than modernist predecessors were economic migrants trying to gain access to printers. American avant-garde poems of the 1960s became migrants because for a short period an elective affinity between American and British poets, readers, and publishers emerged to shape the reception of this poetry. The British presses that published the Americans—Cape Goliard, Fulcrum (by far the most significant), Trigram, and Wild Hawthorn—also offered an exceptional integration of book design, quality, and responsiveness to the author whether American or British, allowing poets, artists, and printers to collaborate closely. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s books are now collected as artworks, and a number of the books produced by the British presses, such as Olson’s Archaeologist of Morning, Niedecker’s North Central, Snyder’s The Back Country, or David Meltzer’s Yesod, are outstanding examples of the craft of book production. Simply by being published in this company of expatriated books Niedecker’s poetry was for a time read as a part of this movement, whatever its differences and despite her distance from the newer generation of poets. [54.226.222.183] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:53 GMT) Peter Middleton | 249 What might the effect have been on the reception of Niedecker’s poems by American readers as a result of these overseas publications? Her poems did appear in a few U.S. magazines so it was not that her poems were unavailable .2 Did overseas publication mean that the majority of Niedecker’s readers were initially British, or simply that the poems were imported into the United States with their British imprints lending...