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Life Pops from a Music Box Shaped Like a Gun: Dismemberments and Mendingsin Niedecker’s Figures
- University of Iowa Press
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Life Pops from a Music Box Shaped Like a Gun Dismemberments and Mendings in Niedecker’s Figures “Poetry if anything has a sense for everything,” wrote Louis Zukofsky in his essay “Poetry,” which begins by noting his son Paul’s first words, “Go billy go billy go billy go ba,” spoken three months before the atomic bomb was used that “ended the Second World War” (Prepositions+ 3). Lorine Niedecker, possessed of one of the most distinctive senses “for everything,” quietly recorded the presence of things that fly through the air and explode in the body and mind. Many of us may not have noticed the disjunctures of a world gone to war in Niedecker’s poems because we were dazzled by other elements, such as the deft handling of phano- and melopoeia, her silence, her geohistory, her sora rails. Among the many things it has given us, Jenny Penberthy’s labor on the Collected Works has afforded a new window onto this poet whose consciousness must have been invaded at nearly every stage of her life by either the rumblings of war or the aftermath of war. Indeed, Niedecker was eleven at the outbreak of the Great War, a young teen when the United States entered that conflict, and in her early thirties at the start of World War II; she saw the rise of the Cold War, and she died before the United States pulled its troops from Vietnam. Radios Eleni Sikelianos 32 | natural and political histories and newspapers carried reports of deaths, dismemberment, the horror of the atom bomb, and the constant ghost-like smash-us-all-to-smithereens tensions of the Cold War. Her poems are haunted by the news. A re-reading of Niedecker, allowed us by the Collected Works, reveals a poet who might aptly be called political. Although she certainly wrote poems that deal with autobiography and interior states, the limits of such subjects were apparent to her; as she writes in “Progression,” “unto / the one constriction: what am I and why not” (CW 31). Even those poems that speak from the first person tend to offer a collectivized “I,” expressing something overheard or imagined in someone else’s voice. Just as the poems are haunted by headlines, politics, and war, they are also haunted by the accents around her. This, too, might be seen as a worldview. Niedecker ’s poems are testament to a mind keenly interested in the relational and in particular, the political, environmental, and social aspects of the world. “New Goose”—a project long associated with the warm tones of folk-speech, due to poems with lines like “Remember my little granite pail? / The handle of it was blue” or “The museum man! / I wish he’d take Pa’s spitbox!”—takes on an entirely different tone when read in its entirety (The Granite Pail 7, 8). While the series was in part the result of Niedecker’s deep explorations of local speech habits, many of the “New Goose” poems left out of Cid Corman’s 1985 edition of The Granite Pail are about the world being torn asunder, affording a broader sense of the poet’s engagements . The series, written between 1936 and 1945, is rife with references to war, death, dismemberment, Nazism, and the bombing of London during the Blitz. Themes of war (and class) are suddenly obvious with poems like “Bombings”: You could go to the Underground’s platform for a three half-penny tube fare; safe vaults of the Bank of England you couldn’t go there. The sheltered slept under eiderdown, [44.213.80.174] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:03 GMT) Eleni Sikelianos | 33 Lady Diana and the Lord himself in apartments deep in the ground. (CW 92) One of the stunning poems left out of Corman’s selection again brings the war home in just five lines: They came at a pace to go to war. They came to more: a leg brought back to a face. (CW 102) Here Niedecker is attentive to what bombs do to a body—tear it to shreds. The condensation of the last two lines, the severed leg “brought back / to a face”—a reference perhaps to the mental image or even photograph of a dismembered body brought to a mother or lover’s face, or simply to the casual reader of the newspaper headlines—brings us crashing into the domestic , where the war’s aftermath resonates profoundly. The uses of local speech and lore alongside...