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Particular Attention: Lorine Niedecker’s Natural Histories
- University of Iowa Press
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Particular Attention Lorine Niedecker’s Natural Histories Lorine Niedecker, who finds the “facts” of “birds, animals and plants . . . wonderful in themselves,” pays particular attention to natural history (NCZ 243). Poems like “Wintergreen Ridge” or “Paean to Place” take their imagined place in geological time, speak with a working knowledge of ecological relations, and honor humans who extend solidarity across species lines: Life is natural in the evolution of matter Nothing supra-rock about it (“Wintergreen Ridge,” CW 247) the coiled celery now gone from these streams due to carp (“Paean to Place,” CW 263) Women of good wild stock stood stolid before machines They stopped bulldozers (“Wintergreen Ridge” CW 249) J. F. Kennedy after / the Bay of Pigs // To stand up // black-marked tulip / not snapped by the storm / “I’ve been duped by the experts” //—and walk / the South Lawn —Lorine Niedecker Jonathan Skinner 42 | natural and political histories Niedecker’s poems include particular natural facts of human and other species, often at odds yet working together in the stream of the poem. This is work “by water,” between eye and ear: born in swale and swamp and sworn to water (“Paean to Place,” CW 261) As the eye reads “born . . . to water,” the ear is “sworn” from the evolutionary “swale and swamp,” balanced between verb and noun (“born / in . . . [a] sworn”). It is a poetics of flow, this work by water, where line breaks suspend natural, “historic and contemporary particulars” in serial objects of attention (Zukofsky, Prepositions+ 12). As we look for connections between “J. F. Kennedy after / the Bay of Pigs” and the “black-marked tulip” on Niedecker’s lawn, facts shade off into other histories (including perhaps that of overvaluation in the Dutch tulip trading bubble). At the confluence of nature, history, and culture, Niedecker’s awareness of “everything influencing everything” privileges no class of particulars (“Letters to Gail Roub” 42). Her natural histories are rather acts of attention balanced, from the local to the global, on alliances as contingent as that between Asa Gray—who “wrote Increase Lapham: / pay particular attention / to my pets, the grasses”—and his botanical discoveries, singular connections between humans and other species in the evolutionary stream (CW 105). This essay approaches Lorine Niedecker as a poet of the field guide and of natural history. The discussion moves from her reading in the nonfiction prose of natural history to her work in the field of historic and contemporary particulars—a field to which her first published collection, New Goose, offers a kind of guide. Along the way, I consider Niedecker’s leveling play with the mutability of species in time and space, in the spirit of Darwin—who believed “Man . . . in the same predicament / with other animals . . . the universe /not built by brute force / but designed by laws / The details left // to the working of chance” (CW 295, 299). This play takes place between eye and ear in what I call a poetics of flow. I also suggest that, for Niedecker, the poem is an instrument of balance rather than an aesthetic object in the modernist sense of an autonomous work [44.213.80.174] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:37 GMT) Jonathan Skinner | 43 of art. Throughout, the ethics of particular attention flow from practice rather than from scientific or aesthetic correctness: an attention on and off the page, from ecological and interpersonal relations to the play between line breaks and the sounds of syllables. In the choice between inclusiveness and “predatory intent,” it is such particular attention that makes all the difference (Zukofsky, “An Objective,” Prepositions+ 16). Niedecker is a generous interpreter of “natural” signs, cramming, as Richard Caddel puts it, plenty of information into short spaces (LNWP 286). Basil Bunting’s comment that “No one is so subtle with so few words” reminds us how easy it is to miss the details; like signs in the natural landscape , Niedecker’s poems reveal little to the casual passerby (286). Niedecker recognized that the lack of particular attention rots human nature from the inside out—as, in “Their apples fall down” from New Goose, the neighbors’ indifference is mimed into soft homonyms (“their,” “they’re,” “there”) sounding, with a velar difference, all the more distinctly the one word that counts, “care”: Their apples fall down and rot on the ground— they don’t spray their trees, trees need care. You can tell they’re no good that live there. (120) Niedecker’s sustained practical relationship to her surroundings embraces...