Collecte Works

by Lorine Niedecker

  Thanks to Clayton Eshleman, who published “Next Year or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous” in Sulfur 41 (Fall 1997): 42–71.

  Linda Norton, my editor at the University of California Press, has been a pleasure to work with. Her enthusiasm for Niedecker's poetry and her confidence in the importance of this book have sustained me through the years. I am also indebted to senior editor Rachel Berchten and copyeditor Kathleen MacDougall for their meticulous care in managing the production of the book.

  Finally, my deepest thanks go to my family—my husband, René, and our sons, Julian and Thomas—for graciously enduring the interruptions to family life caused by this project.

  J. P.

  LIFE AND WRITING

  “The Brontes had their moors, I have my marshes,” Lorine Niedecker wrote of watery, flood-prone Black Hawk Island near the town of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, where she lived most of her life.1 Although few people endured for long the seasonal hardships of life on Black Hawk Island, Niedecker's attachments to the place ran deep. Her life by water could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene where she also made herself a home.

  Lorine was an only child born on May 12, 1903, to Theresa (Daisy) Kunz and Henry Niedecker. The Kunz family owned much of the island—low-lying land bounded by the Rock River and Lake Koshkonong—including the Fountain House Inn, which they operated until Daisy's marriage to Henry in 1901. As a wedding gift, the couple were given several large properties on the island including the Inn, which they ran until 1910 when they sold it on account of Daisy's illness. In the course of Lorine's birth, her mother had lost her hearing and had gradually declined into isolation and depression over the following years.

  Even so, the collection of photographs from Lorine's youth depicts a congenial childhood. There are many images of large family gatherings beside the river at the Inn, everyone dressed in turn-of-the-century finery. Lorine had a close relationship with her grandparents, particularly Gottfried Kunz, “a happy, outdoor grandfather who somehow, somewhere had got hold of nursery and folk rhymes to entrance me.” After the sale of the Fountain House Inn, Henry divided up the Niedecker property into lots, sold some of them, and built and rented cabins on others. He turned the Inn's pleasure launches into fishing boats and with a partner operated a very successful carp-fishing business. Lorine recalled, “I spent my childhood outdoors—red-winged blackbirds, willows, maples, boats, fishing (the smell of tarred nets), twittering and squawking noises from the marsh.”2 Her work is distinguished by its attentive use of sound, a consequence perhaps of her poor eyesight and her experience of her mother's deafness, but also of her immersion in the rich soundscape of Black Hawk Island.

  When Lorine was ready to start school, Henry built a large home on Germany Street (renamed Riverside Drive) in Fort Atkinson where the family lived until she entered high school. Her parents then moved back to Black Hawk Island and Lorine billeted with Fort Atkinson friends during the school week.

  After graduating from high school in 1922, she enrolled at Beloit College to pursue a degree in literature but was called home in her second year to tend her mother, whose condition was deteriorating. Henry and Daisy's marriage had long since broken down as a result of her illness and his extended affair with Gerte Runke, a Black Hawk Island neighbor referred to in several of Niedecker's poems.

  In 1928, Niedecker married Frank Hartwig, a former employee of her father's, and started her job as library assistant at the Dwight Foster Public Library in Fort Atkinson. Two short poems appeared in print that year. “Transition” reflects her exposure to the Imagist program of Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Amy Lowell. The second poem, “Mourning Dove,” begins with a condensed sample of Imagist practice followed by a riposte to its confining limits. However, she did admire the extended Imagist poems of H.D.'s Heliodora (1924). According to the notes inserted into her copy of Wallace Stevens's Harmonium (1923), she was drawn “to the Imagists, to the wordy ones and the strange rhythms.”3

  In 1930 both Niedecker and her husband lost their jobs to the Depression. Unable to pay the rent on their home in Fort Atkinson, they each returned to their parents' homes, and the marriage effectively ended. Soon after, in February 1931, Niedecker read and was enthralled by Louis Zukofsky's Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine. She wrote to him with her latest poems, one of which was “When Ecstasy is Inconvenient.” Zukofsky responded with interest and referred her to the magazine's editor, Harriet Monroe. This poem, which Monroe accepted for publication, reveals Niedecker's early surrealism, a style she was exploring long before “Mr. Zukofsky referred me to the surrealists for correlation.”4 By this time, she had read the major modernist writers whose work was available to her in Fort Atkinson, principally Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, H.D., Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, D.H. Lawrence. But it was contact with the second-generation modernist Louis Zukofsky that gave her direct access to the American avant-garde.

  Though it was the Objectivist issue of Poetry that had initiated her contact with Zukofsky, Niedecker would never count herself among the original Objectivists—Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and Carl Rakosi. At the time, she was drawn to its affinity with her own writing: “Thank god for the Surrealist tendency running side by side with Objectivism.”5 She admired the priority Objectivism gave both to the nonreferential, material qualities of words and to a “non-expressive” poetry that rejected a too-prominent stance of the poet described by Zukofsky as “imperfect or predatory or sentimental.”6 It appears that her enthusiasm for an object-based poetics was limited. Instead, she pursued abstraction. Niedecker and her Fort Atkinson friend Mary Hoard—wife of Niedecker's future employer—were fascinated by the challenge of registering experience without recourse to representational form. Poems such as the 1934 “Canvass” series record the linguistic content of different levels of consciousness. According to Edward Dahlberg, it was Niedecker's habit to “sleep with a pencil under her pillow so as not to miss any dreams.”7 Dream, she noted, is full of syntax: “in dream the simple and familiar words like prepositions, connectives, etc. are not absent, in fact, noticeably present to show illogical absurdity, discontinuity, parody of sanity.”8

  Niedecker and Zukofsky debated poetic strategies, he with little interest in the abstract or in surrealism but nevertheless impressed by the energy of her experiment. For the next thirty-five years they would continue their conversation in weekly letters, at times even more frequent. An edited selection of her letters to him is available in my book Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931–1970. Early in the friendship, toward the end of 1933, she made her first visit to New York, stayed in Zukofsky's apartment, became his lover, and fell pregnant. He insisted on an abortion, and she acquiesced. But the friendship survived these difficulties. Zukofsky continued to supply her with suggestions for reading, sent her copies of magazines and books that were difficult to obtain, read drafts of her poems, made suggestions for changes, and sent them to Ezra Pound, James Laughlin, and others for publication. For her part, Niedecker provided astute critiques of Zukofsky's work, plied him with questions, typed his poems, and prepared notes on subjects of shared interest. The writing that originated in this dialogue conveys a strong sense of shared endeavor.

  Both poets wrote across genres. Niedecker gave the title “TWO POEMS” to her play scripts “THE PRESIDENT OF THE HOLDING COMPANY” and “FANCY ANOTHER DAY GONE,” and wrote another play script called “DOMESTIC AND UNAVOIDABLE,” which she imagined as a series of “print stills” projected on a screen. In the same period, she also wrote a long semi-autobiographical prose piece, “UNCLE,” based on her grandparents' and parents' lives. The work of her early years has a particularly strong and varied material presence: the prose-poems, the script-poems, the trilogy of “Canvass” poems printed side-by-side in allusion to a triptych of abstract paintings, and the gift-book palimpsest, which superimposes her own holograph writings onto a conventionally printed pocket calendar. As she sa
id in a letter to Mary Hoard, “This would of course be what no one else has written—else why write?”9

  During the period 1935-1936, she made a shift from overt surrealist experiment toward a poetry attuned to political and social immediacies: “Looking around in America, working I hope with a more direct consciousness than in the past….”10 She had read Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and, although not a member of the Communist Party, was committed to social reform. Her writing explored folk models and, in particular, the short metrical rhymes of Mother Goose—poems of anonymous authorship, of proletarian origin, and of subtly subversive intent. Another significant shift occurred in 1938 when Niedecker began work in Madison for the federal Work Project Administration (WPA). There she was a writer and research editor with the Federal Writers' Project, helping to compile Wisconsin: A Guide to the Badger State. The job focused her attention on the local and added to her folk poems the vernacular of her Black Hawk Island/Fort Atkinson community and particularly of her mother, “descendant for sure of Mother Goose.”11 These poems offer a rich and subtle study of folk habits made by a poet with twin allegiances to a rural backwater and a metropolitan avant-garde.

  Her attention to local and international politics, visible though not prominent in her early surrealist work, coalesced in the folk project with its poems about the Depression, the growth of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, the Vichy government in France, the American involvement in World War II, the atomic bomb, and so on. Her engagement in current events and politics was matched by an interest in American history. Much of her research would be reflected in her poems in the form of quotation, a practice familiar to her from her reading of Zukofsky, Pound, and Marianne Moore. Between 1935 and 1944 she wrote more than 80 folk poems. Many of these would appear in New Goose, published in 1946 by the Press of James A. Decker.

  Upon completion of the Wisconsin guidebook in 1942, Niedecker worked briefly as a scriptwriter for the Madison radio station WHA. Then, in 1944 she began work in Fort Atkinson as a stenographer and proofreader for the local journal Hoard's Dairyman. Her poor eyesight would force her to give up the job in 1950. While she had known material comforts in her youth, her circumstances had become increasingly straitened. Her earnings were minimal and intermittent, and her parents' resources were dwindling. Her father's carp-fishing business failed in the late 1930s, and his property management was notoriously reckless, so that by the time of her parents' deaths in the early 1950s, Niedecker inherited no more than two cabins on the island. These brought in little income and proved a great headache to manage.

  In 1939, Louis had married Celia Thaew, and the birth of their son, Paul, in 1943, was a great pleasure to Niedecker. Zukofsky's letters gave her detailed accounts of Paul's childhood. In 1949 she began the long poem project “FOR PAUL,” where “[t]he central figure is a child of six or seven who composes music and plays the violin…. [T]he poem undertakes the child's further instruction, offering a middle ground between Paul's very personal world and the real world of history, wars, depressions, art and science.”12 The project was not unlike New Goose, which located the local and immediate within the global. Over four years, Niedecker composed 51 poems in a sequence of eight groups, each group a varied collection of forms and styles: quotation-based poems, persona poems, ballads, blues songs, riddling rhymes, and nonsense ephemera. Free verse is positioned alongside tightly organized stanzas; individual poems range in length from 4 to 204 lines. The result is remarkably spirited and assured. Her pace of composition was brisk, and the first two groups quickly appeared in print. Then followed a sudden stalling of publication explained, perhaps, by Zukofsky's increasing discomfort with the personal content of the poems. With this project, he had assumed and was allowed a more proprietary role. His relation to the poems was, of course, close, and when he experienced them as intrusive, his criticism was barbed.

  The “FOR PAUL” poems are nevertheless an assertion of Niedecker's own poetics, “the outcome of experimentation with subconscious and with folk—all good poetry must contain elements of both or stems from them—plus the rational, organizational force.”13 They are also insistently personal, at times extended and uncondensed, and in some cases focused on the less than idyllic qualities of life on Black Hawk Island. By 1956 Niedecker had abandoned the eight-group structure and rearranged the poems within a larger manuscript titled “FOR PAUL AND OTHER POEMS.” Some poems were removed and others added, resulting in a collection of 72 poems. This was intended to be her second book, ten years after the first, but despite her efforts, “FOR PAUL AND OTHER POEMS” was never published. Zukofsky's ambivalence was an important obstacle. As late as September 1960, Niedecker told Cid Corman that she had “ready, a book not yet printed, under title of For Paul.”14 Soon after she would dissolve the collection and instead publish the individual poems in magazines. Several of these were substantially revised, others remained unpublished, and still others such as “What horror to awake at night” and “Sorrow moves in wide waves” had to wait 18 years for their first publication in her T&G: The Collected Poems (1936-1966).

  Until the 1960s, publication—even in magazines—was a rare satisfaction for Niedecker. She told Edward Dahlberg in 1955, “Creeley has now accepted 4 [for Black Mountain Review]. I'm almost overcome, this would make my 6th publication in 10 years!”15

  In the mid-1950s, after the expansive form and energetic, personal disclosure of the “FOR PAUL” poems, she shifted toward an astringent, condensed haiku form, developing her distinctive five-line stanza. The choice of a minimalist form also coincided with the start of her job, in 1957, as a cleaner at the Fort Atkinson Hospital. Until she retired in 1963, time for writing would be rare. Her friendships with neighbor Aeneas McAllister and with the Milwaukee dentist Harold Hein sustained her through the 1950s and early 1960s. An important friendship by mail with Cid Corman began in 1960. Niedecker's side of the correspondence can be found in Lisa Pater Faranda's edition, “Between Your House and Mine”: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960 to 1970.

  When Ian Hamilton Finlay in Scotland read New Goose in 1961, the folk poems struck an immediate chord with him, caught up as he was in the Scottish folk poetry revival. He wrote to Niedecker with lavish praise and offered to reprint some of the poems. Within a year My Friend Tree was published. It reprinted nine of the original New Goose poems and added seven new ones. Niedecker planned the book as a selected poems including several more from New Goose; however, budget constraints kept the book trim. Buoyed by the sudden interest from a publisher, Niedecker returned to thinking of herself as a folk poet. She made the too-modest comment to Jonathan Williams that her folk poetry might be her only claim to difference between herself and other poets.

  In 1963, Niedecker married Al Millen, a housepainter from Milwaukee. The marriage allowed her to retire from the hospital job (she identified herself as “laborer” on her marriage license) and return to full-time writing. She moved to Al's apartment in Milwaukee; they spent their weekends on the island and their summers on road trips into the surrounding states and Canada. In 1964 she collected her current short poems—the product of ten months of new freedom—into three handmade, handwritten gift-books for Corman, Zukofsky, and Jonathan Williams, an acknowledgment of friendship but also of the difficulty of finding a publisher.

  In August 1965, Jonathan Williams offered to publish the manuscript of collected poems that she had prepared and titled T&G. She explained the title as an abbreviation of Lawrence Durrell's “Tenderness and Gristle” to which Williams added, much to her delight, “Tongue and Groove (if you're a carpenter).” But Jargon Society financial troubles kept the book in production limbo for four years. Niedecker waited with growing despair until it appeared in 1969. Meanwhile, in 1967, Stuart Montgomery of Fulcrum Press in London had solicited poems for another collection. In 1968, North Central was published. It included her two travel- and research-based poems, “LAKE SUPERIOR” and “WINTERGREEN RIDGE.” The same year Stuart Montgomery accepted
My Life by Water, which Fulcrum would publish in 1970. Originally planned as the British edition of T&G, it was now expanded to include the contents of North Central plus “PAEAN TO PLACE,” her extended reflection on Black Hawk Island. T&G appeared in 1969, and soon after, Niedecker received Cid Corman's offer to publish a selected poems. She prepared two typescripts, “THE EARTH AND ITS ATMOSPHERE” and “THE VERY VEERY,” both of which select from the same work represented in North Central, T&G, and My Life by Water. Neither of the typescripts was published. Her final manuscript, “HARPSICHORD & SALT FISH,” ready in 1970 and including the text-derived poems such as “THOMAS JEFFERSON,” “HIS CARPETS FLOWERED,” and “DARWIN,” was also unpublished at the time of her death.

  Throughout the 1960s, she was regularly published in little magazines. Her preference for quiet led her to refuse offers to read in public, but she enjoyed enormously visits from fellow poets such as Jonathan Williams, Basil Bunting, Tom Pickard, Carl Rakosi, Stuart Montgomery, and a month before her death, Cid Corman. She savored her contact with local friends Gail and Bonnie Roub and her correspondence with Clayton Eshleman, Bob Nero, and Kenneth Cox. After the mid-1960s, letters to Zukofsky were less routine. Niedecker died of a cerebral hemorrhage on December 31, 1970, at the height of her career. Two weeks before her death she told Cid Corman, “I think lines of poetry that I might use—all day long and even in the night.”16

  During her life, she attracted high praise from her peers. Her work was much admired by Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Edward Dahlberg, Charles Reznikoff, Jonathan Williams, Cid Corman, and many others. On January 5, 1971, six days after her death, the Wisconsin State Journal published the following letter, written by Basil Bunting from his home in Wylam, U.K.: