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Jenny Penberthy I Sent University of Wisconsin Milwaukee a Copy of T&G Way Back in Sept Lorine Niedecker’s Century 1903-2003 Jenny Penberthy I sent University of Wisconsin Milwaukee a copy of T&G way back in Sept. A few days ago I wrote: Did you fail to receive? They answer they’ve placed it with regional materials. I should ask: What region—London, Wisconsin, New York? –LN in her December 7, 1969 letter to Cid Corman WHAT REGION? 1.1 Lorine Niedecker’s Century 1903-2013 1.2 Increase Lapham & Lorine Niedecker Lorine Niedecker’s Century 1903-2003 Jenny Penberthy The text of a public lecture given at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater 8 May 2003 When I first proposed the title for this talk, “Niedecker’s Century 1903-2003,”1 I had in mind Niedecker’s centennial. Certainly a reason to celebrate. Since then the meaning has shifted in my mind towards sovereignty: Niedecker’s Century, hers, the century defined by Niedecker. It’s a wonderfully large assertion, one that among other things confronts the miniature scale in which she has often been viewed. I imagine “Niedecker’s Century” as the slogan for city banners lining the streets of the state capital. According to British composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Lorine Niedecker “is officially recognized by the State of Wisconsin as its greatest poet.”2 Given this internation- ally acknowledged status, street banners are certainly in order. I’ve spoken before about the tendency for Niedecker’s work to Bob Nero, “How’s my fellow astronaut of inner space?” She had no be read in miniaturizing terms.3 It is certainly true that most of her mythologizing illusions about space travel; citing Einstein, she said: poems are short; that she herself was slightly built and modest; that “… space / is what it’s made up of”.6 she lived her life within a circumscribed geography. Here are two Romantic transcendence held no appeal for Niedecker. Her ex- among many recollections: the first by Mary Oppen who met Nied- ploratory gaze is more typically turned towards the ground. ecker in New York in the 1930s, “New York was overwhelming, and [Niedecker] was alone, a tiny, timid, small-town girl. She escaped A student the city and returned to Wisconsin …. [H]er poetry emerged from my head always down a tiny life. From Wisconsin came perfect small gems of poetry … of the grass as I mow 4 from the crevices of her life ….” Then George Oppen writing to a I missed the cranes. friend in 1963: “[Niedecker] … must be 60 now; a tiny little person, very, very near sighted always. She had graduated from Wisconsin “These crayons fly but was too timid to face almost any job. She took a job scrubbing in a circle ahead” floors in a hospital near the run-down farm she inherited, and is still said a tall fellow. living in that crumbling farmhouse and scrubbing floors. Someone in Scotland printed a tiny little book of her poems, which are little (Collected Works, 220-21) barely audible poems, not without loveliness ….”5 These ill-con- sidered and inaccurate comments parallel the minimizing early commentary about Emily Dickinson: “a plain, shy little person” She is a student of the grass at the expense of witnessing the soaring (Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1891), “a little home-keeping cranes overhead, but the short-sighted speaker can delight in the al- person” (John Crowe Ransom, 1956), etc. The Oppens’ portraits ternative experience of the cranes’ flight framed in quirky language. need to be set alongside Niedecker’s statements that suggest the Yes, she’s a student of grass, of the micro—and much of it would far-from-miniature scale of her literary ambitions. She told Bob literally be viewed through a magnifying glass—but the close focus Nero in 1967 that she dreamed “of an ease of speech that takes in of her work is by no means an accommodation to short-sightedness, the universe” and Ezra Pound in 1934 that as a reader of poetry a shrinking of scale. Collapsing and expanding perspectives—often “one seeks an extension of one’s own wit to comprehend …. the head to the point of incongruity—held great appeal for Niedecker. Here’s … has no business to do anything but reel.” She wrote to Jonathan a letter she wrote to Edward Dahlberg in 1956: “I wish I could do Williams in 1965, “A good winter anyhow—in one word: Melville. the birds, worms, plants of my little plot of earth here in the manner Benito Cereno, The Encantadas, Moby Dick, followed by DH Law- of the first explorers landing in Virginia and with my own human rence and Charles Olson on that vastness. I feel nothing less than a setting, mental furnishing, etc. … all the Greeks, your Bible people, reforming of my elements.” In the era of moon-landings, she wrote to everyone and all ideas strained, pointed to this. I might get 8 lines!” 2 | LORINE NIEDECKER’S CENTURY JENNY PENBERTHY | 3 True to Objectivist theory, she would want to present the particulars Once a rabbit and a rail were eating away both absorbed, of her place while evoking a large and rich history. looking down—suddenly they came face to face and both jumped back. Rabbits not having bills are quite peaceful creatures—and always nibbling—it’s a wonder there’s any I want to address more specifically Niedecker’s relation to her part of grass left in this world. I seem to have planted my gladioli for them. Living in the teeming tropics under jungle law the world, what she called “North Central.” “The Brontes had their I wasn’t surprised to find two blood spots on my cement moors, I have my marshes,” is a strong statement of literary belong- steps and not far away a decapitated young rabbit. I had ing. On my first visit to Blackhawk Island with Gail Roub and Milo turtles too of course in my mud flat—I can’t be sure of the Jones in 1996, I learned from the proprietor of the Fountain House difference between their noises and bull frogs’ but I think Inn (at one time owned and run by Lorine’s parents, Henry and it’s turtles that have that deep thing, always three times, Daisy) that Niedecker had been a “river rat.” Those able to endure from evening to two in the morning. I’d wake up in my the rigours of life on Blackhawk Island earned the unflattering label sleep and wonder what all those dogs were doing barking of “river rats.” Niedecker’s attachments to the place ran deep despite around my house. One day there was a water spaniel (rhi- the routine flooding and submersion that brought water and dirt noceros) plowing through-! soon got him out of there with into her home. For all the challenges, she clearly revered the place. my cannon-like voice and clapping of hands (bring-em- “I am what I am because of all this—I am what is around me,” she back-alive-Niedecker) as every time a dog gets excited over told Gail Roub in 1967. Her extended “Paean to Place,” a poem of a bird and jumps on the soft lawn he leaves a hole. Lots of snakes of course, one disporting himself on a young willow praise to the god of poetry, is located in “swale and swamp,” “sworn to like Spanish moss. I notice frogs get eaten in quantities water,” saturated rather than soaring. A letter to Zukofsky in 1950 by almost everything. Mozart’s Air and Chopin much too gives a strong sense of the contradictory appeal: delicate for this country but beautiful moonlight nights.7 The flood is subsiding and maybe the monsoon has passed. The birds and animals came close, practically inside the Her life on Blackhawk Island could not have been further re- house because on two sides I had only a couple of feet moved from the avant-garde terrain where she also set up home. of land. A flood in the summer here is like a tropical The avant-garde attended closely to developments in the world’s jungle. The Amazon flowed through just in front of my thick growth of dogwood. Here a large (very fat) musk- metropolises. For many years her connection to these developments rat swam—they seem to swim with their noses as that’s was Louis Zukofsky (along with his friends in and around New what you notice first—and came out on the shore to sun York—Jerry Reisman, Charles Reznikoff, William Carlos Williams, himself. What’s more wet looking when it’s wet than a rat? Edward Dahlberg); later she added Cid Corman in Kyoto, Japan; My family of king rails worked for food, whacking at little Bob Nero in Milwaukee; Clayton Eshleman in New York; Ian Ham- crab-like things sailing along but rails are really very shy. ilton Finlay in Edinburgh, Scotland; Kenneth Cox in London; the 4 | LORINE NIEDECKER’S CENTURY JENNY PENBERTHY | 5 peripatetic Jonathan Williams; and a few others. With them she had Administration (renamed the Work Projects Administration in intense conversations about emerging currents in poetry. 1939). Her research for Wisconsin: A Guide to the Badger State and a series of biographies of prominent Wisconsinites for an anticipated dictionary of biography would have brought her into close contact She began her writing career in a self-styled surrealist mode, docu- with details of the local history, topography, botany, architecture, menting layers of consciousness and unconsciousness, juxtaposing linguistic culture, etc. TheGuide , for instance, records examples of fragments of language drawn from a variety of sources: her dreams, folk speech in the Wisconsin town of Pepin: “Their speech draws politics, literary biography, etc.
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