Lorine Niedecker, the Anonymous: Gender, Class, Genre and Resistances Author(s): Rachel Blau DuPlessis Source: The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 96-116 Published by: Kenyon College Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4336668 Accessed: 10-09-2018 18:07 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Kenyon College is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Kenyon Review This content downloaded from 128.91.51.41 on Mon, 10 Sep 2018 18:07:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms RACHEL BLA U DuPLESSIS LORINE NIEDECKER, THE ANONYMOUS: GENDER, CLASS, GENRE AND RESISTANCES A poem is a peculiar instance of language's uses, and goes well beyond the [person] writing -finally to the anonymity of any song. ROBERT CREELEY' Anonymity was a great possession.... We can still become anonymous.... VIRGINIA WOOLF2 L ORINE Niedecker is an American woman poet, born in 1903, who lived most of her sixty-seven years in rural Wisconsin on the confluence of a lake and a river, in a small cabin like those which her father, then she, managed for vacationing fishermen. She was married twice, once very briefly in her late twenties, and then in the last seven years of her life, but she was more deeply marked by her bonds to her parents. She died in 1970. Her life was modest; her poems, mainly, short; her friendships among literary folk-Louis Zukofsky and Cid Corman-and neighbors (Gail and Bonnie Roub) were few, but they nurtured her intent and elegant working in the objec- tivist poetics within modernism.3 Her work was published only by small presses.' She is barely anthologized. She made no "literary career." All of this could be told as a narrative of pathos. But feminist critics, it becomes clear, must insist on the agency of writers, on the series of choices (even among narrow options, even those favoring self-erasure) which allow a person to construct an oeuvre.5 I will argue that the notion of anonymity saturated Niedecker's attitude towards the poetic career. In her late and unfinished essay "Anon," Virginia Woolf argues that "Anonymity" was a great possession of the (approximately sixteenth-century) past, giving us ballads, songs, implacable attitudes, nonegoistic subjectivities, frankness, and abilities to articulate communal values; we can still become anonymous when we read and respond to work from that era. Niedecker became anonymous in this way and more. 96 This content downloaded from 128.91.51.41 on Mon, 10 Sep 2018 18:07:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Being female is not a transcultural absolute, though it is always a marked position (and a woman writer is a marked marker). Femaleness always plays itself out in specific historical and social conditions, and in relation to other social markers. For Niedecker one such was her social class, or, more accurately, her multiple class facets - as a poorish, semi-rural person holding low-level jobs, as an intellectual poet, responding to at least three very specific poetic traditions (folk, surrealist, and objectivist), and as a political radical, a person making a left critique of American culture and society. She was visually disabled as well as poorish; and she had spent a good part of her life involved with her impaired mother (deaf, with her "big blind ears'). The resistances Niedecker makes in her poetry involve her critical discomfort with gender norms, class assumptions, and Americanist ideology as she lives out her intense marginality to a dominant culture of materialism, bellicosity, bigness/bestness, and fame as it developed in the post-war period. These resistances play themselves out not only thematically but as well in her choices of genre: Mother Goose rhymes, ballads, and haiku/renga. She seems to seek a minority, a littleness, a miniature scale almost unthinkable, especially for a female writer who can be culturally coded as minor no matter what genre she chooses, but especially if she chooses tiny-looking, and folk, forms.6 CONTEXTS AND RECEPTIONS Lorine Niedecker is not a poet without context; no poet could be so described. But because she is little known, she seems always to arrive in discus- sions as a surprise, uncontextualized. One might speak at more length than I will here of her loyal friendship to Louis Zukofsky and his family, as country mouse to city mouse. Zukofsky's prodigious young son Paul (the well-known violinist to whom Niedecker wrote "musical" offerings) figures in Niedecker's imagination as a sibling artist, or even as an imaginary son, for the complex- ities of affiliation, some filial piety, some love longing carefully set aside, and continuous artistic camaraderie between Niedecker and Zukofsky is one of the decisive stories of her formation.7 Her poetic development was interdependent with his colleagueship, but she also assumed the pose of loyal disciple as a strategy and a demeanor of intentional modesty. This may be surmised from a letter by Carl Rakosi to George Oppen. "I was shaken by the sudden death of Lorine Niedecker. I met her for the first time last spring in her house on the edge of a creek, a house so small that if there had been one more person than the four of us there [probably Al Millen, Leah Rakosi, Carl and Lorine], it would have been impossible to sit down to table. She had been described as having some strange ailment and refusing to see anyone, but she was delighted to see me and I found her as fresh and wide-awake as a daisy. I jolted her when I didn't go along with her adulation of Zukofsky. When she saw I was serious, she beamed and looked relieved. She said she found it refreshing. All in all, a very healthy person."8 97 This content downloaded from 128.91.51.41 on Mon, 10 Sep 2018 18:07:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 98 THE KENYON REVIEW Niedecker has not been visible as a participant in American poetry because her "school" of poets, the "Objectivist" cohort-insofar as one may talk of "schools" -is also virtually invisible. That cohort is downplayed in part because they do not participate in the current period style, and in part because they were making a radical political critique of modernism just as it was com- ing into cultural hegemony. Those using an objectivist poetics were not a group, but a cohort with some pattern of friendship and mutual influence; they are Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, later Carl Rakosi, along with Niedecker. None is represented in the current Norton Anthology of Modern Literature; Zukofsky appeared in the prior edition and was recently cut. What is wanted - one must see this as soon as such a poet's perpetual "discovery" suggests the great lacks and fissures of the canonical - is a new literary history. The hegemony of modernism is created by the dispersal and divestment of energies of many competing, contemporaneous modernist moves, and the loss of many poetries. Tracking this process in Repression and Recovery, Cary Nelson has spoken eloquently about the current conservative confluence between literary history and canon formation, where the one is innocently accepted as the equivalent of the other.' Instead, Nelson argues for their separation and even polarization, into terms importantly, permanently in "aggressive dialogue" and debate. Literary history is the account of what is there, what is "on the ground"; who is writing, what, and possibly why; who is responding, what discursive practices and social meanings are created. Literary history would, at least, be responsible to Niedecker's presence. Such a survey should be, for all intents and purposes, as "neutral" and as "inclusive" as one can make it. Even though those categories are fictions, they might be effectual fictions. Canon formation, taken itself as a more fluid and relativized phenomenon than the term "canon" suggests, then asks questions of selection which are always nonneutral questions involving power: perhaps based on the always relativized questions of "quality," perhaps on thematic attractiveness, perhaps on historical needs for certain literary texts. These criteria are regarded by all as unabashedly driven by interests, needs, and desires. Canons are tem- porary, multiple, and conflictual. They are always contested spaces. Artists are not unaware of the different drives in which canon formation occurs. A cross- light on classification categories and the construction of artists comes in a 1969 letter by Niedecker to Corman: "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?" (Faranda 208) A further context of reception for Niedecker might speak about the severe diminishment of value, right now, in American criticism, where metonymic and nonnarrative poetries are concerned. When narrative epiphany alone is valued in versions of mainstream poetries, we lose the possibility of nonlinear constructions, fields of material that intersect, multiple climaxes, This content downloaded from 128.91.51.41 on Mon, 10 Sep 2018 18:07:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS 99 flattened telos, unstressed or reticent closures.