Lorine Niedecker, an American poet who died in 1970, is sometimes compared to Emily Dickinson, though she is much less well known than the Belle of Amherst. Though not precisely loners, both women lived outside mainstream social convention and wrote distinctive, sometimes downright weird verse about social issues and the limits of women's roles in their times and societies. Niedecker has pretty much been left out of the canon, though (she is scarcely anthologized), and was little recognized during her life. She did not have an artist's ego, nor did she thrill to the idea of posthumous fame (Dickinson did). You can get an appetite for her poetry, which is distinct, empty-sad, sometimes funny, and inseparable from the dark water, marshes, and thirsty lakeside trees of Black Hawk Island, Wisconsin, near Fort Atkinson, where she lived virtually her entire life.
Lorine Niedecker Collected Works, published by University of California Press and edited by Jenny Penberthy, is a great way to taste the bare-stripped, supercompressed lines that reek of silence and the rural Midwest's cadences and concerns. Hardscrabble living is one theme: "I spent my money/by the ocean/and have not any/to fill a tooth." Other strains running through her work are about resistances to gender role rigidity and social class, along with surrealistic wordplay.
Some critics say geographical remoteness caused Niedecker to be unknown; I think it was also because of her lack of interest in self-promotion. Her anonymity and outsider status were deliberate, part of a rejection of official culture, which in the 1930s-'50s was as full of hyperbolic personalities, glitz, commercialism, gender norms, and class stereotypes as it is today (well, almost). Her lean lines, like all the best literature, speak to us about the parts of life shuttered away from gargantuan cultural noise.
Deliberately small and remote, Niedecker's work has been linked with surrealism and the New York-based "objectivist" movement, which shunned emotion or sentimentality in poetry, preferring to capture the hard objective world. She was interested in objectivism, and in the early 1930s visited objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky in New York, had an affair with him, and returned to Wisconsin--but the two remained lifelong friends and artistic comrades. (Their letters are collected in Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931-1970, edited by Jenny Penberthy, Cambridge University Press.)
A physically beautiful, squarish-shaped book, Collected Works contains poetry, short fiction, a radio play, and 27 facsimiled pages of a 1935 desk calendar on which Niedecker wrote odd, funny, perplexing lines: "What a white muffler/in a dark coat/will do for a/dull man," or "I like a/loved one to/be apt in/the wing."
In "Paean to Place," a longer, fairly autobiographical poem in three sections, there's a sense of molten grief behind the precise, compressed, "I was the solitary plover/a pencil/for a wingbone." The plover is a common bird, and one variety pretends to be injured whenever an enemy approaches its nest. The brief lines suggest the hollowness of bird bones in pencil, an extension of the poet's hand, or maybe a bird bone filled with lead; the poem's shifting nuances also suggest the solitary writer with the creativity and deceptive cunning to deceive others for survival.
"Lake Superior," one of her best poems, is sensually similar to "Paean," but thickly packed with awe and science: "In every part of every living thing/is stuff that once was rock/In blood the minerals/of the rock...." In language of nearly twiglike simplicity, the poet manages to describe the scientific law of the conservation of mass, which says no physical matter is created anew or discarded, but instead changes from one form into another over millennia. Niedecker makes her surprising, economic poetry itself echo this scientific law, too. Near the end of the poem, she writes, "The smooth black stone/I picked up in true source park/the leaf beside it/was once stone/Why should we hurry/Home."
The poet has found a home in understanding how the molecules of life repeat themselves infinitely. In the midst of this, there's no rush to die. But to die means to arrive home, which sounds nice and fine, a place where even outsiders can be soothed.
