<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Dear All,<div><br></div><div>first some news of a party: everyone is invited to Jean-Jacques Poucel's fond adieu to the French Department: W<b>ine and Cheese Reception, Thursday May 6, 3pm, Romance Languages Lounge, 82-90 Wall Street, 3rd floor. </b></div><div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>And this Friday, May 7 from 3-5 in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center the poet Elizabeth Willis will be joining us to discuss her poetry and poetics. Below I will paste the text of questions culled from last Friday's generative and lively discussion of Elizabeth Willis's collection Meteoric Flowers. As is our usual process, these questions are prompts that will give this Friday's session some initial structure. As ever, the session should be a free flowing conversation with our visitor. Below the questions I'll paste a brief essay Willis has written about Lorine Niedecker. And as a cods to last week's discussion (and as an epigraph to this week's) I offer these lines from Willis's essay "Art against the State; Or What I Lived for." She writes:</div><div><br></div><div>"At times, another’s words seem to gather the energy one is unable to
gather for oneself. 'We gather our energies in order to make this
intolerable world endurable.' Such a sentence signals the relief in
understanding that the battles we fight individually may be nonetheless
shared. "</div><div><br></div><div>++</div><div><br></div><div>Our sessions are open to any and all guests, so be sure to spread the word to anyone who might be interested. This will be our last session of the academic year, so it is especially celebratory.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Onward--</div><div>Richard Deming, Co-conspirator </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div>ELIZABETH WILLIS is the <span style="color: black; ">Shapiro-Silverberg Associate Professor of Creative Writing</span> at Wesleyan University. She is the author of four books of poetry, <i>Second Law</i>, <i>The</i> <i>Human Abstract</i>, <i>Turneresque</i>, and <i>Meteoric Flowers. </i>Her work has been selected for the National Poetry Series and her awards include the Boston Review Prize, an award from the Howard Foundation, a Walter N. Thayer Fellowship for the Arts, and a grant from the California Arts Council. As a critic, she has written on 19<sup>th</sup>- and 20<sup>th</sup>- century poetry, and she has edited a collection of essays entitled <i>Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Politics of Place</i>.</div><div><br></div></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>+++++++++++++++</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Questions for Elizabeth Willis</div><div><!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal">When we discussed the work of Lorine Niedecker a few years
ago, we noted the emphasis in her poems on the domestic as a countervoice to
the monumentalism and even hypermasculine tendencies of modernism. While one
wouldn’t see your poems as domestic, is there a way that you conceive of the
feminine within poetry—or specifically your own work.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>To further contextualize this, your discussion of identity
with Charles Bernstein could be made to speak directly in part to your being a
woman—how does that aspect inform (rather than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">explain</i>) your sense of poetics or the perspective of your
poems?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Or, to quote one of your
poems, “What form do women take?”</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">At our recent session, the fact that the majority of the
poems in Meteoric Flowers are prose poems raised the question of why prose is
becoming more and more present in contemporary poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Do you see this a kind of acquiescing
to prose as the more dominant mode (culturally and commercially within our
present moment)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Is it a way of employing
a mode that disrupts the categories of prose and poetry?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What might such a disruption offer?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In terms of the structure of Meteoric Flowers, do the poems
interrupt the prose poems, or do they set up the prose that follows (with the
poems acting as “proems”)?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In what ways did the tropes of flowers and botany provide
principles of organization for you in the writing of the poems and in thinking
about the collection as a whole?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In Turneresque you found a correlation between the painter
J.W. Tuner and Ted Turner’s Turner Class Movies channel. Is there a
contemporary analogue to Erasmus Darwin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</span>In other words, is there a way that the Enlightenment thinker is re-inscribed
culturally in the present?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This
would speak to how the collection of poems escapes nostalgia or sentimentality.
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">One question that came up often had to do with the role of
intentionality in your work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>How
do you think of intentionality within readings of poems in general? To what
extent does the author’s intent guide readings of the poems? Since your poems
disrupt linearity within and between sentences, it would seem that intention is
a hard thing to determine—yet does that end up suggesting that meaning has no
place within your act of writing.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">How does one decide the measure of allusions? Do you imagine
your reader ought to go read Erasmus Darwin to understand your work? Do readers
who catch the allusions throughout your work read a different and perhaps “more
authentic” poem than those who do not catch those allusions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Is it the reader’s responsibilities to
track these down?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">We discussed very intensely the question of lyric
subjectivity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Is it voice or style
that creates a field of expressivity within and between the poems?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What is the difference between voce and
style in terms of what lyric poems express?</p>
<!--EndFragment-->
</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>++++++++++++++</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><table align="center" bgcolor="#c6d3d8" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" width="660"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" width="100%"><table bgcolor="#ffffff" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><table border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" width="70%"><span class="TITLE">Who
Was Lorine Niedecker?</span></td>
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by Elizabeth Willis </td>
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<tr><td><br><p>It's hard to write about Lorine Niedecker without using
the terms that have, in part, kept her in critical obscurity. Her poems
are plain styled and folk driven, wryly in love with the negative
economy of poetic labor. Their wit and precision sneak up on you with
quiet inevitability. They are proud of themselves and subtly
self-mocking, consciously combining high <a href="http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5664">modernist</a> and
homespun aesthetics. They can move deeply and laterally, engaging the
alternate realities of history, geology, botany, politics, aesthetics,
and sociology through brilliant wordplay and juxtaposition. </p><p> Niedecker herself was rich with complications—an ambitious poet who
chose to live almost entirely outside professional networks; a localist
fascinated with Lawrence of Arabia; a Marxist who owned property; a folk
mannerist, setting the literary within the equally complex beauty of
the commonplace. Beyond the work of her fellow <a href="http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5669">Objectivists</a>—Louis
Zukofsky, <a href="http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/694">Charles
Reznikoff</a>, Carl Rakosi, and George Oppen—Niedecker clearly knew, and
played on, the writing of William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Percy
Shelley, <a href="http://www.poets.org/wbyea">W. B. Yeats</a>, <a href="http://www.poets.org/wcwil">William Carlos Williams</a>, <a href="http://www.poets.org/edick">Emily Dickinson</a>, <a href="http://www.poets.org/wstev">Wallace Stevens</a>, <a href="http://www.poets.org/mmoor">Marianne Moore</a>, and on the
political economy of Karl Marx, John Ruskin, William Morris, Thomas
Jefferson, and John and Abigail Adams. In the relative isolation of
rural Wisconsin, this was her company. </p><p> But who was Lorine Niedecker? To follow her own aesthetic practice
of tracing phenomena to their sources, let's say that she was born in
1903 to Daisy Kunz and Henry Niedecker, their only child. She grew up
and lived most of her life on marshy Black Hawk Island, near the town of
Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, 35 miles from Madison. Daisy's side of the
family was the source of some property, which was gradually lost to the
Great Depression, bad luck, and Henry's poor business sense and drinking
habits. Lorine grew up around her father's carp-fishing and
cottage-rental business. She went to Beloit College to study literature
in 1922 but was called home less than two years later to take care of
her ailing, deaf mother. In 1928 she found work as an assistant at the
nearby public library, placed her first poems in national magazines, and
married Frank Hartwig, an employee of her father's whom she divorced
two years later. </p><p> Niedecker traced her poetic beginning to the discovery of the
Objectivist issue of <em>Poetry</em> magazine, guest-edited by <a href="http://www.poets.org/lzuko">Louis Zukofsky</a> and published in
February 1931. She immediately wrote to Zukofsky, who had recently
taught at the nearby University of Wisconsin, and so began their
life-long friendship and correspondence. In 1933 Niedecker's poems
appeared in <em>Poetry</em>, and she visited New York where she and
Zukofsky became lovers for a time. The same year, Niedecker returned
home to Black Hawk Island, devoting the rest of her creative life to her
poetry and correspondence, often filling both with descriptions of
local geography and overheard social commentary—much as <a href="http://www.poets.org/wword">Wordsworth</a>, at about the same age,
returned to his Lake District to find poetry in common speech. Having
read Wordsworth and the <a href="http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/179">Shelleys</a> in her
youth, she was conscious of the historical resonances between landscape
and literature, the "traces of living things" imprinted on both. As a
teenager, she took Wordsworth with her onto Lake Koshkonong, and in the
magnificent late poem "Paean to Place" she notes with wonder that
"Shelley could steer as he read." Niedecker lived most of her life by
water, eventually married again, earned her living by manual labor, and
wrote well over 400 pages of poetry, fiction, and drama before she died
in 1970. </p><p> Niedecker's association with Objectivism continued throughout her
life. But with the nationalist ethos of World War II and the Red scare
that followed, the loosely affiliated group, with its communist
associations and explicitly intellectual and working class concerns,
fell into obscurity in the 1940s and 50s. It wasn't until the late1960s
that it had its brief renaissance, with <a href="http://www.poets.org/goppe">George Oppen</a> winning the Pulitzer
in 1969 for <em>Of Being Numerous</em>. This was the period of
Niedecker's renaissance as well. After working through the1940s and
early 1950s as a proofreader at the local paper, <em>Hoard's Dairyman</em>,
and taking care of her aging parents, her poetic production increased
dramatically, and her poems again found their way into print. </p><p> It's also in this period that folk became acknowledged within
American popular culture as a significant influence and aesthetic with a
distinctly counter-culture, anti-capitalist agenda. As the project of
American expansion and global control began to fail abroad in the late
1960s, grassroots resistance flourished, bringing about a political and
poetic concern with the local. Niedecker's repeated critique of American
consumerism had rural and writerly distrust behind it: "Civilization is
an immense ad: Go to hell and be happy." </p><p> Until recently civilization seemed content to let Niedecker's work
drift into obscurity. Three individual volumes of her work were
published in her lifetime: <em>New Goose</em> (Prairie City, Ill: James
Decker, 1946), <em>My Friend Tree</em> (Edinburgh: Wild Hawthorn, 1961),
and <em>North Central</em> (London: Fulcrum, 1968); and two versions of
her collected poems appeared just before her death: <em>T& G </em>
(Highland, NC: Jargon, 1969) and <em>My Life By Water</em> (London:
Fulcrum, 1970). Other small collections have appeared and disappeared,
but for years the only widely available edition of Niedecker's work has
been the slim but beautiful selection <em>The Granite Pail</em> edited
by Cid Corman, published in 1985 by North Point and recently expanded
and reprinted by Gnomon. In 2002, an expanded reprint of <em>New Goose</em>
was published by Listening Chamber and the University of California
Press released the long-awaited edition of Niedecker's <em>Collected
Works</em>, meticulously edited and annotated by Jenny Penberthy. </p><p> Apart from her poems, Niedecker's letters—of which, two volumes have
been published—let us know she's an ambitious artist. While they
include buoyant descriptions of the plights of country life, complete
with aches and pains, job searching, plumbing troubles, and weather,
they also recount her reading and document her quest for hard-to-find
titles like <a href="http://www.poets.org/mloy">Mina Loy</a>'s <em>Last
Lunar Baedecker</em>. But the undercurrent of all her correspondence is
her indelible sense of herself as a poet, in spite of the frustrations
of being largely unpublished, unread, misinterpreted, overlooked. </p><p> In 1957, after yet another delay in the production of her eventually
aborted manuscript, <em>For Paul</em>, she writes to her publisher
Jonathan Williams: "Poetry is the most important thing in my life but if
sometime someone would print it without asking me for any money I'd
feel it would be important to someone else also." As if to cover for her
own directness, she goes on to explain, "Then too at the moment I'm
involved in hot water heaters for my cottages, in drilling for a flowing
well and in job hunting, the last named the greatest nightmare of all
even when I find the job." After her stint at <em>Hoard's Dairyman</em>,
she worked through the 1960s as a cleaning woman at a local hospital,
struggling to supply the money and labor needed to maintain the cottages
inherited from her parents. </p><p> In her geographical seclusion, Niedecker depended on her reading and
correspondence for a sense of poetic context, and when her work wasn't
being published, she sent out handmade books to her closest compatriots.
In 1964 she writes to her friend, fellow-poet, supporter, editor, and
now-executor Cid Corman: "I somehow feel impelled to send you the
product of the last year, just to keep in touch. I know you're not
printing (Origin). . . . I wish you and Louie and Celia and I could sit
around a table. Otherwise, poetry has to do it. . . ." But the intensity
of her connectedness to other poets was often misunderstood. The
Zukofskys were at times overwhelmed by her friendship, and even the
valiant Corman tellingly wonders if Niedecker's handmade book had been
sent "to celebrate her marriage, her home-making?" Having established a
community through the exchange and discussion of books, why not a
celebration of her poetry? </p><p> Like <a href="http://www.poets.org/wwhit">Whitman</a> and Oppen,
Niedecker saw herself as multiple, a manifestation of geological and
biological evolution, a being composed of vocabularies and iron and
water and leaf matter, having inherited the job of speaking for,
rephrasing, recombining and condensing the phenomenal world into art.
She was acutely aware of the interconnectedness of things, masterfully
mixing the universal with the regional. Even in defining her own poetic
process, she would localize <a href="http://www.poets.org/epoun">Pound</a>'s
sweeping command that the poet "condense" by translating it into the
economy of Wisconsin creameries ("Poet's Work"). </p><p> Niedecker's poems sometimes function as glosses to her reading,
reintegrating biographical and historical elements with the literary,
tracing a thought or poem back to its sources in living things, whether
it means acknowledging, as Erasmus Darwin did, the metaphorical links
between animal and vegetable existence, or invoking the life-context of
another writer as a "source" of his or her work. Literary sources
receive the same treatment as oral text and hearsay. The title of her
collected poems <em>T & G</em> is a condensation of Lawrence
Durrell's "tenderness and gristle," and throughout her poems one finds
acutely condensed references to the biographies and works of major
writers—as in the deceptively simple phrasing of "Who Was Mary Shelley?"
with its phenomenal attention to the periphery, to what is left out,
the historical invisibility of women's work. </p><p> This art of elision can bring about stunning combinations of terms
("dangerous parasol") and wonderfully stretched slant rhymes ("...jumped
me / ...country"). Her poems coax subtle tonal shadings from even a
commonplace term like "friend"; she wrote poems to "My Friend Tree" and
"To my Small Electric Pump," but the word is also charged with sexual
innuendo and restraint. At times Niedecker's art seems to rest on the
delicate hinge of a single line break which can overlay syntactical
logic with other meanings, as in "Wintergreen Ridge," when the end of
one grammatical clause abuts the beginning of another to synthesize both
lines within a single metaphor: "let's say of Art / We climb." And
there are often surprisingly weighted reversals—say, the quick inversion
of looking and being looked at: "you are lovely / you have seen"; or
the wry aside that "future studies will throw much darkness on the
home-talk"; or the paradoxical juncture of inspiration and ownership:
"I'm possessed and do possess." </p><p> The ambitious scale of Niedecker's poetic address is clearest in her
long poems, like "Wintergreen Ridge," where we witness a transformative
movement from mineral to animal, from a fashion reference to a comment
on the nature of memory, to the awareness of plants as parts of oneself,
to a reference to flower children and social protest, to a comment on
rural vs. urban church architecture, to <a href="http://www.poets.org/tseli">T. S. Eliot</a>, to Henry James, to
the <a href="http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5646">Beats</a>,
to a murder-dismemberment in Madison, Wisconsin, to the Vietnam War, to
differences between human and bird grief. One thinks, here of the scale
of Reznikoff's poetics of witness in <em>Testimony</em> and <em>Holocaust</em>,
<a href="http://www.poets.org/goppe">Oppen</a>'s metaphysics in <em>Of
Being Numerous</em> and <em>Primitive</em>, <a href="http://www.poets.org/lzuko">Zukofsky</a>'s attenuation of sound, <a href="http://www.poets.org/epoun">Pound</a>'s subject rhyme, <a href="http://www.poets.org/mmoor">Moore</a>'s use of textual collage. </p><p> Elsewhere, there is the simple beauty of poetic tautology: "If I am
fernal, it's fern country, then. . . ," where one can hear the infernal
hovering between "I" and "fernal," the dark energy behind creative
generation, the primitive self speaking within the fern, the "I" as
metaphor in the ancient stroke of self-definition. We find the building
of metaphor through the invention of precise verbs—"Orioled" and
"owled"—poetry infused with the originary power of naming. We find the
shock of honesty around which a poem resonates: "I forget my face." </p><p> There's a tendency when writing about an underacknowledged writer to
try to set her up as a kind of hero, but Niedecker is inspiring less in
her heroism than in her perseverance—the perseverance of a poet who
would not be separated from her cultural and aesthetic sources. It's as
if she learned the lesson of Mary Shelley's self-immolating promethean
mythology. Her perceived humility seems to stem less from midwestern
decorum than from the modern acknowledgment that we live and work in a
reality as much evolutionary as creationist, where the poem is a
fossil-like record of both individual genius and the pressures of the
various histories into which we are born. Where would Niedecker tell us
to go from here? "Here in the lush wash, you go back to the exuberant
source and start over." With her <em>Collected Works</em> now published,
we can do just that. </p></td>
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