[Wgcp-whc] WG/Poetics--Niedecker Minutes 1/20

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

1/25/06

On January 20, the Whitney Humanities Center Working Group in Contemporary
Poetry and Poetics met for the first session of the new semester and discussed
the work of Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970).  We began by locating Niedecker in
terms of her association with the American Objectivists, particularly in
regards to her close friendship with Louis Zukofsky, with whom she initially
corresponded because of his editing of the Objectivist issue of Poetry
Magazine, which appeared in 1930.  According to Jenny Penberthy (editor of
Niedecker?s Collected Works), Niedecker, living in Fort Atkinson,
Wisconsin?as far from the New York avant-garde milieu as one can
imagine?read the issue ?and was enthralled? and so wrote to Zukofsky,
sending him poems.  This started a voluminous correspondence (and a complicated
love affair) that went on for years.

We began our discussion by looking first at a number of poems from the early
book, New Goose (published in 1946), which Cid Corman, editor of Granite Pail,
Niedecker?s selected poems, described as being written during her period of
apprenticeship to Zukofsky.  Corman might misrepresent the working relationship
of the two poets, in that each seems to serve as the other?s interlocutor.
There is, however, a prevailing reading of Zukofsky?s influence on Niedecker.
One question that arose in our discussion regarded what aspect of Zukofsky?s
poems might be evident in Niedecker. Since the group has spent a number of
sessions on Zukofky?s obdurate magnum opus ?A,? few saw connections
between that and the short, condensed poems of Niedecker.  I will paste below a
poem from Zukofsky?s body of short poems in order to give some sense of the
connections between the two poets..

 The discussion, after the preliminary establishing of Niedecker?s context
within imagist and objectivist frames, turned to asking what might make this
poet ?avant-garde.? We would periodically refer to Peter Middleton?s
essay ?Lorine Niedecker?s ?Folk base? and Her Challenge to the American
Avant-Grade,? who argues that the poet?s use of the vernacular is a radical
challenge to the avant-garde?s characteristic emphasis on linguistic
innovation in that it foregrounds the local to suggest the ways that language
use marks a set of social relationships.  Niedecker?s inclusion of
?folksy? discourse is in no way parodic nor is it a way of providing
?color.? Instead, the language arises out of the immediacy of her locale
and from its attendant social conditions (and social conditioning).  In one
way, we saw this as an avant-garde practice because it cut against the
high-cultural ?poetic diction? of many of the dominant poetic strains
during her lifetime (Stevens for instance). Niedecker used the language common
to her as a means of thinking because, arguably, that is the language one used
to think with.  Certainly, when put against ?the folksiness? of Frost,
Niedecker seems avant-garde.  In part, this is because she shapes the local
language rather than ?uses? it to establish ?voice.? In short, she
isn?t consciously attempting a kind of mimetic representation of speech;
instead, she uses the language at hand.  While, this might not create the
?shocks? Peter Burger argues accompanies the reading of avant-garde texts,
one can certainly note the dissonance or distance between expectations of
poetic diction and the language of Niedecker?s poems.  There is thus the
interweaving of life and art in her poems that is also so often characteristic
of avant-garde works.  Furthermore, we discussed that what might be the best
measure of her modernist or avant-garde register might be to consider the
relationship of her poems to tradition.  In this way, we were able to contrast
her profitably with Ezra Pound, who constantly set the terms of his own
genealogy, thereby depending on the legitimacy or authority conveyed by
tradition, but a tradition of his own fashioning.  This tendency is also
visible in Williams, Moore, Stevens, and H.D, as well as Niedecker?s more
immediate contemporaries?Zukofsky, Olson, and Oppen.  Rather than relying on
classical allusion, or overt discursus on poetic lineage, Niedecker again
focused on the language of her environment and her experience as a mechanism of
?authenticity.?

During the conversation, the point was raised that ?avant-garde? should not
be equated with ?good? (and vice-versa).  The discussion also began to
revolve around the vexed issue of ?greatness? in poetry.  What are the
criteria for ?great poetry??  On one hand, the markers where Niedecker fall
short are clear?there is no manifesto, no major project, no ?magnum opus,?
and no metaphysical/political/social reach.  This is especially relevant to
Niedecker?s work in that in many ways she seems to have also gone directly
against the masculinist tendencies of Modernism in that not only are her poems
speaking to and from her Wisconsin milieu, but also deal directly with such
issues as domesticity.  For some, Niedecker?s attention to the homely and to
the quotidian as moments for meditation and reflection (rather than say
History, as in Pound?s case, or mythology in H. D.?s) perhaps work against
the possibility of seeing Niedecker as great.  Indeed, ?ambition? seems
ultimately to be the central criterion for what constitutes ?great? (of
course, one would also add that that ambition must, on some level, be achieved
as well).  In that Niedecker abjured this kind of poetic ?will to power,?
that might explain, as Penberthy says, Niedecker?s ?near invisibility on
the American scene.?   To which one might add, that Niedecker also refused
reading her poems publicly (or even privately).  Rather than courting the
?great man? or ego-centered poetry and poetics, Niedecker used the language
of the local and images to ground meditations. As was recurrently said, although
people don?t speak like a Niedecker poem, a Niedecker poem uses the language
that people speak with.  In that sense, there is diffusion, it might be argued,
of a central ?I? rather than the articulation of ?greatness.?  Thus,
Niedecker seems consciously to court the status of minor poet not as an act of
humility or deference but in order to ?shift the compass of value? from
ambition?s will to power so characteristic of modernist and New Americanist
work, to highlight a consciousness within and determined by the domestic
sphere. As we dioscussed, such a recasting calls the privileging of
?ambition? into question.  In light of this, one readily sees the
importance of Niedecker?s poetry within a feminist, non-patriarchal context
and is in that way also radical and avant-garde in a particular way in its
implicit critique by means of presenting and valuing alternative modes of
experience and expression.  If Deleuze tells us that in minor literature every
element is political (because within it social milieu isn?t background, but
is part of a collective value), then Niedecker?s work may be importantly
minor.

It was, all in all, an intense discussion of Niedecker?s work that brought the
group to some of the most important questions of poetics, aesthetics, and their
participation in social values.

The Working Group next meets on Friday, Feb. 2.  At that meeting, we?re
delighted to have member-at-large Paolo Valesio join us to discuss his work on
the Italian Futurists.  The reading is still pending but once that is
available, I?ll contact people to let everyone know where materials can be
picked up.

Your humble servant,
Richard Deming, Secretary, Scribe, and Scrivener

?The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets every other Friday
at 3.00 PM in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University to
discuss problems and issues of contemporary poetry within international
alternative and /or avant-garde traditions of lyric poetry. All are welcome to
attend.?




When the crickets
sound like fifty water-taps
forsaken at once

the inclemency
of the inhuman noises
is the earth?s

with its roadways
over cabins in the forests

the sheets smell
of sweet milk

All the waters
of the world

we are going
to sleep to sleep

	--Louis Zukofsky