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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2012
While Niedecker's “life by water” is the subject of many of her poems, reflecting the experience of living on the flood-prone island of Black Hawk, Wisconsin, the water imagery that saturates many of her poems also becomes a way of reflecting upon time as it is experienced, of consciousness as process, of subjectivity as something pulled along by a temporal stream. The poetics of temporal flow suggests Niedecker's interest in exploring forms of experience that fall outside conscious attention and that point to her affinity with the modernist philosopher of time, Henri Bergson, whose Creative Evolution she read in 1955. This paper examines some of the short, concise poems Niedecker wrote in the 1950s, together with the later, looser-limbed poems such as “Paean to Place” where she turns away from the objectivist principles of com pression in order to produce fluid, malleable poems commensurate with the flow of experience.
1 Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 107.
2 Ibid., 193.
3 Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications Inc., 1998), 200Google Scholar, 178.
4 Penberthy, Jenny, ed., “Lorine Niedecker: ‘Knee-Deck Her Daisies’: Selections from Her Letters to Louis Zukofsky,” Sulfur, 18 (1987), 110–51Google Scholar, 129.
5 Ibid. 112.
6 Ibid., 134.
7 Ibid., 174.
8 Antliff, Mark, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 12Google Scholar.
9 Bergson, 128.
10 Ibid., 153.
11 Ibid., 49.
12 Ibid., 167, 185.
13 Niedecker: Collected Works, 195.
14 Ibid., 170.
15 Bergson, 201.
16 Jesse Matz, “T. E. Hulme, Henri Bergson, and the Cultural Politics of Psychologism,” in Mark S. Micale, ed., The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 339–51, 344.
17 Bergson, 128.
18 Robert J. Berthorf., ed., Robert Duncan: Selected Prose (New York: New Directions, 1995), 2. For a discussion of Niedecker's relation to Duncan see Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker's ‘Paean to Place’ and Its Reflective Fusions,” in Patricia Willis, ed., Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 170–1.
19 White, Heather Cass, “‘Parts Nicely Opposed’: Lorine Niedecker's Emerging Reputation,” Western Humanities Review, 59, 1 (2005), 144–63Google Scholar, 144.
20 Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker, the Anonymous: Gender, Class, Genre and Resistances,” in Jenny Penberthy, ed., Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996), 113–38, Peter Nicholls, “Lorine Niedecker: Rural Surreal,” in Penberthy, Woman and Poet, 193–217.
21 For detailed examinations of Niedecker's early experiments with surrealism see Penberthy, Jenny, “‘The Revolutionary Word’: Lorine Niedecker's Early Writings 1928–1946,” West Coast Line, 26, 1 (1992), 75–98Google Scholar; and Ruth Jennison, “Waking into Ideology: Lorine Niedecker's Experiments in the Syntax of Consciousness,” in Willis, 131–50. For an account of the brief affair between Niedecker and Zukofsky see Glenna Breslin, “Lorine Niedecker: Composing a Life,” in Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom, eds., Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography and Gender (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 141–53.
22 Lorine Niedecker, “Local Letters,” in Penberthy, Woman and Poet, 88.
23 DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker's ‘Paean to Place’,” 160.
24 Nicholls, 193–217.
25 Ibid. 213.
26 Faranda, Lisa Pater, ed., “Between Your House and Mine”: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960 to 1970 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), 185Google Scholar, 46.
27 Mary Pinard, “Niedecker's Grammar of Flooding,” in Willis, 21–30, 22.
28 Jonathan Skinner, “Particular Attention: Lorine Niedecker's Natural Historie,” in Willis, 41–59, 42.
29 Michael Davidson, “Life by Water: Lorine Niedecker and Critical Regionalism,” in Willis, 3–20, 3.
30 Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker’s ‘Paean to Place’ and its Reflective Fusions,” in Willis, 151–79, 162.
31 Penberthy, “Knee-Deck Her Daisies,” 146.
32 Zukofsky, Louis, Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky (London: Rapp and Carroll, 1967), 23Google Scholar.
33 See, for example, Perloff, Marjorie, “Canon and Loaded Gun: Feminist Poetics and the Avant-Garde,” Stanford Literature Review, 4, 1 (1987), 23–46Google Scholar, DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, “Lorine Niedecker, the Anonymous”; Heather Cass White, “‘Parts Nicely Opposed’: Lorine Niedecker's Emerging Reputation,” Western Humanities Review, 59, 1 (2005), 144–63Google Scholar.
34 For a fascinating discussion of the surrealist influence in the early work of Zukofsky and Niedecker see Golston, Michael, “Petalbent Devils: Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, and the Surrealist Praying Mantis,” Modernism/Modernity, 13, 2 (2006), 325–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau and Quartermain, Peter, eds., Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1999), 3Google Scholar.
36 Zukofsky, 21, 24.
37 Ibid., 20.
38 Ibid., 23.
39 Charles Altieri, “The Objectivist Tradition,” in DuPlessis and Quartermain, 25–36. DuPlessis and Quartermain, 32.
40 Hass, Robert Bernard, “(Re)Reading Bergson: Frost, Pound and the Legacy of the Modern,” Journal of Modern Literature, 29, 1 (2005), 55–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 62, 71.
41 Niedecker: Collected Works, 197.
42 Niedecker quoted in DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker, the Anonymous,” 123.
43 Williams, William Carlos, Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1969), 256Google Scholar.
44 Willis, Elizabeth, “The Poetics of Affinity: Lorine Niedecker, William Morris, and the Art of Work,” Contemporary Literature, 46, 4 (2005), 579–603CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 591.
45 For a discussion of the relation between objects and bodies in Niedecker's poetry see Peterson, Becky, “Lorine Niedecker and the Matter of Life and Death,” Arizona Quarterly, 66, 4 (2010), 115–34Google Scholar.
46 Jeffrey Peterson, “Lorine Niedecker: ‘Before Machines’,” in Penberthy, Woman and Poet, 245–79, 266.
47 In Faranda, 108.
48 Niedecker: Collected Works, 195.
49 Ibid., 201.
50 Quirk, Tom, Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 1990, 47Google Scholar.
51 Jenny Penberthy, “Lorine Niedecker: ‘Knee-Deck Her Daisies’,” 135.
52 Zukofsky, 31.
53 Niedecker: Collected Works, 147–48.
54 DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker, the Anonymous,” 122.
55 Jane Augustine, “‘What's Wrong with Marriage’: Lorine Niedecker's Struggle with Gender Roles,” in Penberthy, Woman and Poet, 139–56, 145.
56 Lowney, John, “Poetry, Property, and Propriety: Lorine Niedecker and the Legacy of the Great Depression,” Sagetrieb, 18, 1 (1999), 29–40Google Scholar, 35.
57 DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker, the Anonymous,” 131.
58 Randall, Bryony, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
59 Penberthy, Woman and Poet, 212.
60 Nicholls, “Lorine Niedecker: Rural Surreal,” 194–95.
61 Mullarkey, John, Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 9Google Scholar.
62 Highmore, Ben, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 8–9Google Scholar.
63 Willis, 166.
64 In Faranda, 153.
65 Zukofsky, 23, 20.
66 Niedecker: Collected Works, 268.
67 Bergson, 11.
68 Willis, 42.
69 DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker's ‘Paean to Place’,” 161.
70 Niedecker: Collected Works, 261.
71 In Faranda, 33.
72 W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 191, cited in DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker's ‘Paean to Place’,” in Willis, 151–79, 167.
73 DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker's ‘Paean to Place’.”
74 Bergson, 49
75 Bergson, 11.
76 Ibid. 177.
77 DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker's ‘Paean to Place’,” 166.
78 Bergson, 5.
79 Niedecker: Collected Works, 263.
80 Ibid., 269.
