SOURCE: Jowett, Lorna. “Lorine Niedecker: Auto/biography and Poetry.” In Representing Lives: Women and Auto/biography edited by Alison Donnell and Pauline Polkey, pp. 77-86. New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's, 2000.

[In the following essay, Jowett explores how Niedecker's poetry engages her personal life and constructs her own autobiography.]

Carolyn Heilbrun opens her book, Writing a Woman's Life, with the statement:

There are four ways to write a woman's life: the woman herself may tell it, in what she chooses to call an autobiography; she may tell it in what she chooses to call fiction; a biographer, woman or man, may write the woman's life in what is called a biography; or the woman may write her own life in advance of living it, unconsciously, and without recognizing or naming the process.

(1989: 11)

But there is a fifth way a woman's life can be written, which Heilbrun describes when discussing Adrienne Rich, whose ‘autobiography is not to be found in a single book but rather in her poems and in diverse parts of her prose works’ (Heilburn, 1989: 66). Heilbrun briefly discusses the cross-fertilization between autobiography and poetry, concentrating on ‘confessional’ poetry written by white, middle-class, women poets after 1960. Lorine Niedecker (1903-70) does not fit Heilbrun's proposed model, since she did not write the kind of detailed, autobiographical, feminist poetry that Rich, Sexton and Plath are known for. Yet Niedecker's poetry can be read as autobiography, and we can find submerged in her poems the very problems about which the next generation of women were to speak out so strongly.

Traditionally, autobiography is written in prose, and ‘the story of one's life’ in poetry might be expected to be an epic of narrative poetry. However, in Niedecker's poems there is no sustained linear narrative, no story of her life with a beginning, a middle and an end. But whilst these might be autobiographical poems, do they constitute autobiography? In other words, how important is the autobiographical element, and how important is the poetry? These are some of the questions I will address in my discussion.

Niedecker was born in 1903 and spent most of her life on Black Hawk Island, a small peninsula jutting into Lake Koshkonong, about five miles from the small town of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. She attended college in Beloit but returned home after only two years because of family problems. In 1931, having separated from her first husband a few years before, Niedecker was inspired by Louis Zukofsky's guest editing of the Objectivist issue of Poetry. She wrote to, and subsequently visited, Zukofsky in New York. After a brief affair with Zukofsky and a terminated pregnancy, she again returned to Black Hawk Island. On the occasion of her second marriage in the 1960s, Niedecker moved to Milwaukee, but she returned to Black Hawk every weekend; after a few years the couple retired there permanently. Five collections of her work were published during her lifetime, and her death in 1970 caused hardly a ripple in literary circles. There is, as yet, no full biography of Niedecker.¹

Whilst Niedecker deals with problems similar to those tackled by the female poets Heilbrun mentions, she does use the autobiographical ‘I’ in her poems. Nevertheless, one difficulty with reconstructing autobiography from Niedecker's poems is that she frequently uses transcribed ‘folk’ speech, so that a poem is spoken by an unidentified first person. Certain poems clearly can be read as autobiographical, and are verified as such in letters (the letters are particularly important in decoding Niedecker's poems), or because the connections are too strong to overlook. The autobiographical poems touch on several sensitive personal details, such as Niedecker's father's affair, her mother's death, her relationship with her working-class community, her friendship with Harold Hein and her second marriage to Al Millen.² For the purposes of this chapter, I shall discuss only her mother's death and her relationships with Hein and Millen.³

We know from Niedecker's letters that she spent a long time working on poems before they reached their final form: redrafting, condensing, cutting and finally re-positioning the words or lines. She once commented: ‘For me the sentence lies in wait—all those prepositions and connectives—like an early spring flood. A good thing my follow-up feeling has always been condense, condense’ (Letter to Corman, 18 February 1964; 1986: 33). Indeed she mentions this process in several of her poems: in ‘Poet's Work’ she wrote, ‘No layoff / from this / condensery’ (Niedecker, 1985: 54); elsewhere we read, ‘What would they say if they knew / I sit for two months on six lines / of poetry?’ (21).

Some of this effort might be read as ‘poet's work’, but translating an event from one's own life into a poem also means instilling the poem with a meaning for the reader as well as the poet whose experience it records. Autobiography is necessarily reflective, as with hindsight the writer imposes a structure or form onto past events, thus ‘creating and not inertly remembering his [sic] past life in the present’ (Cox, 1980: 125). Furthermore, as Gusdorf argues, it is clear that ‘This postulating of a meaning dictates the choice of the facts to be retained and of the details to bring out or to dismiss according to the demands of the preconceived intelligibility’ (Gusdorf, 1980: 42). This is similar to the process of composing a poem, the meaning of which will dictate what is emphasized and what downplayed or omitted. From her painstaking construction of poetry, Niedecker can be seen to be giving her life's events meaning in retrospect.

Niedecker often drew poems from ‘folk’ speech, and especially from her mother: she once commented ‘Time for BP to write me a poem’ (Letter to Zukofsky, 25 April 1949, Correspondence, 159)⁴ Niedecker described her mother's natural ‘folk’ idiom thus: ‘here was my mother … speaking whole chunks of down-to-earth (o very earthy) magic, descendent for sure of Mother Goose (I her daughter, sits and floats, you know)’ (Letter to Cox, 10 December 1966; 1983: 36). In ‘Well, spring overflows the land’ (Niedecker, 1985: 13) the voice of Daisy Niedecker describes her family: ‘My man's got nothing but leaky boats. / My daughter, writer, sits and floats.’ Perhaps it was as a result of her relationship with her mother that Niedecker felt easy about transcribing ‘folk’ idiom, for Daisy Niedecker's increasing deafness (which became complete when Lorine was in her early twenties) meant that the two communicated by writing notes. Niedecker's father is also recognized as an important contributor to her ‘folk’ base in the poem ‘He lived—childhood summers’ (19).

When her mother died, Niedecker incorporated her last words into a poem. She described her mother's death in a letter to Zukofsky:

BP died last Wednesday and was buried Saturday. Her last words may not have been of importance, she sat up for her supper an hour after we left and then fell back dead. But her last words to me were ‘Wash the floors, wash the clothes and pull weeds.’ BP the ole worker. What a drudge she'd like to have made of her daughter! A clean drudge.

(Letter to Zukofsky, 31 July 1951; 1993: 181)

The poem ‘Old Mother turns blue and from us’ (Niedecker, 1985: 17) translates this experience, using Daisy Niedecker's last words and a few phrases of Niedecker's own to present a bleak picture of the dying matriarch, her power denoted by the capitalization of ‘Old Mother’. Significantly, Niedecker includes her own name in the poem ‘“Wash the floors, Lorine!”’, thus placing herself as both child and poet. The insertions are kept simple to match the speech register. They provide the context and their very simplicity serves to emphasize the horror of the situation. The single word ‘blue’ is horribly graphic; the mother's ‘turning from’ her family demonstrates her movement towards death and away from life, perhaps her choice of this, as well as restless movement on her death bed. ‘Death from the heart’ implies pain and grief as well as the cause of death, while ‘a thimble in her purse’ continues the somewhat incongruous insistence on the domestic, pointing towards the final lines. The line-breaks, as usual in Niedecker's poems, are important, often leading to an unexpected conclusion, as in: ‘Give me space. I need / floors.’ The whole poem is keyed towards the last words—the last words of the poem, the last words of ‘Old Mother’, and of Daisy Niedecker—which appear with much more emphasis than in the letter: ‘“Wash the floors, Lorine!— / wash clothes! Weed!”.’ The poem confronts the daughter-mother relationship, implying something of its tension in the admonition to ‘drudgery’, seen by the mother as an essential part of her identity, but neglected by her daughter. As Clausen suggests (1987: 11), this poem shares some similarities with William Carlos Williams's ‘The Last Words of my English Grandmother’, and may be a conscious echo.

It is clear that the arrangement of material is particularly important to an autobiographical poem. However, Niedecker seemed to have particular reasons for cutting and redrafting certain poems. On more than one occasion she omits things which are ‘too personal’, implying that this would detract from her poetry. I would suggest that Niedecker was particularly concerned to omit mention of private relationships and the problems they brought to her as a woman. I would further argue that Niedecker often erases her negative feelings about her situation, and in this way she avoided drawing attention to her contradictory status as woman and poet.

Niedecker's relationship with Milwaukee dentist Harold Hein provides a personal subtext to several of her poems. Niedecker hoped to marry Hein, whom she described as ‘A simple person with innate goodness. Sensitive, warm, warm-hearted, terribly lonely since his wife died 6 years ago. She was dying for 3 years—cancer.’ Niedecker later added to Zukofsky, ‘Celia [Zukofsky's wife] is right—marry him—wonder when he'll ask me’ (Letter to Zukofsky, 27 June 1960; 1993: 264). Several poems were inspired by Hein, among them: ‘You are my friend’ (Niedecker, 1985: 15). In this poem, the ‘friend’ brings gifts for the speaker and performs small services (‘you carry / my fishpole’) as well as helping out with tasks the speaker might be reluctant or unable to do for herself (‘you water my worms / you patch my boot’). This proof of friendship might imply that there is no fear of rejection—the speaker asserts, ‘You are my friend.’ Yet, given the autobiographical subtext to the poem, we realize that this could be bitter irony, for the final lines of the poem (‘nothing in it / but my hand’) suggest that while the relationship is only friendship (there's ‘nothing in it’ to make us think otherwise), the speaker wishes it was something more. The ‘hand’ could be her hand in marriage. Hence, the opening line implies far more than we may first have thought—longing, disappointment, regret. By September, after spending more time with Hein, Niedecker was prepared to admit: ‘I suppose I no longer count on his marrying me’ (Letter to Zukofsky, 15 September 1960; 1993: 267). However, Niedecker was uncertain about using her life for poetry in this way. An early version of ‘You are my friend’ (Niedecker, 1985: 316-17) had a third stanza, making explicit reference to Hein.

The trouble of the boot on you, friend
your dentist fingers
an orchard to mow
you also
paint

This was cut later, with the comment: ‘it shore [sic] bothers me now, dead weight of that third stanza’; she explains: ‘Sometimes I can be so blind especially on something directly out of life. There's a pitfall for poets—directly out of life’ (Letter to Zukofsky, 18 December 1960; 1993: 271). Niedecker obviously sees this as dangerous ground and her condensation changes the tone of the poem, offering resigned acceptance and regret, rather than frustration (the first line originally read, ‘Why do I press it: are you my friend?’).

The problematic relationship with Hein is confronted more openly in ‘The men leave the car’ (Niedecker, 1985: 49). Niedecker's description of the event which inspired this poem is confined to a brief statement: ‘We stopped in one place and the men rushed out to pick Calla of the Swamp or Water Arum for us—greenish-white lilies with heart-shaped leaves’ (Letter to Zukofsky, 2 July 1961; 1993: 282). The incident is translated in the first lines of the opening stanza: ‘The men leave the car / to bring us green-white lilies / by woods.’ It is interesting that the ‘heart-shaped leaves’, which might have taken on some symbolic meaning, have been omitted from the poem altogether. Jenny Penberthy comments on the ‘emphatic rhythms and repetitions’ of the final stanza, which culminate in the ‘clear’ statement of Hein's intent: ‘No marriage / no marriage / friend.’ She also describes the last line, the single word ‘friend’ as, ‘In the context … chastened, muted (those soft words), meek, confirming the opposition she [Niedecker] sees between male perpendicular strength and female floating irresolution’ (Penberthy, 1993: 78). It is indeed ‘the context’ of the poem (not necessarily the life event) which enforces these roles. The juxtaposition of ‘large pine spread’ and ‘swamp’ is a figure that unifies the poem, and conveys emotion. Niedecker's feelings about the incident are thus distanced or translated, projected onto, and encoded within nature.

This is by no means an unusual poetic technique for Niedecker, who uses it elsewhere. ‘Club 26’ (Niedecker, 1985: 47), for instance, is charged with sexual energy and sensuality transmitted through imagery of plants and flowers, culminating in the vivid last line: ‘We stayed till the stamens trembled.’ In using the natural world as a figure for (female) emotion and / or sexuality, Niedecker takes her place in a line of women poets which includes Dickinson, Rossetti and H. D., who all employ the same strategy, though perhaps for slightly different reasons. ‘Unacceptable’ aspects of women's lives such as female sexuality, and especially female desire, are thus coded in acceptable ways. In the case of ‘The men leave the car’ the technique might further act as a means of retrospectively controlling the actual experience described. In the life situation she describes, Niedecker had little control, but as a poet translating that autobiographical experience she arranges her material with confidence and skill, and manages a successful outcome—the poem itself.

Another poem that reflects on Niedecker's life, ‘I knew a clean man’ (20), features Al Millen, Niedecker's second husband, and compares him with Hein. The poem demonstrates Niedecker's use of repetition, or repetition with variation. It begins ‘I knew a clean man / but he was not for me’ and ends ‘He's / the one for me.’ The unifying theme in this poem is the contrast between the ‘clean man’ (presumably Hein) and Al Millen. From a letter which comments, ‘Sewing new slip covers for my new house chairs … so that when Al comes in from looking at a fish pole or cutting another tree down he can sit down without my worrying. He can cover himself with more sand and/or mud and new cut grass etc.’ (Letter to Zukofsky, 25 August 1964; 1993: 348), Niedecker writes: ‘Now I sew green aprons / over covered seats.’ The first stanza breaks a new sentence after the first word ‘He’, leaving it hanging until we pick up the sentence in the second stanza. This runs on to the final statement, ‘He's / the one for me’, a positive repetition of the poem's beginning. Ending the first stanza here creates an ambiguity since we might assume that ‘He’ is the same ‘he’ who has been rejected in the second line. The word ‘now’ effects movement from one ‘he’ to another, from Hein to Millen, from one period of Niedecker's life to another. It seems significant that Niedecker identifies the book Al uses to ‘smooth’ his wet ‘pay-check’ as Whitman's Leaves of Grass, thus including him in her literary life, as well as linking back through both leaves and grass to the natural elements of ‘muddy water’ and ‘sun’. It is interesting that this poem is often grouped with earlier poems, since it was published with the My Friend Tree collection (1961) and is thus not generally placed in proximity with other poems about Al, such as ‘I married’.

Niedecker was uneasy about using her personal experience in ‘I married’ (Niedecker, 1985: 93), for she wrote to Cid Corman that she had composed the poem ‘Just a few moments ago from a folk conversation and I suppose some of my own dark forebodings. We shd. try to be true to our subconscious? Sorry it is another I poem. My god, I must try to get away from that’ (Letter to Corman, 20 July 1967; 1986: 129). It would seem that Niedecker was frequently inspired to write poetry by things ‘directly out of life’, but was not always happy with the end product, especially if she considered it had too much biographical detail. Or rather, she considered certain kinds of biography and personal reminiscence to be acceptable, while others were not, especially those connected with Niedecker's position as a woman. Niedecker often seemed uneasy about including such material and perhaps feared the disapproval of her male correspondents and publishers for doing so.

‘I married’ emerges from Niedecker's experience of her second marriage to Al Millen. It touches on some of the issues that later feminist poetry would address so forcefully, and also obliquely addresses the problem of being a woman poet. The reasons given for marrying in old age are more practical and realistic than romantic—‘for warmth / if not repose’—but what one has in the end is just ‘someone’. The relationship seems uncomfortable, restricting—‘We lay leg / in the cupboard, head / in closet’. One specific problem is the husband's drinking (‘he drank / too much’), but the whole marriage seems problematic and, as autobiography, the poem certainly suggests the difficulty Niedecker had in reconciling her marriage and her writing: note the juxtaposition of ‘I thought / he drank’.

In fact, one of the misrepresentations Niedecker has suffered is that she was a childless spinster, with all its connotations of an unfulfilled woman who writes because she cannot find a man or have a family of her own. Indeed, this image persists despite her two marriages, and the relatively recent revelations about her early relationship with Zukofsky and subsequent abortion. As the number of rediscovered women writers proves, the idea that a woman either writes or marries is far from the truth; nevertheless, as ‘I married’ suggests, much of the tension in Niedecker's second marriage arose precisely from the fact that she continued writing. In one letter she anticipated the problems her second marriage would cause: ‘I'll marry him. Somehow I'll work it out, time and space for poetry’ (Letter to Zukofsky, 10 April 1963; 1993: 332), while later letters describe the problems her work faced after her second marriage when the couple lived in a small house with little private space. Niedecker had to rise early to write, and also mentions using ear plugs so that she could continue her work when her husband was watching TV. Thus we find Niedecker struggling against the same gendered misrepresentations, as well as the same conflict between work and marriage, that literary women have struggled with for many years.

We have seen that the concerns of Niedecker's life continually emerge in her poems. However, only in reading the letters can we fully grasp the autobiographical aspects of the poems, and the way in which Niedecker has re/written them as poetry. The tension between autobiography and poetry at times meant that Niedecker had to make choices for poetry's sake which affected the representation of her life. Hence the poems can be seen as transcribing a version of Niedecker's life, translations from the letters and from the events of that life. Given the nature of her literary correspondents (male), and the apparent lack of female support and friendship at home, poetry may have been Niedecker's only way to work through her concerns, and to confront, in however coded a manner, the nature of her own gender. The construction of autobiography in Niedecker's poems thus both reveals and conceals, and in doing so reflects on and critiques the life which produced both her self and her poetry.

Notes

1. Glenna Breslin began to write Niedecker's biography, but has never completed it. The privately printed Knox (1987) is available to visitors to Fort Atkinson.

2. For instance, Henry Niedecker's affair is mentioned in ‘Paean to Place’ and ‘The Graves’; ‘Old Mother turns blue and from us’ deals with Daisy Niedecker's death; ‘In the great snowfall before the bomb’ is often quoted in discussions of Niedecker and her community; several poems refer to Harold Hein, notably ‘You are my friend’ and ‘The men leave the car’; while among others, ‘I knew a clean man’ and ‘I married’ refer to Al Millen.

3. See Middleton (1997) for discussion of Niedecker as a ‘folk’ poet.

4. Daisy Niedecker was known to Niedecker and Zukofsky as ‘BP’, from bellis perennis (daisy).

Works Cited

Breslin, G. ‘Lorine Niedecker: Composing a Life’, in S. Groag Bell and M. Yalom (eds) Revealing Lives: Gender in Autobiography and Biography (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990).

Clausen, J. ‘Lorine Niedecker’, Belles Lettres, 2.5 (1987) 11.

Corman, C. (ed.) The Granite Pail (San Francisco: North Point, 1985).

Cox, J. M. ‘Recovering Literature's Lost Ground through Autobiography’, in J. Olney (ed.) Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

Dent, P. (ed.) ‘Extracts from Letters to Kenneth Cox’, The Full Note (Devon, UK: Interim, 1983) 36-42.

Gusdorf, G. ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’, in J. Olney (ed.) Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

Heilbrun, C. G. Writing a Woman's Life (London: Women's Press, 1989).

Knox, J. S. Lorine Niedecker: An Original Biography (Fort Atkinson, WI: Dwight Foster Public Library, 1987).

Middleton, P. ‘Folk Poetry and the American Avant-Garde: Placing Lorine Niedecker’, Journal of American Studies, 31.2 (1997) 203-18.

Niedecker, L. From this Condensery: The Complete Writings of Lorine Niedecker, R. Bertholf (ed.) (Highlands, N.C.: Jargon, 1985).

Niedecker, L. ‘Between Your House and Mine’: the Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman 1960 to 1970, ed. L.P. Faranda (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986).

Niedecker, L. (ed.) Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931-1970 ed. J. Penberthy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).