Lorine Niedecker's ‘Lake Superior’, as it appeared in her sumptuously printed North Central (Fulcrum Press, 1968), consists of twelve short or very short passages of verse. Accordingly it can be quoted in full:

In every part of every living thing
is stuff that once was rock
In blood the minerals
of the rock
Iron the common element of earth
in rocks and freighters
Sault Sainte Marie—big boats
coal-black and iron-ore-red
topped with what white castlework
The waters working together
                    internationally
Gulls playing both sides
Radisson:
‘a laborinth of pleasure’
this world of the Lake
Long hair, long gun
Fingernails pulled out
by Mohawks
                                                                      (The long
                                                                                canoes)
‘Birch Bark
          and white Seder
                    for the ribs’
Through all this granite land
the sign of the cross
Beauty: impurities in the rock
And at the blue ice superior spot
priest-robed Marquette grazed
azoic rock, hornblende granite
basalt the common dark
in all the Earth
And his bones of such is coral
raised up out of his grave
were sunned and birch bark-floated
to the straits
                                                                                Joliet
Entered the Mississippi
Found there the paddlebill catfish
come down from The Age of Fishes
At Hudson Bay he conversed in latin
with an Englishman
To Labrador and back to vanish
His funeral gratis—he'd entered
Quebec's Cathedral organ
so many winters
Ruby of corundum
lapis lazuli
from changing limestone
glow-apricot red-brown
carnelian sard
Greek named
Exodus-antique
kicked up in America's
Northwest
you have been in my mind
between my toes
agate
                                                            Wild Pigeon
Did not man
          maimed by no
                    stone-fall
mash the cobalt
          and carnelian
                    of that bird
Schoolcraft left the Soo—canoes
US pennants, masts, sails
chanting canoemen, barge
soldiers—for Minnesota
Their South Shore journey
                                        as if Life's—
The Chocolate River
                                        The Laughing Fish
and The River of the Dead
Passed peaks of volcanic thrust
Hornblende in massed granite
Wave-cut Cambrian rock
painted by soluble mineral oxides
wave-washed and the rains
did their work and a green
running as from copper
Sea-roaring caverns—
Chippewas threw deermeat
to the savage maws
‘Voyageurs crossed themselves
tossed a twist of tobacco in’
                    Inland then
beside the great granite
gneiss and the schists
to the redolent pondy lakes'
lilies, flag and Indian reed
‘through which we successfully
                                                            passed’
The smooth black stone
I picked up in true source park
                    the leaf beside it
once was stone
Why should we hurry
                    home
I'm sorry to have missed
                    Sand Lake
My dear one tells me
                    we did not
We watched a gopher there

Faced with such daunting or taunting brevities, our first impulse is to annotate. Sometimes the impulse should be resisted, and certainly it shouldn't be indulged at length. But in this case some annotation cannot be avoided. And so we may start with Sault Sainte Marie, named in the second section, of which we may learn from Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopaedia that it is:

county seat and port of Chippewa County, Mich., on the St Mary's River, opposite the Canadian town of the same name, with which it is connected by a railroad bridge 1[frac12]m. long.

The Chippewa Indians had their favourite fishing grounds at this site and the first settlement of Michigan was made here. Following visits by several French explorers, Father Marquette established a mission (1668). At a great council of Indians held here in 1671, the governor general of New France claimed for France all country south to the Gulf of Mexico and west to the Pacific. The British held the area, 1762-1820, when it came into the possession of the United States. Incorporated as a city in 1887.

What must first strike us is how impassively or indifferently Niedecker passes over those dimensions of her subject that to a writer of another temper might have seemed most ‘poetic’—the chequered history through three centuries, the poignant or bizarre juxtaposition, around those dates of 1668 and 1671, between the Versailles of Louis XIV and the wilderness outpost in the middle of untracked North America. Nor is it only the remote past of the Sault (or ‘Soo’) that is resonant: for the Encyclopaedia entry goes on to record the prodigious feats of engineering which, in the nineteenth century, lifted ships from the eastern Great Lakes up to the level of Lake Superior through two ship canals and five massive locks. As it happens we have evidence of what a poet's imagination of a different temper could make of this material, in Janet Lewis's shamefully neglected masterpiece, The Invasion. A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnston Family of St Mary's (originally University of Denver Press, 1932). An extraordinarily intent paragraph on pages 343-4 of Janet Lewis's book, about a ship's passage through the Weitzel lock (completed 1881, 515 feet long), makes a very striking and instructive contrast to Niedecker's blank, almost perfunctory ‘big boats / coal-black and iron-ore-red / topped with what white castlework.’

A more famous masterpiece of American historiography, Francis Parkman's multi-volume France and England in North America, identified Pierre Esprit Radisson from St Malo, who in La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869) is credited with having discovered, as early as 1658-9, the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri. In The Old Regime in Canada (1893) Parkman tells how Radisson later, ‘having passed into the service of England … wrote in a language which, for want of a fitter name, may be called English.’ Hence, we may suppose, ‘a laborinth of pleasure’—which is hauntingly unEnglish in more than the misspelling. Radisson's Second Voyage made in the Upper Country of the Iroquois was published by the Prince Society in 1885; along with other narratives by Radisson it appears, modernised by Loren Kallsen in The Explorations of Pierre Esprit Radisson (Minneapolis, 1961). He was mutilated by the Mohawks on his first expedition (1652-3); the Lake Superior expedition was his fourth, nowadays dated 1662-3. Thus in Radisson we have a subject that seems to cry out for heroic treatment; and when we look at Niedecker's verses, we have to note how she has either missed the possibility or else firmly set her face against it.

The case is even clearer in the sixth section, with Jacques Marquette (1637-75), French missionary explorer (‘Through all this granite land / the sign of the cross’), whose name is commemorated in a Michigan county and port on the south shore of Lake Superior, and also in placenames much farther south, near Niedecker's life-long home at Fort Atkinson on Lake Koshkonong in south-east Wisconsin. Marquette's heroic status is as it were official; a marble effigy of him, a gift of the people of Wisconsin, stands in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington. But as with Radisson so more conspicuously with Marquette, Lorine Niedecker shows no interest in heroic exploits; Marquette in her verses is subdued to, and identified with, what he saw or what he moved among. For the last four lines we can turn to Parkman, in La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West:

In the winter of 1676, a party of Kiskakon Ottawas were hunting on Lake Michigan: and when, in the following spring, they prepared to return home, they bethought them, in accordance with an Indian custom, of taking with them the bones of Marquette, who had been their instructor at the mission of Saint Esprit. They repaired to the spot, found the grave, opened it, washed and dried the bones and placed them carefully in a box of birch-bark. Then, in a procession of thirty canoes, they bore it, singing their funeral songs, to St Ignace of Michilimackinac. As they approached, priests, Indians, and traders all thronged to the shore. The relics of Marquette were received with solemn ceremony, and buried beneath the floor of the little chapel of the mission. …

And in 1877, on the supposed site of the Jesuit chapel at Point St Ignace, there were in fact found buried some human bones with fragments of birch-bark. Thus a beam of pathos is allowed to play on Marquette, as it did on mutilated Radisson. But Niedecker is not centrally interested in the pathetic any more than the heroic; the sunning of Marquette's bones, and their being levelled with birch-bark, comes at us as an appropriate consummation of a life—Marquette in death is levelled with those natural presences (hornblende and basalt as well as birchtrees) which loomed so indifferently above and around him in life. For a word like ‘sunned’ to bear such a weight of implication, Niedecker's language in this section has to rise above the blank and blunt quality of the earlier passages. And so it does: ‘superior’ and ‘grazed’ are both near-puns, lifting the language so as to accommodate the Shakespearean allusion of line 7: ‘Of his bones are coral made’. If up to this point Niedecker's words have been, as Hugh Kenner said searchingly of the words of William Carlos Williams, ‘stunned’, at this point they come to ramifying life; and of course their liveliness comes with the greater impact because of the stunned drabness that has preceded them. Niedecker, we realise, has paced her sequence very carefully.

The drab language now returns, with Québecois Louis Joliet or Jolliet (1645-1700) who, though his exploits were extraordinary and he accordingly gives his name to a town in Illinois, seemed to Parkman—that connoisseur of the heroic, withal so aware of heroism's shadowed and sinister side—conspicuously not epic material:

In what we know of Joliet, there is nothing that reveals any salient or distinctive trait of character, any especial breadth of view or boldness of design. He seems to have been simply a merchant, intelligent, well educated, courageous, hardy, and enterprising.

All the details of Niedecker's section 7—the paddlebill catfish, the Latin-speaking Hudson's Bay Englishman, the playing of the cathedral organ, and the ‘funeral gratis’—are to be found in Louis Jolliet, Explorer of Rivers, by Virginia S. Eifert (New York, 1962).

It comes as all the more of a shock that in the next two sections the disconcerting potencies simply of language are suddenly released. For it would be quite wrong to suppose that we can make nothing of this abrupt blaze of ‘Ruby … corundum … carnelian sard’ unless we have or can acquire a mineralogist's knowledge about adamantine spar and granular emery. Poetry is not made out of such things, but out of the names that such things bear. The sixth line gives the clue—‘Greek named’; perhaps we have already spent too much time with the encyclopaedia, at this point if not before we must exchange it for the dictionary. It is O.E.D. that identifies the Greek word as ‘agate’: ‘1570, a.Fr. agathe, ad.It. agata, f.L. achates, a.Gr. agates’. How does it help, after thus tracking the word through its dazzling etymology, to proceed to the definition: ‘one of the semipellucid variegated chalcedonies’? It does not help at all unless we are mineralogists, and perhaps it does not help even then. Better to stay in excited bemusement with etymologies, which will reveal for instance that ‘corundum’ comes from the Tamil for ‘ruby’. It is the words that flash, that turn their hard edges towards us and towards each other. We need not know, and Niedecker need not have known (though I dare say she did), which of the glinting grains that she kicked up between her toes could properly be identified as agate. It is enough that it be in her mind, that she be mindful of how there lies on the shores of Lake Oshkonong or Lake Superior a mineral that lay around also (the etymology proves it) in ancient Greece. That is the history she is concerned with, and lays claim to. And the record of it is in the dictionary, nowhere else. So it is from the dictionary, if we do not know it from our own usage, that we discover how the names of minerals—‘cobalt’, ‘carnelian’ (‘a flesh-coloured deep red, or reddish-white variety of chalcedony’)—are also the names of colours, such colours as once glowed on the passenger pigeons whose random extermination by the white man's gun has symbolized, ever since Fenimore Cooper, the heedless exploitation by man of North America's bounties. Williams's ‘No ideas but in things’ is shown up for the sloppy and shallow slogan that it always was. No ideas but in things as named, in the names of things; that is to say, in words. No ideas but there, and no sentiments either—such sentiments as guilt and indignation at the extinction of passenger pigeons. They are to be found—ideas and feelings alike—nowhere else but in words. And what rapidity, what succinctness the words afford us, if only we will trust them! No bleeding hearts need be worn on sleeves, no breasts need be beaten—the point is made simply by moving one word ‘carnelian’ from one snatch of verse to the next snatch, taking it away from rocks and putting it with birds.

And the point thus made, that once, does not have to be laboured. For it is not the point of Niedecker's poem, not what she is mainly driving at. It is, pretty well, the point of The Invasion, though there is no breast-beating by Janet Lewis either—through her 350 pages the indictment gathers and emerges gradually from the historical record recounted seemingly at leisure and with seeming impassiveness. The difference between the two writers appears most clearly in how they deal with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793-1864), explorer and ethnologist, author of A View of the Lead Mines of the Missouri, Travels in the Central Portion of the Mississippi Valley, and other books culminating in his monumental Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (6 volumes published by Congress, 1851-7). ‘Schoolcraft left the Soo’, writes Lorine Niedecker; and does not think to inform us that the departure was from Sault Sainte Marie in 1826, its purpose the signing of the treaty of Fond du Lac, by which (The Invasion, p. 239) ‘the Ojibways of Lake Superior and the upper reaches of the Mississippi River ceded to the United States, as a token of their goodwill, all mineral rights to the great lake basin.’ In Janet Lewis's account Schoolcraft is the well-meaning but still inexcusable embodiment of most of what was wrong with the white Americans' treatment of the red man—from his role in engineering treaty after treaty depriving the Indians of their land and rights, through to his supplying Longfellow with the materials for the falsifications of Song of Hiawatha (on which, see her biting pages 323-5). If in Lorine Niedecker's treatment of Schoolcraft there is any hint at all of the rationalistic prissiness of which Janet Lewis convicts him, it is at most only a hovering and ambiguous implication. It could hardly be more, since (as we may now notice with something approaching consternation) the Indians, the indigenous and original inhabitants of the Lake Superior region, figure in Niedecker's poem nowhere at all, except as the savages who tore out poor Radisson's finger-nails. What a field-day a perfervidly anti-colonialist critic might make of that! And yet, as we have seen, Niedecker gave us due notice: the only time-spans that interest her are those of geological time, or else those (much shorter, but still to our sense vast) of etymology—the etymology that links classical Greek with current American. No wonder therefore if she asks, in her penultimate section, ‘Why should we hurry / home?’ And how can it matter, in the last lines, whether she did or did not visit Sand Lake? Why indeed should she hurry, and how indeed could it matter? In terms of what we usually understand as history, Niedecker's treatment, though it adverts to and uses historical documents like Joliet's, Marquette's, Radisson's, Schoolcraft's, is profoundly unhistorical—certainly as compared with Janet Lewis's. Indeed we are forced to go further and say that, since the minerals of the Lake Superior region are in a real sense the only true ‘heroes’ of the poem first and last, that poem seems to imply that the mineral riches had to be excavated and thus known—a process impossible until the indigenous inhabitants had been expropriated in the ways that Janet Lewis indignantly chronicles.

Philip Sidney said that poetry is essentially superior to history. A European reader of Lorine Niedecker may reflect spitefully, and yet to some purpose, that for a poet of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, Sidney's dictum would be readily palatable since there is in Wisconsin so little history for poetry to be superior to. There is some history, however; rather more, and more significant, than we had thought—as Janet Lewis's book makes us realise. And for a poetry that does not rise superior to history we may recall certain long narratives, mostly by Canadian poets, in which Father Marquette and his martyred fellows, being celebrated straightforwardly as heroes of human history, are reduced to figures in a fancy-dress pageant. For that matter, Lorine Niedecker was not the first North American poet to suppose that in an epic of her country the heroes might be rocks and minerals, rather than men. Robinson Jeffers, the rhapsode of Point Sur, declared as much; but while Jeffers declared, it was Lorine Niedecker, in her astonishing isolation, who simply did it. What she did, for instance in ‘Lake Superior’, cannot help but seem to us of the Old World, and to some of the New World like Janet Lewis, forbidding and even repellent in the consistency with which it proceeds from that initial premise. But the consistency is there, impressively; and it ought to be, with whatever private qualms, saluted.