SOURCE: Penberthy, Jenny. “‘The Revolutionary Word’: Lorine Niedecker's Early Writings 1928-1946.” West Coast Line 26, no. 1 (spring 1992): 75-98.

In a letter to Cid Corman in the 1960s, Lorine Niedecker recalled: “When I was 18 … I didn't quite know, yet I think I was vaguely aware that the poetry current [1921] was beginning to change” (12 December 1964; “Between Your House and Mine” 49). Ten years later that intuition would find its most persuasive articulation in Louis Zukofsky's “Objectivist” issue of Poetry, February 1931. This single issue ignited Niedecker's career as poet.

Only four poems survive from the period before her encounter with the Zukofsky-edited issue of Poetry: two highschool yearbook romps “Reminiscence,”¹ which she refers to later as an ode to Lake Koshkonong, and “Wasted Energy” which reveals an early start to her fascination with language and idiom); the Imagist-influenced “Transition” published in Will-o-the-Wisp; a Magazine of Verse:

Colours of October
wait with easy dignity
for the big change—
like gorgeous quill-pens
in old inkwells
almost dry.

(From This Condensery 4)²

Later that same year, the disaffected Imagist “Mourning Dove” was published in Parnassus: A Wee Magazine of Verse:

The sound of a mourning dove
slows the dawn
there is a dee round silence
in the sound
Or it may be I face the dull prospect
of an imagist
turned philosopher

(FTC 4)

The Imagism of the first two lines yields to a more interesting reflection on literary image-making. However, neither pursuit satisfies the poet and the second stanza, with resigned distaste, rejects the first.

Three years after the publication of “Mourning Dove” Niedecker read the tide-turning issue of Poetry and there found direction for her restless talent. This issue, a radical digression for a usually more restrained magazine, was the one to intrigue her. Zukofsky's statement of poetics was aimed not at “mere pretty bits (American poetry, circa 1913) but … [at] entire aspects of thought: economics, beliefs, literary analytics, etc. … [at] active literary omission” (273).

Reading through the issue now, one struggles to match the poems with Objectivist principles. We know, of course, that Zukofsky appended the label and the manifesto essay, “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931” as a courtesy to Harriet Monroe who was eager for the guest-edited issue to espouse a movement. The poems show little evidence of our contemporary understanding of Objectivism: of the “flying poetic truth squad,” of the Objectivist motto “No Myths” (Kenner 187), or of the pristine “thinking with things as they exist” (Zukofsky 273) that we have come to associate with the work of a core Objectivist such as George Oppen. Many of the poems are flagrantly subjective, taking reckless liberties with language and image.

Carl Rakosi:

Continuously the undefined plane
emerges
in the form of a ship,
her nose speeding in the brine-ellipsis

(239)

Norman MacLeod:

Sky a kiva of the turquoise people
to circle rusty earth where smoke drifts
underground

(253)

Harry Roskolenkier:

The moon is in a cellar with religion;
as the bottles pop they find a new law

(257)

Charles Henri Ford:

the blood's obedience
will follow
instantly designs
left in the sky's hollow;
each fearful often
each ear then
accepts its
rightful coffin

(286)

Like the written object, Zukofsky's theory “may not be harbored as solidity in the crook of an elbow” (274). We do find, however, that his “desire for the objectively perfect” carries no prescriptions for subject matter other than an interest in “clear or vital ‘particulars’” (269) and a sense of “something ‘aimed at’” (269), that the non-representational image was acceptable, and that even hallucination could claim objectivist merit. In each of the issue's poems one can recognize “objectivity of cadence” (288) which is “the complete satisfaction derived from melody in a poem” (282). For Niedecker, here was an exhilarating expansion on the cameo orthodoxies of Imagism.

The issue stimulated less enthusiasm elsewhere on the American literary scene. In his August 1931 talk at Gotham Book Mart, Zukofsky's lofty restatement of Objectivism was calculated to upbraid his fellow writers: “The Objectivist number of Poetry appeared in February. Since then there have been March, April, May, June and July and we are now in the middle of August. Don't write, telegraph.”³

Niedecker's reconstructions of those days have her writing to Zukofsky about six months after reading the Objectivist issue. That would have been August. Exemplary timing to mollify a smarting Zukofsky. No trace remains of this first letter though we can infer Zukofsky's positive response to it from the following letter to Harriet Monroe, 5 November 1931. Niedecker wrote: “Mr. Zukofsky encourages me to send some of my poems to you to be considered for ‘Poetry’.”⁴ Monroe accepted “When ecstasy is inconvenient” but no record remains of the others.

“WHEN ECSTASY IS INCONVENIENT”

Feign a great calm;
all gay transport soon ends.
Chant: who knows—
flight's end or flight's beginning
for the resting gull?
Heart, be still.
Say there is money but it rusted;
say the time of moon is not right for escape.
It's the color in the lower sky
too broadly suffused,
or the wind in my tie.
Know amazedly how
often one takes his madness
into his own hands
and keeps it.

(FTC 5)

Niedecker submitted this poem under her married name, Lorine Hartwig, although by November 1931, the marriage had already ended. The poem is poised on the edge of breakdown. However, each stanza asserts some measure of control—a feigned calm, a stilled heart, a contained madness. Imperatives strive to direct the encroaching illogicality but the subtly cadenced, zany lyricism gains the upper hand. Here is an imaginative daring previously thwarted by the constraints of Imagism.

Pressed to recall her beginnings as a poet Niedecker credited the influence of Objectivism. “I went to school to Objectivism” she told Clayton Eshleman⁵ (18 November 1967). Objectivist principles can indeed be traced through much of her writing, though to identify her too singularly with Objectivism would be to miss the originality of her frequent and radical digressions. Two other recollections shift the credit slightly: “Without the Feb 1931 issue of Poetry edited by LZ I'd never have developed as a poet” (LN to Kenneth Cox, 10 December 1966⁶); “Poetry Feb 31 edited by LZ introducing Objectivists—turned the tide for so many of us” (LN to Roger Stoddard, 13 October 1964⁷). Most crucially, it was Objectivism's inauguration, the February 1931 issue of Poetry, that led her to sustained contact with one of America's most determined literary innovators, contact that gave sanction and focus to her already forming proclivities. “I had no direction in my education” she wrote to Edward Dahlberg, “until I met Louie twenty years ago but several very strong interests and I suppose we learn what we love” (4 November 1955).⁸

The first surviving communication between the two poets is a fragment of Zukofsky's dated 21 March 1933, a letter which, incidentally, minimizes the significance he gives to Objectivism. These and other scattered sources tell us that this was a period of avid communication between the two. Again Niedecker's letters to Harriet Monroe give us the best indication of the exchange taking place between the two poets and, also, of Niedecker's own “very strong interests.”

Jan. 31, 1933.

Dear Miss Monroe:

I am enclosing three poems tending toward illogical expression. The one, “Progression,” was written six months before Mr. Zukofsky referred me to the surrealists for correlation. I had explained the poem in this way: 1st section—simple knowing and concern for externals; 2nd section—the turn to one world farther in; 3rd section—the will to disorder, approach to dream … the individual talking to himself, the supreme circumstance.

I should be glad if there is a place for the poems in POETRY MAGAZINE but in any case your opinion would be valuable to me. I live in the mid-west and it is of this magazine and its editor I think first. The direction of “Progression” and the others may not be surrealism, and it may not matter, only that it's a little disconcerting to find oneself six months ahead of a movement and twenty years behind it.

Very sincerely yours,

Lorine Niedecker (Mrs. Frank Hartwig)

She makes sidelong acknowledgement of Zukofsky's objectification and sincerity but she is far more intent on her independently evolved surrealism. For all the self-consciousness of the letters to Harriet Monroe, Niedecker articulates a theory of poetry that shapes much of her subsequent work. Between the late 1930s and 1967 she showed a reluctance to explicate the workings of her poetry and she formed a distaste for secondary discourse which, she felt, could only obstruct the subtleties of her art.⁹

The poem “Progression” disappeared without trace but Harriet Monroe did accept “Promise of a Brilliant Funeral” and published it with “When ecstasy is inconvenient” in September 1933 under the single title of “Spirals.”

“PROMISE OF A BRILLIANT FUNERAL”

Travel, said he of the broken umbrella, enervates
the point of stop; once indoors, theology,
for want of a longer telescope, is made
of the moon-woman passing amid silk
nerve-thoughts in the blood.
(There's trouble with the moon-maker's union,
the blood-maker's union, the thought-maker's union;
but the play could be altered.)
A man strolls pale among zinnias,
life and satin sleeves renounced.
He is intent no longer on what direction herons fly
in hell, but on computing space in forty minutes,
and ascertains at the end of the path:
this going without tea holds a hope of tasting it.
(Chalk-faces going down in rows before a stage
have seen no action yet.)
Mr. Brown visits home.
His broker by telephone advises him it's night
and a plum falls on a marshmallow
and sight comes to owls.
He risks three rooms noisily for the brightest sconce.
Rome was never like this.
(The playwright dies in the draft
when ghosts laugh.)

(FTC 4-5)

She wrote “Promise of a Brilliant Funeral” (FTC 4-5)¹⁰ after “correlation” with the surrealists and before her first visit to New York. We don't know which surrealists Zukofsky would have referred her to but her more complete acquaintance with the movement would have had to wait until her visit to New York in late 1933.

Her own “strong interests” had already led her to surrealism which would continue to hold a far greater fascination for her than for Zukofsky. But whatever disdain he expressed for surrealism he did keep an eye on the movement. Jerry Reisman remembers that both Niedecker and Zukofsky were keen readers of transition magazine—required reading in a 1930s curriculum of the modern.¹¹

“It's a feeling of the vertical more than the simple straight line—shade of transition (ever see those copies?—of forty years ago)” Niedecker wrote to Cid Corman on 30 January 1968. Eugene Jolas, editor of transition, had urged a more direct portrayal of the unconscious and a wide range of linguistic experiment. In twenty-seven issues, between 1927 and 1938, the magazine provided America with a steady infusion of new writings from the European and American—mainly expatriate—avant-garde. It promised and, indeed, delivered “the quintessence of the modern spirit in evolution.” James Joyce and Gertrude Stein were its most regular contributors: Joyce's “Work in Progress” (published later as Finnegans Wake) and a variety of Stein's writings including a reprint of “Tender Buttons” were published in the magazine, transition published almost all the major surrealists but it stopped short of advocating complete surrender to the subliminal. Automatic writing and the transcription of dreams were useful, the editors believed, only as stages towards the conscious making of a poem.

Both Niedecker and Zukofsky's work of this period bears the mark of transition's “immense lyricism and madness of illogic” (transition 3). Niedecker's “Spirals” would have fitted comfortably into any of its issues, as would many of the contributions to the Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine.¹² The “Revolution of the Word” manifesto appeared in transition 16-17 (June 1929). Its “Proclamation” announced, for example, that “The literary creator has the right to disintegrate the primal matter of words imposed on him by textbooks and dictionaries” and “He has the right to use words of his own fashioning and to disregard existing grammatical and syntactical laws.” Objectivism in its earliest manifestation can be seen as a contribution to this debate that traces back as far as Marinetti's Les mots en liberté futuriste of 1919. Zukofsky's August 1931 “Recencies” speech aired his objections to Jolas' “Proclamation.” “The revolutionary word,” said Zukofsky, “if it must revolve cannot escape having a reference. It is not infinite. Even infinite is a term.” In the 1932 issue of transition, Jolas is still beating the same drum: “The old words have reached the age of retirement. Let us pension them off! We need a twentieth-century dictionary!” (transition 21: n.p.). This time Zukofsky countered with a panegyric of “Thanks to the Dictionary.” In July 1932 he called his then incomplete manuscript, “Work in Process”—a cheeky allusion to Joyce's “Work in Progress.” There he demonstrates that single pages of the authorized lexicon hold unlimited incantatory properties. Both within its scientifically precise dictionary definitions and on its associational margins, the unadorned word is sufficient. He frees words from narrow service to syntactic and contextual functions, allowing them to assert their own random particularity and eccentric reference. Niedecker read “Thanks to the Dictionary” closely. It would have coincided with and further stimulated her own interest in the radiance of the single word—its primitive innocence and its hallucinatory powers.

The first surviving poem written after her 1933 meeting with Zukofsky is “CANVASS,” in fact a group of three poems. Niedecker sent them to Harriet Monroe on 12 February 1934 with the following prescriptions:

… I hope I do not impose upon you by asking for a word about CANVAS,¹³ form for planes of consciousness, which I am also enclosing. An experiment in three planes: left row is deep consciousness, middle row beginning of monologue, and right row surface consciousness, social banal; experiment in vertical simultaneity (symphonic rather than traditional long line melodic form), and the whole written with the idea of readers finding sequence for themselves, finding their own meaning whatever that may be, as spectators before abstract painting. Left vertical row honest recording of constrictions appearing before falling off to sleep at night. I should like a poem to be seen as well as read. Colors and textures of certain words appearing simultaneously with the sound of words and printed directly above or below each other. All this means break-up of sentence which I deplore though I try to retain the great conceit of capitals and periods, of something to say. It means that for me at least, certain words of a sentence—prepositions, connectives, pronouns—belong up towards full consciousness, while strange and unused words appear only in subconscious. (It also means that for me at least this procedure is directly opposite to that of the consistent and prolonged dream—in dream the simple and familiar words like prepositions, connectives etc … are not absent, in fact, noticeably present to show illogical absurdity, discontinuity, parody of sanity.) I am aware this form is rather difficult to print—I mean it might have to stretch across two pages though perhaps small type could keep it to one page. …

Harriet Monroe's response to the poems was, “Utter mystification” written across the top of Niedecker's letter. This was the gist of Monroe's letter of refusal. On 31 May a tenacious Niedecker again sent “‘Three Poems’ another experiment in planes of consciousness [that] will probably disturb you even more than it does me.” Monroe, of course, rejected them. Pound published all six of the poems in his issue of Bozart-Westminster (1935) but he did so without enthusiasm. Zukofsky, however, had sensed the vigor of her disciplined, selfless explorations. Here is the exchange between Zukofsky and Pound over the publication of these poems: “Glad you agreed with me as to the value of Lorine Niedecker's work and are printing it in Westminster” (LZ to EP, 17 February 1935), “Surrealism (meaning the yester year variety) is a painter's show / what fahrtin literature has it got? … I don't think yr Niedecker is so hot. … It got by, because I printed one tadpole on each recommendation of qualified critics. …” (EP to LZ, 6 March 1935), “There's no use wasting yr time calling me down about surrealisme—if you had read Mantis, An Interpretation, you'd have found out I think pretty much as you do about surrealism—but you haven't read it. Nor have I swallowed Miss Niedecker's mental stubborness. However, her output has some validity, some spark of energy, which the solipsistic daze = maze of Mr Kummings hath not” (LZ to EP, 25 March 1935; all quotations from Ahearn 161-65).

“CANVASS”

Unrefractory petalbent
prognosticate
halfvent purloined
adark
vicissitudes of one-tenth
                                                            steel-tin
bluent, specifically unjust
                                                  cream redbronze
attempt salmon egress
masked eggs
                              ovoid
                                                  anodyne lament
metal                                                            bluegrean
                                                                                                                        drying
                                                                                smoke dent
exceptional retard
bald out
affidavit
flat grey shoulder.
carrion eats its call, waste it.
He: she knows how
for a testament to Sundays.

“CANVASS,” the first of the three planes of consciousness, is a record of “constrictions appearing before falling off to sleep at night”—the poem records the elemental, physiological fact of loosened semantic and syntactic control on the fringes of consciousness. It draws the eye and the ear away from a strictly linear reading; it invites improvisation. Words float free or cohere momentarily to random meanings before shifting into fresh alignments—“readers finding sequence for themselves, finding their own meaning whatever that may be, as spectators before abstract painting.” Rhyming words such as “petalbent,” “halfvent,” “bluent,” “lament,” “smoke dent,” and “testament” sound simultaneously in “[s]ymphonic rather than long line melodic form.” The visual richness of the poem is harder to pinpoint. The poem is threaded with colours, both named and suggested, but the structure of each word, its etymological composition, becomes a focus for primarily visual rather than semantic recognition. On to this most minimal of her surrealist writings, this spare graph of the mind's activity, she lightly imposes a critique of rhetorical conventions: “the great conceit of capitals and periods, of something to say.”

Her 1928 “Mourning Dove” rejected Imagism and its growing tendency to use the image as starting point for a self-indulgent excursion through nature. With “Spirals,” referential meaning is demoted to one of the word's many paratactic features. Non-representational imagery steers attention towards its vehicle, language. With “CANVASS,” conscious image-making is supplanted altogether by the expressive properties of the individual word. Both Surrealism and Objectivism had affirmed the word as object: “… each word in itself is an arrangement … each word possesses objectification to a powerful degree” (Zukofsky 274); “… the entirety of the single word which is in itself a relation, an implied metaphor, an arrangement and a harmony” (279).

The object status of language is fundamental to Niedecker's poetics. Her experiment with language in later work such as “Lake Superior” has its origins in poems such as “CANVASS.” These help to shift our understanding of the source of her aesthetics away from marshes, birds, and trees—the visual array of her island landscape—towards language.

In much of her 1930s poetry, she remained intrigued by the chemistry between adjacent words and phrases: between sense and nonsense, between the arcane and the colloquial, between words that custom keeps apart. Any fragmentation of conventional usage was likely to generate unpredictable results. Hence her interest in words skimmed off the top of a hubbub, meaning made by an eavesdropper out of barely audible conversation, or words and meaning to the hearing impaired, such as her mother.

The three “CANVASS” poems are her most austere and clinical treatments of the word as object. She quickly moved from there into a more social arena. Her next experiment in planes of consciousness was the companion group of “Three Poems.”

“BEYOND WHAT”

decapitated areas
momently to the constant removal
liquidating aftermath
inspired marksmanship
Devil the ash trays show it
instant with glee
black winged lazuli
beets redden and revert

“I HEARD”

too far for me to see
lest we forget
no fan thank you
peonies
if only one could
I was born on a farm
I watched arrive in spring
city your faith in arches

“MEMORIAL DAY”

Thou hast
not foreign aggression
but world disillusionment
dedicated to the proposition
of an ice cream cone
and the stars and stripes forever
over the factories and hills of our country
for the soldier dead

The first is again subtitled “subconscious”—perhaps phrases recalled from dreams.¹⁴ We find “the simple and familiar words like prepositions, connectives … noticeably present [in dreams] to show illogical absurdity, discontinuity, parody of sanity.” Each of the three poems appears to be an assemblage of fragments of newspaper reportage, overheard conversation, and political euphemism. In each, the often commonplace fragments are transformed by their juxtaposition: in the first poem, they suggest menace; in the second, self-absorbed ennui; in the third, satire. With the “CANVASS” poems, words established few lateral connections: their associations were vertical, barely constrained by adjacent words; each word was the tip of its own iceberg. With the second group, the associations are lateral: words are nudged by traces of syntax and by contemporary usage into more readily identifiable meanings. The poems, in fact, verge on political criticism. However submerged the sources and contexts of each fragment may be, their elided presence contributes to the poems' political bite. Collage draws the poems towards a peopled world where meanings are made and manipulated.

In the movement from her Imagist poems, through “Spirals” and into the planes of consciousness poems, one can trace, amongst other things, an evolving relationship with the self. Her attention to the transitional states of her own mind was exhaustive and exact. Here was material for poetry unmarked by the ego. She had no interest in self-regarding embellishment of these psychic depths. Only in disciplined documentation which words—ciphers of that reality—alone could accomplish. All six of the “planes of consciousness” poems minimize, if they do not entirely erase, her own presence or signature. One recalls the uncomfortable relationship between the poem and poet in “Mourning Dove.” What she wanted was an uninterfering record of “the most immediate projections of the real” (Zukofsky, trans. 293) or “The fact as it forms, that is not as it is cooked by the imperfect or predatory or sentimental poet” (Zukofsky, trans. 292). With these more experimental poems she had reduced the discrepancies between the world out there and the literary constructs that seek to represent it. Behind these poems and indeed much of her subsequent writing, one sees the urge to minimize visible artistry in order to reveal the already existing, splendidly adequate fact. This scrupulous relation between poet and material is, of course, a hallmark of Objectivism.

After the “CANVASS” poems, the next dated manuscript we have is a long-lined poem called “Stage-directions” (FTC 279).¹⁵ Its date is August 1934. This and the undated prose-poem “Synamism”¹⁶ appear to be the only remaining parts of a larger sequence called “Sub-entries,” perhaps subentries to Zukofsky's dictionary project—Niedecker's sub-conscious entries or a sub-dictionary of the sub-conscious.

“Stage-directions” (FTC 279) has all the syntactic connectives one expects of a narrative but an only fleetingly discernible meaning. The unconscious speaks in freely associated dream images: “the man with the juniper growth to his beard,” “somebody sleeps over the oatshed and resets his pudding.” Tucked into the poem are several political barbs—attacks on marriage, wealth, and conspicuous consumption. “Necessary delirium,” her phrase for a fellow poet's work,¹⁷ is an apt description of “Stage-directions” whose delirium also carries a political agenda. But “Stage-directions” is humorous too. It includes the first evidence of transcribed folk speech that will characterize her first volume, New Goose.

                              His wife says he used to work
in a factory; now he's a gentleman—runs a beer tavern.
But he doesn't exercise enough. If he could only
make himself tired. …

Pound's issue of Bozart-Westminster (Spring 1935) also included “Stage-directions.”

The same issue published a play for voices, “Domestic and Unavoidable” (FTC 239-41), an experiment in aural collage.¹⁸ From the din of conversation in an institutional diningroom, random words and phrases combine into illogical but syntactical units.

Two more plays, “The President of the Holding Company” and “Fancy Another Day Gone,” were published in New Democracy, May 1936 and simultaneously in the first issue of New Directions, 1936. In New Democracy they are titled “Two Poems”¹⁹—another index of Niedecker's questioning of established categories and conventions. Once again, her method is nonsequitur and associational, and the results delightfully inventive and humorous. The plays bear the marks of her recent reading—Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, Lewis Carroll, and Mother Goose—all important ancestors in the surrealist pedigree. Here is an extract from “The President of the Holding Company”:

SECRETARY:
Pardon sir, who gives you fanatic worry when the rest of us boop on the stairs?
PRESIDENT:
I consume it my dignity
VOICE Outside:
to go straight to the devil
PRESIDENT:
Stuff and retain him … I'll have him by the stem of his hat.
SECRETARY:
O Matchbox, save him, he's the best timidity we have.
PRESIDENT:
O why am I tired why haven't I
a circumlocus of design
someone to come in and say
the pears smell ripe here …
But I'm bound to the fears of my weathers.
Are you ready to release the evening?
SECRETARY:
Maygo is waving his voice by the well.
PRESIDENT:
Success like raisins comes first in the mouth.
But who wants a mouthful of raisins.
VOICES Outside:
Sylva Wergles was a worty witchwoo
She lived by the side of a tree.
She combed the worldside for pennies and peas
And wood a few sallies to sea.
O my, said the counterfeit judge, By the boo
You cost me a tendril and then a long shoot.
Get thee from me and relate
How frogs come out of a gate. …

(FTC 233-34)

Her fascination with Mother Goose and nonsense verse was never simply arch or whimsical. She used its deliberately anarchic playfulness to challenge convention and language habits. And, of course, a commitment to the radicalizing of poetry is compatible with disdain for established principles of political order. Objectivism—a Depression-era movement that showed a thrifty disregard for poetic posturing and excess—invited the poet's own judgement of “historic and contemporary particulars” (Zukofsky 268), and surrealism urged on the socialist millennium. Zukofsky's gratitude to the neutral authority of the dictionary was also a political gesture: “As against any dictator, there is that book containing the words of a language, modes of expression, diction” (“Thanks to the Dictionary”). Along with the “CANVASS” poems, Niedecker sent Harriet Monroe a piece called “Communism or capitalism.” The high seriousness of the letter is a reflection of the political urgencies of the time:

I am enclosing “Communism or capitalism” for consideration. … The effect of propaganda in poetic (?) form has the effect on me of swearing that I as a writer will portray my epoch and truthfully evoke life in its totalities only as I am able to make magic, magic of dream and deep subconscious and waking isolation thick unto impenetrability. One's fear is people—going social—but now I have another fear: it has been hard to sell magic—will the time come when it can't be given away.

(12 February 1934)

The primary motivation for her work was her desire to experiment with language; she had no interest in compromise for the sake of intelligibility. Behind the strong statement of the letter is the personal reticence, the fear of “going social,” that determined her political and her literary choices: her preference for suppressed authorship, an afflatus-free style, a refusal to predetermine sequence or to legislate a single, official meaning.

A year later, Zukofsky advised Niedecker not to send Poetry magazine the pieces titled “God slain by Troops” and “No retiring” because Harriet Monroe might baulk at the propaganda. Only the second of these has survived:

No retiring summer stroke
not the dangerous parasol
on the following sands,
no earth under fire flood lava forecast,
not the pop play of tax, borrow or inflate
but the radiant, tight energy
boring from within
communizing fear
into strike,
work.

(Unpublished manuscript, Zukofsky Collection, TxU)

By 9 November 1935 Niedecker was typing Zukofsky's highly political “A”-8; he considered sending it to Louis Aragon, the surrealist turned communist.²⁰ Zukofsky was also compiling the “Worker's Anthology” which was to include a selection of Niedecker's poems. He kept her supplied not only with literary magazines but also with regular copies of the Daily Worker and New Masses. They both stopped short, however, of joining the communist party.

On 25 February 1936, Niedecker wrote to Harriet Monroe: “Looking around in America, working I hope with a more direct consciousness than in the past, the enclosed Mother Goose (this title as you may know not copyright).” The three-page manuscript titled “Mother Goose” included twelve short poems.²¹ Monroe's reply was again dismissive, “Nay nay.” James Laughlin accepted seventeen “Mother Geese” for the opening issue of New Directions, which he dedicated

                                        To
                    The Editors
                    The Contributors
                    & the Readers
                                        of
                              transition
who have begun successfully
The Revolution of the Word

Many of these “Mother Geese” poems are as political as their models: they attack the New Deal politics of individual gain. The first of them, “O let's glee glow as we go,” is a criticism of consumer excess, that combines surrealist images, nonsense language, and Mother Goose rhythms.

O let's glee glow as we go
there must be things in the world—
Jesus pay for the working soul,
fearful lives by what right hopeful
and the apse in the tiger's horn,
costume for skiing I have heard
and rings for church people
and glee glo glum
it must be fun
to have boots for snow.

(FTC 6)

Grouped together, all the “Mother Geese” poems take on a political character, even those that are not overtly political. “There's a better shine” and “My coat threadbare” can be read as reflections on the privations of life during those years.

There's a better shine
on the pendulum
than is on my hair
and many's the time
I've seen it there.

(FTC 6)

My coat threadbare
over and down capital hill,
fashions mornings after.
In this Eternal Category's
land of rigmarole
see thru the laughter.

(FTC 6)

But the poems are saved from bitterness and self-pity by Niedecker's humour. The millennial theme of “Scuttle up the workshop” is undermined by a teasing recognition, implicit in the rhythm, that reformist talk is easy:

Scuttle up the workshop,
settle down the dew,
I'll tell you what my name is
when we've made the world new.

(FTC 6)

What strikes one about Niedecker and Zukofsky's writings in this period is their combination of fun and high seriousness. Charlie Chaplin was for them both the quintessential modern—artistically daring, politically astute, and highly entertaining. They pursued their art with a zeal that was driven by a similar sense of artistic and political responsibility but their models were often playful and the research and resulting poems must have provided a fund of shared pleasures. In 1935 Zukofsky wrote his essay “Lewis Carroll” and several of his short poems bear signs of a Mother Goose influence.²² Two-poems from his longer sequence “Light” could be mistaken for Niedecker's: “A house where every / jigger” (“Light 2, Complete Short Poetry, 115) and “I'm a mosquito” (Light 15, Complete Short Poetry, 121).

By 1938, Niedecker's regular visits to New York were over and she had taken a full-time job in Madison. Increasingly, Black Hawk Island and its people became her focus. Her Madison job as a writer and research editor in the Federal Writer's Project (which produced the Wisconsin guide book),²³ required detailed research into the state's history, geography, and culture. It accounts for her familiarity with the early history of her region, particularly of Black Hawk Island. The research became the basis for a number of poems and, more important, it entrenched her method of attending to the linguistic details of original documents, a Relationship to material and sources not unlike the one she had to her unconscious and to Mother Goose.

Although Zukofsky had delighted in the experimentation in poems like “Sub-entries”—he read them to fellow poets William Carlos Williams and Robert Allison Evans and reported back their praise²⁴—he now did his best to rid her of her continuing interest in the surrealists. His letters during this period were packed with advice to read the newspaper, to talk to more people, and to attend to the riches immediately at hand in her community. She was drawn particularly to local habits of speech. Both “Don't shoot the rail!” (FTC 25) and “The clothesline post is set” (FTC 29), Zukofsky described as near perfect. He praised her fugue of r's in her weather poem—the final version of which appears amongst the “For Paul” poems (FTC 62)—and suggested the addition of a further ‘r’ sound with the word “through.” The second poem of the New Goose typescript (included in this issue) he liked enormously and urged her not to revise it at all. There was no need, he said, to embellish something that came to her so instinctively.

In their early discussions of technique, Zukofsky advised Niedecker to avoid imposing rhyme on choice nuggets of speech such as those she had used in poem 10 of the New Goose typescript. Prosody, he said, was serviceable as analysis but it didn't make a poem. The poem itself would determine its flow, whether it should be regularly rhymed or whether it should follow the casual accent of speech. She evidently had reported her struggles to balance speech and song. His advice was to ignore initially the amputation of song and to concentrate on recording speech and thought. “My man says the wind blows from the south” he called essential Niedecker.

My man says the wind blows from the south,
          we go out fishing, he has no luck,
          I catch a dozen, that burns him up,
I face the east and the wind's in my mouth,
but my man has to have it in the south.

(FTC 27)

Not surprisingly, this poetry based on transcribed vernacular led her back to her own biological folk. She acknowledged the influence of “a happy, outdoor grandfather who somehow somewhere had got hold of nursery and folk rhymes to entrance me” and more particularly of her mother, “daughter of the rhyming, happy grandfather mentioned above, speaking whole chunks of down-to-earth (o very earthy) magic, descendant for sure of Mother Goose” (LN to Kenneth Cox, 10 December 1966). Her father too gave her “a source / to sustain her— / a weedy speech, / a marshy retainer” (FTC 93). Zukofsky told her that he envied her this steady source, this goldmine of poetry and he thought her mother's “spitbox” remarks made a perfect poem.

The museum man!
I wish he'd take Pa's spitbox!
I'm going to take that spitbox out
and bury it in the ground
and put a stone on top.
Because without that stone on top
it would come back.

(FTC 24)

In 1939, Furioso published “Two Poems from ‘New Goose’.” Her first collection had its title, New Goose, at least seven years before publication. On Labor Day 1944, she wrote to Zukofsky, “Our woiks are sealed in a big envelope ready to be mailed off tomorrow. The Decker-Niedecker deal should soon take place.”²⁵ The Press of James A. Decker in Prairie City, Illinois published both Niedecker's New Goose and Zukofsky's Anew simultaneously in 1946.

Five of the poems from “Mother Geese” appear again in New Goose. Two are unchanged: “She had tumult of the brain” and “My coat threadbare”; the remaining three have been condensed. The fourth line of “There's a better shine” changes from “and many's the time” to “and many times,” a change from a lightweight Mother Goose rhythm to something more pointed and serious. The overtly political poems of “Mother Geese” are not included in this volume. Of the two ‘law and order’ poems in Furioso (1939) clearly earmarked for New Goose, the more indignant one—“A working man appeared in the street”—is rejected. In their new context, “There's a better shine” and “My coat threadbare” read as personal reflections rather than as comments on contemporary deprivations.

Politics remained important to her but to judge from scattered remarks in the letters, her orientation changed over the years. She felt less community with the worker or the underdog and more of a disenfranchised outsider. She wrote to Zukofsky, “You and I are being squeezed between the expensive workman and the capitalist. Neither wants the type of thing we have to offer. I worried and worried how to say this without saying it in III of the enclosed (its middle section) and then I decided to put it in as it is. No, those two are fighting it out and I hope the worker wins but where does it get us now and a long time after the victory?” (9 November 1949). With news of the Stalinist purges, her early hopes for Russia had begun to pall and by the 1950s she was ready to assent to the anti-Russian mood at home. Her substitution of “Europe” for the original “Russia” in the poem, “In Europe they grow a new bean while here” (FTC 86) was a response to new sensitivities.

Politics is still present in the collection but instead of local politics we have the global crisis of war. She wrote many of the New Goose poems during World War II and made her final selection in 1944. There are four explicit war poems—“They came at a pace,” “Bombings,” “The brown muskrat, noiseless,” and “Gen. Rodimstev's story” (the second two are about the war in Russia)—and a fifth poem, “A lawnmower's one of the babies,” which jokingly mentions the threat of bombs to her property in Wisconsin.²⁶ In a few letters that survive from that time Niedecker and Zukofsky talk particularly about the bombings. After New Goose appeared, she wrote to Zukofsky about William Carlos Williams' praise: “So——and when I got Williams' letter of course I was happy. But we're all too tired to be breathless these days. Or we're breathless and nothing else. Ten years ago such a letter would have sent me higher than the great blue heron. Guess now I've got my feet on bombed ground” (19 May 1946).

A “bombed ground” realism. Her years of soaring on cosmopolitan, avant-garde thermals were over. Like Williams, she committed herself to making poetry on scorched earth using the language of the people.

The majority of the poems is built almost entirely out of overheard local speech. Her method depended on an opportunistic ear, ready for the irregular sounds of living speech, for any undiluted linguistic possibility. Here is an example of how her adjustments for rhyme and measure preserve the authentic character of speech.

Mr. Van Ess bought 14 washcloths?
Fourteen washrags, Ed Van Ess?
Must be going to give em
to the church, I guess.
He drinks, you know. The day we moved
he came into the kitchen stewed,
mixed things up for my sister Grace—
put the spices in the wrong place.

(FTC 25)

Implicit in this report is a succinct portrait of Mr. Van Ess and his scandalized detractors. One feels the poet's pleasure in the subtly composed ambiguities of this piece of gossip—Mr. Van Ess is stewed; Grace is in a stew; the spices for the stew are in a stew; Grace (whose name associates her with the church of stanza one) is upset by Mr. Van Ess' indecent, spicy suggestions; he put the spices in the wrong place, i.e. he misplaced his solicitations. The naive surface of the poem belies its psychological penetration.

Such a ready ear for charged speech was likely to find material elsewhere too. Niedecker's research on behalf of poems was unending. Some of the local history poems—“Black Hawk held: In reason,” “Du Bay,” “Pioneers”—include quotation, often in slightly modified form.

Black Hawk held: In reason
land cannot be sold,
only things to be carried away,
and I am old.
Young Lincoln's general moved,
pawpaw in bloom,
and to this day, Black Hawk,
reason has small room.

(FTC 21)

With the minimum of words, she suggests a defeated, dying culture and an emerging, immature culture that will spawn a continuing sequence of misguided generations. Black Hawk's dictated life, one of her favourite books of this period, is the direct source for some of the poem's lines:

My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have the right to the soil—but if they voluntarily leave it then any other people have a right to settle upon it. Nothing can be sold, but such things as can be carried away.

(Patterson 89)

The texts which appeared to serve her poetry best were letters. In letters she found models for scale, voice, and diction. “Poems are for one person to another, spoken thus, or read silently,” she wrote to Corman on 3 May 1967. Especially between friends, the language of letters is intimate, unstudied talk—co-respondence. In another letter to Corman she quotes a letter from Kenneth Cox, “… your love of letters: the delightful, deshabille style, talking to someone, not just talking” (15 May 1969). Letters gave her the model and also the substance for many poems. She and Zukofsky found abundant material for poems in each other's letters but Niedecker took the practice further and found poems in the collected letters of a great number of other writers.

In New Goose, “Audubon,” “Van Gogh,” and “Asa Gray wrote Increase Lapham” all derive from letters.

Asa Gray wrote Increase Lapham:
pay particular attention
to my pets, the grasses.

(FTC 25)

This remarkably sure and minimal poem places great confidence in words; in the quiet intimacies retrieved from unrhetorical speech. Plain speech merges with barely detectable artifice. The poem is framed by the unobtrusive rustling of the name Asa Gray with his almost anagrammatic grasses. Both names, Asa Gray and Increase Lapham, contribute to the poem's strange appeal.

Finding poems in speech and in written texts is consistent with the precepts behind her earlier experiments and it also would have won Objectivist sanction: “It is more for the communal good that individual authors should spend their time recording and objectifying good writing wherever it is found” (Zukofsky 283-84). The practice would also have satisfied her natural thriftiness and her instinct for conservation.²⁷

A New Goose poem “The broad-leaved Arrow-head” (FTC 21) reveals the magnetism that the printed page had always held for her. She had to school herself to turn her non-interfering, Objectivist gaze from the word to the world.

The broad-leaved Arrow-head
grows vivid and strong
in my book, says: underneath
the surface of the stream the leaves
are narrow, long.
I don't investigate,
mark the page … I suppose
if I sat down beside a frost
and had no printed sign
I'd be lost. Well, up
from lying double in a book,
go long like a tree
and broad as the library.

It is these poems that she came to refer to as her folk poems and that, looking back over her work, she regarded as her most original contribution. Zukofsky praised them as among the best of the realist tradition. (The transformation of surrealist to realist was complete!) He wrote the following statements for the New Goose dust jacket: “She speaks and sings against all that's predatory in ‘Mother Goose.’ Whatever in it is still to be touched or felt she recreates for people today to feel and touch in her—their—own way” and “I read only two modern woman poets Moore and Niedecker. One feels closer to Niedecker.” For her, New Goose remained an important collection. It included poems that late in her life she still referred to as her favourites. She would have to wait fifteen years for her next published volume, My Friend Tree, and even then the selection would be largely drawn from New Goose.

Notes

1. The Tchogeerrah (1921): 52.

2. “From This Condensery”: The Complete Writing of Lorine Niedecker abbreviated hereafter to FTC. I have corrected two transcription errors in this poem: line 1 “colors” (LN used “colours”) and line 3 “game” (LN used “change”). Elsewhere, it was not her habit to anglicize American spelling.

3. The text of his talk was published as “Recencies in Poetry”—the preface to An “Objectivists” Anthology (9-25).

4. Niedecker's eleven letters to Harriet Monroe are among the Poetry Magazine Papers 1912-1935, The Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago Library. Thanks to the library for permission to quote from the letters in this essay. All eleven will be published in Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, forthcoming from National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine at Orono.

5. Niedecker's letters to Clayton Eshleman are in the Fales Collection, Bobst Library, New York University.

6. Excerpts from Niedecker's letters to Kenneth Cox appear in Dent.

7. Curator at Brown University Library, Providence, R.I. The letter is in the John Hay Collection at Brown University.

8. Niedecker's letters to Edward Dahlberg are in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

9. Her essays on Zukofsky and Corman's poetry were not intended as probes into the motivations of their poems, but simply as means of introducing readers to their work. After these letters to Monroe, her next surviving, extended account of her work is in a letter to Gail Roub, 20 June 1967, published in Origin 4th ser. 16 (July 1981): 42-3. She told Edward Dahlberg on 16 November 1955: “… I abhor talking at length about one's own poetry.”

10. FTC mistakes this for two poems. Stanza 3 should have no line space after line 6.

11. transition published a poem of Zukofsky's—“Cocktails & signs of ‘ads,’” in issue 15 (February 1929)—but it appears from a Zukofsky letter to Niedecker that they refused one of her submissions.

12. Several of the contributors to the Objectivist issue of Poetry had already been published in transition: William Carlos Williams in issues 2 (May 1927) and 9 (December 1927); Zukofsky in 15 (February 1929); and Norman MacLeod, Parker Tyler, and Charles Henri Ford all in 19/20 (1930).

13. In its Bozart Westminster (Spring-Summer 1935) appearance, the title is spelt “CANVASS,” appropriate since an early meaning of “canvass” is to toss in a sheet or to shake up. Syntactic logic is the loser.

14. The title and line 5 are perhaps an unconscious or submerged allusion to Zukofsky's “A”-1. From an early version of “A”-1, in Pagany 3.3 (July-Sept. 1932): 461-62.

    “Not past that exit, Zukofsky!”
    “Devil! what!—!”
    .....I lit a cigarette, and passed free
    Beyond the red light of the exit.

    Zukofsky gave considerable credence to dreams too. Arise, arise (finished in 1936) was a “dream play”; he dreamt the first poem of Anew, “che di lor suona su nella tua vita;” he sent Niedecker a transcription of a poem dreamt by Jerry Reisman; and in a letter to Niedecker admitted to having dreamt some of the lines for “A.” Jerry Reisman recalls that “LN was much affected by [LZ's] dreams, a number of which, as you know, were recorded in his poems. In the early 30s ‘dream writing’ was a fad, especially in France. Once I dreamt a long poem, and when I awoke, I could remember the last two lines:

    Nothing squared and nothing rounded,
    The living with the dead confounded.

    That was my ‘dream poem’” (letter to the author, 27 December 1988).

15. FTC overlooks Niedecker's line breaks and prints the poem as a block of prose.

16. At the foot of the “Synamism” manuscript (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin), Niedecker has written, “Finish of Sub-entries, at least for the present. Stage directions is the ‘theatre’?”

17. James Daly, mentioned in a letter to Harriet Monroe, 12 February 1934.

18. The play is grouped in FTC with other radio plays. It is unlikely to have been written for radio since it has explicit stage directions, e.g. “The curtain rises on. …” Zukofsky sent Pound “[Reisman's] short scenario of Lorine Niedecker's ‘Domestic and Unavoidable’ to show you we got a young man here who can be as good as Cocteau and the Surrealiste scenarists if luck favors him” (17 February 1935; Ahearn 161). Reisman recalls: “Actually I did nothing to LN's play. I simply added instructions for a cameraman” (letter to the author, 5 April 1989).

19. Neither are these “radio plays” as FTC would have them. Zukofsky had been busy with his play Arise, arise, also conceived of as a poem. Marcella Booth cites a note accompanying the manuscript: “I conceive of Arise, arise as an action which is at the same time a poem …” (224).

20. In a portion of a 1936 letter to Niedecker, Zukofsky complained that neither a past surrealist (unnamed in the fragment) nor Cocteau was able to comprehend the international significance of his play Arise, arise. He hoped Aragon would do better with “A”-8.

21. “O let's glee glow as we go,” “She had tumult of the brain,” “Troubles to win,” “A country's economics sick,” “There's a better shine,” “Lady in the Leopard Coat,” “Fascist Festival,” “Jim Poor's his name,” “Scuttle up the workshop,” “There was a bridge once that said I'm going,” “When do we love again Ann,” and “Missus Dorra.”

22. The influence of Mother Goose can be found in the following poems: “Motet” written in 1937, “Michtam 2” in 1948, and “Anew 24,” apparently dreamt in 1939. Another of his poems, titled “Anew 25” but never published, came to Niedecker with the comment that Jerry Reisman thought Zukofsky was having geese.

23. This was a WPA job. She left it in 1942 and moved briefly to a job as a script writer with WHA, a Madison radio station. Between 1934 and 1942 Zukofsky was employed in a variety of WPA projects too. Carl Rakosi speaks about the role of the WPA in the invigorated cultural life of 1930s America: “The action took place in the WPA, which at one time seemed to be providing work for every writer and artist in America. … Everything looked possible then. The task of the Federal Writers Project and the other projects was to discover and portray America. And that was fun. And a great public mission. … And the writers were working away with a great eye for detail on those masterpieces of cooperative writing, the guide books for the then forty-eight states” (Rakosi 242).

24. Williams praised the originality of her forms while Evans said he'd never read such writing by a woman.

25. Niedecker's letters to Zukofsky are in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. A large selection of them will appear in my book. Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931-1970, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

26. Another group of war poems not included in New Goose, concerns the fate of France in the hands of the Vichy government: “Tell me story about the last war” (FTC 56; the poem was first included in the 29-poem unpublished “New Goose” typescript printed for the first time in this issue of West Coast Line) and “Laval, Pomeret, Petain” (FTC 82). In “A”-10, Zukofsky wrote his own impassioned protest against the betrayal of France.

27. The good material of letters is saved for poems. The choice poems of New Goose (1946) are recirculated in My Friend Tree (1962). A number of her early, unpublished poems appear, ‘recycled’ inside later poems, e.g. some of “If he's not peewee wafted” (FTC 65) turns up in “Paean to Place” (FTC 219).

Thanks to Cid Corman, Niedecker's literary executor, and to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, for permission to quote unpublished Niedecker material.

Works Cited

Ahearn, Barry, ed. Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. New York: New Directions, 1987.

Booth, Marcella. A Catalogue of the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection. Austin, Texas: U of Texas P, HRC, 1975.

Dent, Peter, ed. The Full Note: Lorine Niedecker. Devon, U.K.: Interim Press, 1983.

Kenner, Hugh. A Hememade World: The American Modernist Writers. New York: Morrow, 1975.

Niedecker, Lorine. “Between Your House and Mine”: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960 to 1970. Ed. Lisa Pater Faranda. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1986.

———. “From This Condensery”: The Complete Writing of Lorine Niedecker. Ed. Robert Bertholf, Highlands, N.C.: Jargon Society, 1985.

———. “Mourning Dove.” Parnassus: A Wee Magazine of Verse 2.2 (15 Nov. 1928): 4.

———. “Transition.” Will-o-the-Wisp; a Magazine of Verse 3.3 (Sept.-Oct. 1928): 12.

———. An “Objectivists” Anthology. Var, France: TO Publishers, 1932.

Patterson, J.B., ed. The Life of Black Hawk. Boston: 1934.

Rakosi, Carl. “An Interview with Carl Rakosi.” With George Evans and August Kleinzahler. Conjunctions 11 (1987): 220-45.

Zukofsky, Louis. Complete Short Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991.

———. “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931.” Poetry 37 (Feb. 1931): 268-72.

———, trans. “Three Poems by Andre Salmon.” By Rene Taupin. Poetry 37 (Feb. 1931): 289-93.