The girl, short with stubby legs: “sturdy,” as her Ma says. Except for the glasses, two saucers of glass, or Coke bottle bottoms—but the world ain't green when you look through em. And there's this light, the girl says, it floats on the river that's always moving. She pushes up her glasses, over and over, makes another note with a pencil stub: Dark ain't the opposite of anything.

After reading The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker, I looked through the poet's eyes at the Great Flood, the world awash with water and poetry and “dreadfully much else” (p. 21). I'd read most of the poems before, but in scattered places—in several of Niedecker's original collections, for example, or an edition of Origin. Fortunately, The Granite Pail, edited and with a preface by Cid Corman, is a well-organized selection of her work and all in one volume. It forms the type of “seined” fishing net, floats attached at the top edge and weights along the bottom, that Niedecker the fisherman's daughter would have appreciated.

For many years Lorine Niedecker lived on Black Hawk Island, which overlooks Lake Koshkonong and is near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, her birth and death place (1903-1970). She observed “wingdrip / weeddrift” (p. 69), river mud and hard granite, muskrats, frogs, tightly curled ferns, water lilies, and “the simple / the perfect / order” (p. 83). Niedecker's work presents the minute and variegated details of her surroundings directly, as themselves. For this reason, she could be called an Objectivist. Niedecker recognized how much the 1931 “Objectivist” issue of Poetry influenced her; after its publication, she contacted editor Louis Zukofsky, who later became a good friend and correspondent. At the same time, her marshy landscape expands in the reader's mind, encompassing much more than a small area of southeastern Wisconsin. In Niedecker's best poems, objects in a natural catalog overlap and merge, becoming part of the destructive yet ever-renewing Flood.

During the span of her 67 years, Niedecker worked in a Fort Atkinson library and printshop, scrubbed hospital floors, and maintained close ties with her family and the rural community. Despite her correspondence with writers such as Zukofsky, Corman, and William Carlos Williams, she wrote her poems far from the literary mainstream and produced a body of work that rivals any other American poet's of this century. Her books, most of them small-press editions, include New Goose (James A. Decker Press, 1946); My Friend Tree (Wild Hawthorn Press, 1961); North Central (Fulcrum Press, 1968), T&G: The Collected Poems (The Jargon Society, 1969); My Life By Water (Fulcrum Press, 1970); and Blue Chicory (Elizabeth Press, 1976). These books are difficult to come by now, and her work has remained unknown to most poetry readers. However, the 1985 release of the The Granite Pail by North Point Press should bring her unique world and words to a wider audience.

The Granite Pail is divided into three sections—“My Friend Tree” (Niedecker's early work); “North Central” (her later poetry, mainly published in the late 1960s); and “Harpischord & Salt Fish” (what Corman calls Niedecker's “final work—much of it known posthumously—showing how she was probing other voices into a larger plenum”¹). Each section contains many poems, ranging from the four-line “Remember my little granite pail” to long works such as “Lake Superior” and “Wintergreen Ridge.” I can only touch on a few of them here, but all of the poems in the volume fit into Niedecker's “seine”: They are simple “Thoughts on things.” Yet they also form complex nets that:

fold unfold
          above the river beds

(p. 68)

One of the first things I noticed about the design of The Granite Pail is how Niedecker's poems, some as short as three lines, are isolated on separate pages. The tiny blocks of type seem to “float” in space. The effect is heightened even more by the relatively small type size of the text. The tension between a few condensed lines on almost blank pages is particularly obvious in “My Friend Tree,” the first section of the volume. Here, the longest of the 34 poems (“In the great snowfall before the bomb,” p. 21) is still only 24 lines.

Lorine Niedecker called her work condensery. In a letter to Cid Corman, she wrote: “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.”² Her poem “Poet's Work” (p. 54) focuses on the same theme:

Grandfather
          advised me:
                              Learn a trade
I learned
          to sit at desk
                                        and condense
No layoff
          from this
                    condensery

The poem itself exemplifies the “trade” Niedecker practices so well. It begins with a one-word line and ends in the same way, as if the poet's musings move out of silence with great effort (“I learned / to sit at desk”) and merge with it again at the finish. The poem's movement also connects “Grandfather,” a word that denotes a human relationship bound by time (grandfather—granddaughter), to “condensery,” Niedecker's own word for her art. The tension between sound and silence is an important product of Niedecker's condensery, and can be felt in the white space between stanzas as well as the surrounding page.

Jeanne Kammer, in her essay “The Art of Silence and the Forms of Women's Poetry,”³ notes that poets Emily Dickinson, H. D., and Marianne Moore, use white space around words as more than a background; for them, as for Niedecker, silence becomes an equal (or even greater) element in the poem. For example, in H. D.'s early work (Kammer refers to “Oread” specifically), the tension between sound and silence mirrors the tension between the poetic voice and the threat of annihilation—by the sea, the sky, the gods, life and death, the white space itself. Synthesis may be reached only through transformation of the word, which, in turn, mirrors transformation of the artist/self. As a poet of transformation, H. D.'s project differed considerably from Niedecker's, although they both used silence and details of the natural world in their work. H. D.'s “objects,” her cyclamen and hyacinths, her individual grassblades, are always merged with the self in transition. In contrast, Lorine Niedecker catalogues a world that exists whether or not she's around to record it.

For Niedecker, silence is an ally, not an antithesis; silence is a form of the Flood (just as the “flow” of words is), a place where one can “Throw things.” (p. 75) Her arrangement of words is like a skeleton: brilliantly intricate and with even the smallest bone accounted for—but with nothing extra either, a framework the reader fleshes out. Her poems allow us to know the world directly, instead of being replicas of experience that we're told. But, once again, perhaps a better analogy than the skeleton is the fishing net. Niedecker's words are the seine, weighted at the bottom in river mud, yet bobbing on the everchangeable surface. Everything else flows through the net: water, time, river silt, light, shadows, and a very concrete kind of silence. And what gets caught is concrete, too: a carp, a frog, a branch, a bone.

Something also flows through the title poem of The Granite Pail—and gets caught in words:

Remember my little granite pail?
The handle of it was blue.
Think what's got away in my life—
Was enough to carry me thru.

(p. 7)

The first two lines fix on a single object, a pail that is both “little” and “granite” and has a blue handle. The last two lines suddenly shift to the poet's life, in Niedecker's condensery fashion, and connect the rock-hard, solid pail to “what's got away”—that is, water, time, memories, words, all the things that get submerged in the Flood. In the last line, the granite pail, an object that somebody carries (as a poet “carries” words) becomes the thing that carries the poet / Niedecker “thru” life. This seemingly simple, four-line poem demonstrates Niedecker's masterful use of sudden shifts between objects and events, which are often connected by nothing more than white space.

It also shows her use of plain speech and delightful sound-play. For if Niedecker makes silence her ally, her other partner is the music of words. In a letter to Corman, she wrote: “I get for the first time that meaning has something to do with song … I'd say mostly, of course, cadence, measure, make song. And a kind of shine (or sombre tone) that is of the same intensity throughout the poem.”⁴ These lines reflect the first poem of the volume: “There's a better shine / on the pendulum / than is on my hair / and many times / … I've seen it there.” (p. 3) The “shine” of the pendulum moves in a “sombre,” constant rhythm. Yet the rhythm and rhyme of the poem are offset by the great space between the first four lines and the last: “… I've seen it there.” Through the rhyme of “hair” and “there” the reader jumps across the silent ellipses and finds a connection; nevertheless, the silence between still exists, and it is deep. Similarly, it's the mixture of a shining, light tone in “Remember my little granite pail” with a constant, “granite” intensity that gives this four-line piece its depth. The nursery rhyme pattern (blue / thru) and rhythm counters the weight of “what's got away in my life,” so that this “little” poem is enough to carry the reader through as well as the poet.

Niedecker's folk rhythms also reflect a great deal of the speech of those around her. As she writes in “In the great snowfall before the bomb” (p. 21):

I worked the print shop
right down among em
the folk from whom all poetry flows
and dreadfully much else.

The local speech of her family and neighbors, particularly of the women, appears again and again in her poetry, and can be seen most clearly in the first section of The Granite Pail. These highly autobiographical poems describe her mother and father, their lives and their deaths, and herself as a child, a young girl, and a woman. She speaks of her rural life with affection, as she does “the folk”: “But what vitality! The women hold jobs— / clean house, cook, raise children, bowl / and go to church.” (p. 21) Yet Niedecker remained very secretive about her “trade” as a poet in her community, fearing that if the neighbors knew about her writing she could no longer go “right down among em”—that is, they would no longer act like themselves or say exactly what they thought in front of her. Through her poetry, she is a chicken hatching a strange egg, in secret—or Mother Goose herself, a poet of the familiar yet mysterious. As Niedecker notes at the end of “In the great snowfall before the bomb”:

What would they say if they knew
I sit for two months on six lines
of poetry?

The poignant sense of distance from those around her is once again mirrored in the overall tension between sound and silence—between Niedecker's obsession to get everything she sees and hears down in words and her desire to keep it secret. She emerges, ultimately, as the observer—the one who stands apart from both her neighbors and the faraway literary world. But Lorine Niedecker, the poet and the cataloguer, is not the self-conscious artist. She is a humble voice, one who recognizes her possible destruction in every spring flood; and she writes with a unique wryness about herself and the place of humanity in relation to other living things. In Niedecker's poetic world she addresses a tree as “My friend” and feels called upon to explain why she cut it down (p. 4):

My friend tree
I sawed you down
but I must attend
an older friend
the sun

This second poem of The Granite Pail is a simple, but powerful expression of the natural order of things. In addition, it's a statement of Niedecker's condensery; many “friends”—words—must be “sawed down” to “attend / an older friend”—silence.

The second section of the volume, “North Central,” contains some of Niedecker's best work. It includes several long pieces from her book North Central (“Lake Superior,” “Traces of Living Things,” and “Wintergreen Ridge”), as well as short poems that expand upon the themes in “My Friend Tree.” The beautiful “My Life By Water” (p. 69), in which Niedecker invokes “the soft / and serious— / Water” as the substance of her daily life, is also here. “Wintergreen Ridge” (p. 77), the last poem of this section, is a marvelous journey through the poet's mind, an epic that is one long flow of triadic stanzas, yet makes stops along the way. The poem begins, “Where the arrows / of the road signs / lead us: / Life is natural / in the evolution / of matter.” In this world, “butterflies / are quicker / than rock.” It's a statement typical of the “North Central” section, in which Niedecker becomes the cataloguer in full. Later in “Wintergreen Ridge,” she comments upon the inner life—and her poetics—in a way that reflects the specifics of the outer world:

Nobody, nothing
                    ever gave me
                                        greater thing
than time
                    unless light
                                        and silence
which if intense
                    makes sound

(p. 82)

Silence, charged with meaning, creates sound itself. In Niedecker's “central” work the tension between sound and silence creates an overlap rather than a resolution: sound and silence become possible at the same time. And just as the words and the white space on the page overlap, so do all of the natural objects the poet catalogues.

Niedecker's layering of sound, silence, the natural world, and history is exemplified by the long poem “Lake Superior” (p. 58). The whole piece is divided into several sections, which are, in turn, divided into her typical, condensed stanzas and single lines. The overall effect is that of many tiny pieces overlapping. The form of “Lake Superior” reflects the merging of elements in the natural world, which is noted in the first four lines:

In every part of every living thing
is stuff that once was rock
In blood the minerals
of the rock

A mineral (iron) in soil and rocks is also in human blood, so that “every living thing” is connected to the earth—not through a cosmic/religious order but through the physical order of the world. Niedecker's connections between the bedrock and living things in “Lake Superior” expand even further as the poem progresses. For example, from the section subtitled Joliet:

Greek named
Exodus-antique
kicked up in America's
Northwest
you have been in my mind
between my toes
agate

(p. 60)

The threads of sound—Greek / antique / between; Exodus / Northwest / agate; kicked / America; my mind / my—create a set of startling associations. The reader moves between cultures and landscapes to a particular person: “my mind / between my toes.” From the internal world of that one person (poet), we move out again to “agate”—fixed in one place (inside the mind or “between my toes”) but also a shining rock that reflects light. In Niedecker's poems, intricately wrought, specific things reflect the larger whole; just as the pendulum that marks time through the earth's movement reflects the same light (even if it's “a better shine”) as the poet's hair.

By contrasting two modes of observation—chronological vs. spatial—Niedecker presents events in time that are layered and twisted. They move out of time, as we know it, so that many events can happen simultaneously. In “Lake Superior,” the human history of the Lake (the first white explorers and exploiters, the Indians) merges with its natural history. Then, in turn, the poet's individual history and perceptions merge with the larger whole. One of the last sections provides a powerful example of Niedecker's condensery, as well as a summary of the poem's action:

The smooth black stone
I picked up in true source park
                    the leaf beside it
once was stone
Why should we hurry
                    home

(p. 62)

The event itself (picking up a stone by a leaf) is condensed into four short lines but its full power is supplied by associations that are nonverbal. The line space that follows the first stanza emphasizes what happens in the silence—the connection we make from the leaf and stone to “hurry / home.” Why should we hurry home—or to any narrowly defined place—when it's taken a millenium for a leaf to become a “smooth black stone,” and vice-versa? The human concept of time is an artificial construction, especially when compared to “true source park.” All events in the larger flow (or Flood) must be put into their proper perspective.

The work of a poet such as W. S. Merwin, who rejected formalism for open forms in the 1960s, bears a surface resemblance to Lorine Niedecker's. But despite a similar philosophical base (taken from Asian poets and philosophers), his poems don't circle round to the world again as Niedecker's do. His stance is still essentially that of the Romantic Self: the Creator/Poet who builds his world through Imagination. In fact, Merwin has fought this tradition in The Moving Target (1963), The Lice (1967), and The Carrier of Ladders (1970) through an effacement of the “I”; pronouns are often used ambiguously, or the “I” shifts through several personae. However, he still creates the world of his poems through the naming (or appropriation) of things, an interesting contrast to Niedecker's work. Merwin confronts a void that is the “shadow” of himself. The silence in his work, the white spaces and jumps between lines, evoke a giant emptiness.

In a poem titled “Footprints on the Glacier,”⁵ Merwin includes such lines as “pointing up into the cold,” “I scan the slopes for a dark speck,” and (at the end) “I hear names leaving the bark / in growing numbers and flying north.” Here the basic dualism of experience, typified by light and dark, falls away; boundaries melt into the Great White Shadow (the frozen void) and the dark speck of self is consumed. Things no longer have names in the patriarchal sense of naming that implies possession and control; but when names “fly north” their qualities as separate entities also disappear.

Niedecker's sense of things in the world is very different. As a naturalist, she spent plenty of time categorizing—giving things their specific niches in the larger picture. But her detailed descriptions of natural objects are not acts of naming, in which bestowing names creates a world—if only in the poet's mind. Towards the end of “Traces of Living Things,” another long poem in the “North Central” section, Niedecker writes: “Thoughts on things / fold unfold / above the river beds” (p. 68). For her, the world is already present in many colorful, fascinating forms. Her “folding” and “unfolding” of plants, animals, rocks, and people reflect the overall, variegated flow of life itself. And what can be named (folded) can also be unnamed (unfolded). In another letter to Corman, Niedecker wrote: “Painting (and you paint what you love) takes away desire of possessing things.”⁶ Again, it is the experience itself that is important, not the control (or possession) of a world created in a poem.

The basic paradox in Niedecker's work is that, although moss on a rock can be described with words, the words themselves do not embody those things—just as verbal boundaries cannot be put on the dark and overwhelming cosmos. It is the separation between things that ultimately connects them, as this piece from “Traces of Living Things” demonstrates:

I walked
on New Year's Day
beside the trees
my father now gone planted
evenly following
the road
Each
                              spoke

(p. 67)

In these lines, trees are separate from the poet's father. However, in the fourth line, Niedecker connects them in words that are strung together with no punctuation. The father's present state (“now gone”) runs into “planted,” so that we feel the father has both planted the trees and been planted (buried) himself. And through this associative net, the poet walks beside the trees and her father—a reclamation of loss that is life-giving. At the end, both “speak” to her, although trees and a dead father can't really speak. In this case, an intense silence makes sound.

More importantly, father and trees speak as separate entities (“Each”) but as part of the same pattern as well. “Spoke” is also a reference to a wheel: an individual wheel “evenly following / the road” and the Wheel of Life itself. In the total experience of the poem, something is brought back to life by its immersion in other living things, moving around in a circle.

The final section of The Granite Pail, “Harpsichord & Salt Fish,” carries through and expands Niedecker's catalog of the world. It begins with three of my favorite Niedecker “shorts”: “Tradition (p. 89), “Easter Greeting” (p. 90), and “Laundromat” (p. 91). “Easter Greeting” starts with the simple statement, “I suppose there is nothing / so good as human / immediacy” and ends up with “… lilies—stand closer— / smell.” And in “Laundromat,” Niedecker transforms “… a public wedding / a casual, sudsy / social affair / at the tubs” into the wry comment: “After all, ecstasy / can't be constant.”

The last poems of the volume contain several historical personages—Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, William Morris, and Charles Darwin. Niedecker writes some of these in voice (as in “Thomas Jefferson”), and sometimes includes words actually written by that person. The Granite Pail ends with the long poem “Darwin” (p. 108), a fitting choice on editor Corman's part. Charles Darwin was the natural cataloguer of them all. In the first line, Niedecker refers to him as “His holy”:

His holy
          slowly
                    mulled over
matter

The humorous connection of words through sound—“holy / slowly / mulled over”—leads to the single word “matter.” In fact, these lines about Darwin the evolutionary theorist are a companionable echo to the opening of “Wintergreen Ridge”: “Life is natural / in the evolution / of matter.” Niedecker certainly “mulled over / matter,” too, and in her poetic presentation the first four lines of “Darwin” become a map not only for how words connect but for all the various forms of matter as well.

In the first part of the poem, Niedecker uses words from The Origin of Species—“Species are not … immutable”—and embeds “(it is like confessing / a murder)” in the same stanza. By taking on Darwin's voice, she is able to combine his public writing with a private thought, cleverly presenting Darwin's internal conflict. It also becomes an ironic comment on the turmoil this naturalist's many meticulous notes—his years of cataloging thousands of details—eventually caused. The details of Darwin's famous voyage to the Galapagos are effectively presented by Niedecker; in fact, they make up the bulk of the poem, turning “A thousand turtle monsters,” “Blood-bright crabs,” “Flightless cormorants,” “barnacles,” and “earthworms” into the everyday objects of life. It is only at the end of the poem that Darwin sails out of Good Success Bay “to carcass— / conclusions—” (p. 111). He notes that the universe is “not built by brute force / but designed by laws.” It is “the details” that are open to endless variations, as are species that evolve and change and find their own niche in the order of things:

The details left
to the working of chance
                              ‘Let each man hope
                                                  and believe
what he can’

The last three lines are in Darwin's voice, but they also fit Niedecker's own philosophy. With the poet speaking through a famous naturalist's words, they make an appropriately humble—and ironic—ending to The Granite Pail.

I think lines of poetry that I might use—
all day long and even in the night

According to Cid Corman, those were Lorine Niedecker's last recorded words (November 15, 1970, Fort Atkinson). She died on December 31st of the same year. It's largely through Corman's work as the editor of Origin (Niedecker was featured there in 1966 and 1981) that she found an audience at all. Now, as her literary executor, Corman has done a fine job in presenting her work in The Granite Pail—both in the selection of poems and his thoughtful preface. Any criticisms I have of the volume are minor. I do wish the original publication dates and places for the poems were listed. Since Complete Works: From this Condensery (Jargon Press, 1986) doesn't contain this information either, readers have to fend for themselves with Niedecker's poetic chronology. (Corman does hope Complete Works will be re-edited one day to correct the problem.) Still, a volume of Niedecker's letters to Cid Corman, edited by Lisa P. Faranda, is also due out in 1985 from Duke University Press. With The Granite Pail as a starting point, perhaps Lorine Niedecker will finally get the recognition she's long deserved. As she notes (p. 42):

Now in one year
                    a book published
                              and plumbing—
took a lifetime
to weep
                    a deep
                              trickle

Notes

1. From the “Editorial Note” in The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker, Cid Corman, Ed. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985.

2. Letter to Cid Corman, February 18, 1962, in Cid Corman, “With Lorine/a memorial: 1903-1970,” Truck, #16, 1975.

3. Jeanne Kammer, “The Art of Silence and the Forms of Women's Poetry,” in Shakespeare's Sisters, S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, Eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.

4. Letter to Cid Corman, July 2, 1965, in “Featuring Lorine Niedecker,” Origin, third series, #2, July 1966.

5. W. S. Merwin, “Footprints on the Glacier,” in The Carrier of Ladders. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

6. Letter to Cid Corman, December 12, 1964, in “Featuring Lorine Niedecker,” Origin, 1966.