“Guido, I wish that Lapo, thou and I,
Could be by spells conveyed, as it were now,
Upon a barque, with all the winds that blow. … ”
Dante to Cavalcanti, trans. Rossetti1
“Robin, it would be a great thing if you, me, and Jack Spicer
Were taken up in a sorcery with our mortal head so turnd. … ”
Robert Duncan, “Sonnet 3, From Dante’s Sixth Sonnet”2
“I wish you and Louie and Celia and I could sit around a table.
Otherwise, poetry has to do it.”
Lorine Niedecker, letter to Cid Corman, October 19643
fly back to it each summer4
Tribute, from tribuere, to assign, give pay, eventually metaphorizes from actual payment in acknowledgement of submission, or in exchange for the promise of peace, to homage paid, or acknowledgement of esteem, affection. Edmund Spenser’s first line of the envoi “To His Booke” echoes Chaucer with affection and esteem:
“Goe little booke: thy selfe present”5
from
“Goe, litel bok, go litel myn tragedye”6
Old words make new worlds, place is idea. Think of the forms water takes: Spinoza, Burns, Xenophanes, Blake, Sappho, Dostoevsky, “the James Brothers,” William Carlos Williams, the Webbs, Jefferson, Pasternak, Engels, the Brontës, Dickinson, Ovid, Einstein, Pound, Gilbert White, Audubon, Duke Ellington, Reznikoff, Darwin, H. D., Langston Hughes, Plato, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and of course Zukofsky, and so on—a discreet selection of references describing Niedecker’s coordinates, her locus, her lost & found.
Without preliminaries, the meticulous unobserved observer enters in medias res (like New York photographer Helen Levitt, whose special camera fitted with a right-angle viewfinder permitted her to work unnoticed by those who show up in her work7), continues her speculations, her “reflections,” as she called them, beyond subjectivity. She speaks of the flood from its midst, for like Cézanne, she has the capacity for repeated defamiliarization of “what is there,” and is endlessly occupied by it. Mind, bird, war, sky, street, “ … a river, impersonally flowing. … ”8
Topologies, dichotomies: “I wonder what the mind will be capable of doing someday without danger to the body?”9 The structure of particularity whose sound mind names and verbs, notates intervals with tender color, sensuous, passionate intellection in a repertoire of motion, its timing and tension fully motivated, activating space.
Extending by re-membering, meaning surprises event. A life/work is shaped by the equation place = “there is nothing else.”10 The choice to live in one’s spot, to restrict one’s engagement with the social, is the choice to coexist atemporally with a selected cohort of makers and thinkers. This coexistence extends to Niedecker’s recuperative use of found materials imbricated with studied dexterity in the immediate, the vernacular of her present, a complex overlapping creating disjunctive order.
Niedecker’s choices are not separate from the form they take. “ … poetry has to do it.”11 Inexorability of the assumptive prerogatives of a dialogic inner speech shapes her acute attention to formal re(ve)lations, causality, chance, change, a strict complexity. The pivotal nature of apostrophe runs through it. Here is someone remembering someone’s remembering in the present. “The tone of the thing. And awareness of everything influencing everything.”12
Language is the body’s last symptom. “ … a rhythm of emergence and secrecy sets in, a kind of watermark of the imaginary.”13 The poet sits in the “anxious seat.”14 The hand gives up the writing. The person in the poem is someone else. Naming echoes. The nothing, like the magician’s hand, conducts the something lost in the flood. Puzzle rejects closure: prosody tells this story. Although words may refer, the poem, like the subject, has no referent, for it does not pre-exist itself. Rather, it predicts itself, calls itself into being by means of calling or being. Indivisible, it cannot be regional.
Lorine Niedecker was born 12 May 1903, Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Except for a few brief excursions (to New York, and on driving trips to further her knowledge of Wisconsin and neighboring states) she lived mostly on Blackhawk Island, Jefferson County, Wisconsin. She died 31 December 1970 in a hospital in Madison, Wisconsin.
now live in music
now read in peace, Lorine15
1 Dante and his Circle, ed. & trans. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London, 1874) 143.
2 Robert Duncan, Roots & Branches (NY, 1964) 124.
3 “Between Your House and Mine”: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960 to 1970, ed. Lisa Pater Faranda (Durham, 1986) 48.
4 “Lorine Niedecker, My Life By Water: Collected Poems 1968 (UK, 1970) 41. This line is cited in Norma Cole, My Bird Book (LA, 1991) 28.
5 Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calendar (1579; in Norton Anthology, 1962) 530.
6 “Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1380; NY, 1987) 1.1786.
7 Sandra S. Phillips, “Helen Levitt’s New York,” in SFMOMA Catalogue HELEN LEVITT (SF, 1991) 16.
8 Jesse Redmon Fauset, Plum Bun, excerpted in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Indiana, 1990) 167.
9 Jenny Penberthy, Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931-1970 (Cambridge, 1993) 198.
10. Ibid., 217.
11 Faranda, 48.
12 Lorine Niedecker, letter to Gail Roub, 1967, in “Getting to Know Lorine Niedecker,” Gail Roub. Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, edited by Jenny Penberthy (Orono, 1996) 86.
13 Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (NY, 1988) 33.
14 John Brinkerhoff Jackson, “The Sacred Grove in America,” in Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins (Amherst, 1980) 85.
15 Norma Cole, MARS (Berkeley, 1994) 19.