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Modernist Women Poets:
Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Lorine Niedecker
Lorine
Niedecker: instructor's notes: Susan Tichy
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Some quotes from Niedecker:
From a letter to Mary Hoard, undated, prob mid-1930s:
Would like to ask: not too much publicity,
please. Not local
publicity. I’ve tried to stay away from it all these years. I came
close to
being written up in the
I always tell everybody including myself: fewer words, more quiet and pay attention to spaces as well as words! LNWP 95
I’ll just speak of something that struck me
in your letter:
“emancipated as you are from the clutches of our society”. Well, wasn’t
ever
thus, not entirely free yet! Now it’s property but I’m slowly working
my way
out of it. In the thirties when I was in my
thirties it was jobhunting, depression, you know. And then, if you felt
the
influence of any poetry it was Proletarian (God forbid) poetry. In NY
it seemed
too absolutely difficult to even try
for a job. The WPA – Writers Project in
I feel that without the Feb '31 issue of Poetry edited by Louis Zukofsly I'd never have developed as a poet -- I literally went to school to William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky and have had the good fortune to have the latter friend and mentor. Well ---- there was an influence from transition and from surrealistes that has always seemed to want to ride right along with the direct, hard, objective kind of writing. The subconscious and the presence of the folk, always there. New Goose, my first book...is based on the folk and a desire to get down direct speech (Williams influence) and here was my mother, daughter of the rhyming happy grandfather mentioned above, speaking whole chunks of down-to-earth (O very earth) magic, descendant for sure of Mother Goose (I her daughter, stis and floats, you know).
From a letter to Morgan Gibson, Feb 27, 1967:
From a letter to Cid Corman, May 3, 1967:
I've thought so much about poems read aloud and poems printed -- with me a tendency to greater drama if spoken (aware of not simply audience but mixed and nerve-crossed audience, or somewhat inattentive audience), to more words, to prose but of a heightened kind. So compromise, but then you lose a tight, perfect kind of poetry. Also why compromise printed peotry with musical composition i.e. notations of pause, chant, loud . . . you'd want some scenery also and then you'd have stage drama or movie. Poems are for one person to another, spoken thus, or ead silently. How would the bug on the branch, walking to the end of it, or the rain drop there -- your poems -- be read to a hall filled with people? If I close my eyes I look for the words on the page...
From a letter to Cid Corman, July 12, 1967:
Basil came! [Basil Bunting, English poet]. . . I took them to a tea room in Fort for lunch. Basil: "I don't suppose it would be possible to get a glass of beer here?" Have you met him? -- his manner is timid and tender. Withal so kindly. O lovely day for me . . . And of course the question came up of reading poems aloud. The world is mad, MAD on this subject. Would somebody would start Meditation Rooms, places of silence, so silent you couldn't help but hear the sound of your page without opening your mouth and reading books would come back . . .
From a letter to Cid Corman, Oct 24, 1967:
. . . Probably all it means is another long stretch of geologic time before anythng really gets printed. The only time the lava flows is those moments while the poems are being written. I should remind them tho, they don't see time as I do who haven't too much more of it.
From a letter to Kenneth Cox, Nov 23, 1970:
At night before Cid left he got out his Cassette (a box that records -- not a tape recorder - then you can play it back) and was getting very tired and had never read poems aloud to anyone but myself. But he thought I should try so clutching my magnifying glass I tried. I fell over one of the stanzas and nearly sqashed it. Two things I did this fall for the first time: shot a can off a post thirty feet from me at the first shot, and read aloud. The reading didn't go as well as the bullet. I got to thinking as I read how one can write for print and it means one thing and let it out of the mouth and into a listener to become soemthing else e.g.: my Darwin commences:
His holy
slowly
mulled over
matter
slowly
mulled over
matter
from the mouth is it holy or wholly or holey????
And in the Thomas Jefferson I have:
Martha (Patsy) stay
so aloud it calls for a bit of explanation perhaps -- e.g. "Patsy, that is" (Not spoiling anything really)
but not in defence of myself at all, I really do not approve too much of reading aloud or or listening to someone read. Unless it's the ballad type of poetry with obvious rhyme and rhythm. For me poetry is a matter of planting it in deep, a filled silence, each person reading it a silence to be filled -- he'll have to come to the poems -- both writer and reader -- with an ear for all the poems can give and he'll hear that as Beethoven heard tho deaf. I said this to Basil three years ago when he was here.
Some quotes from Niedecker's readers:
Beverly Dahlen: "Notes on Reading Lorine Niedecker." HowEver
The difficulty of beginning to talk of Niedecker's work is the number of other readings that are left out -- there are the poems having to do with her relationship to the culture of women: the small town women whom she both admired and felt isolated from ("In the great snowball before the bomb," T & G); literary women ("Who was Mary Shelley," T & G); her view of marriage ("I rose from marsh mud," T & G). It is ironic that Niedecker's work, as H.D.'s, has often been reduced to a simplistic version of small perfections, whereas the work proves to be tenacious, sinewy, not merely gem-like -- a persistence of mind which finds its constant focus in the natural and domestic world.
Michael Heller: "'I've Seen It There'." The Full Note: Lorine Niedecker. Ed. Peter Dent. Budleigh Salterton, UK: Interim Press, 1983 (hereafter FN).
Yet these poems seem neither self-pitying nor mean, for there is in Miss Niedecker’s work an obstinacy, an almost iron commitment to valuing her world, a moral concern for her art that is rare. It is a concern for clarity, for the most basic knowing of one’s own existence. Thus in poem after poem she establishes precisely how it is a human suffers and celebrates there being other humans, other objects in the world. 25
. . . . The experience of passing through the poems is mainly sensuous; moving across and down the lines one senses not ideas but complex interplays: rising and dying sounds, imagery as much counterpoint as counterpart to the music. Such tensions and delays function to build the poem into its own justification and release: an articulation that discharges the energy of the poet's perceptions yet never drives one out of relation to the poem. 26
. . . .This is to trust one's language -- today a decidenly uncommon virtue -- as an occasion in which a "world" might ocur, in which: "a weedy speech / a marshy retainer" sustains a life or at least offers definition to its isolations. Thus Miss Niedecker relies on the fierecest, simplest powers of ordinary wordsk those words as Freud put it, in which the sum ottal of magic is reposited. In this he is a true keeper of hte word-hoard, repurifying its contents thorugh scrupulous use, reawakening in us the sheer dignity of human utterance.
Not that this should be mistaken for modesty or restraint; rather, it is usage located in necessity, a poetry (ronald Barthe's term) of a possible swdventure: the meeting point of a sign and an intention. For Miss Niedecker it is the courageiuos intention to experience the world as it is, to arrive disarmed but for her language. 26
Charles Tomlinson: "Introduction: A Rich Sitter." FN
These tiny poems are not the fruit of anxious isolation. They are rather points of patience. ... Moral persistence, confronted by space and wide water, does not entail a Whitmanian art that would equal or outdo them. Quantity can be a poor measure. 8
Kenneth Cox: "The Poems of Lorine Niedecker." FN
The poems hold attention by thier quiet confidence. Their language is coloquial and elliptical to a degree that registers the feel of a place and the personality of a speaker before meaning. It is the speech of the American people [the writer is English], whittled clean. Many of the poems suppose someone to be saying them and set the immediate human context, the attachments and irritations of domesticity. They catch the inflexion of a voice, establishing relations between persons speaking, spoken to and spoken of. ... The prevailing mood of the poems is alert calm. 29
. . . . The world of the poems is that of everyday adult life, but drawing on the continuum of existence lying a little below consciousness. Things familiar and unfamiliar -- the weather, common objects, something read, a sudden thought -- hang in it together without question, explanation or reason. The tonality of the poem creates a magnetic field in which occasional observations and promptings lie still, imaging depth. .... The poems of Lorine Niedecker leave the reader in peace. 30
The poems gather together a sense of kinship and house, the biological and economic axes of society, with a scope and sense of porportion more often found, writ large, amnog the novelists. Their real subject is not so much an incident or experience as the relation between this experience or incident and another. Elements unrelated are omissable -- hence the apparent sketchines: sometimes the referents are insufficint. The more divergent they are, the more urgent the need to bring them into relation. The concreteness of things is a function of the relation between them. 31
. . . . By...subtle wordplay, using the cadences and overtones of familiar speech, Lorine Niedecker's poems construct miniature imitations of the world magical in their properties. Their tiny structures shape emotion stored a long time.
It is almost impossible to say how it is done... A poem recording a physical ormoral event in common words may aim at something beyond the event without going outside the words used: it can do this by reminiscence of rhythm, accident of sound or coincidence of sense. The most economical form of expression would be by means of a word which happens to have a double sense. The fulcrum of many of the poems is therefore a concealed pun... 32-33
[Examples omitted] These are a method reducible to a verbal or visual pun and possibly owing something to the Janpense use of a hinge-word, kake kotoba, a word working like a two-way switch. ...Lorine Niedecker imitates haiku and tanka loosely, not closely, and retains features of English prosody, such as occasional rhyme, to add point. The extreme reduction of content typical of Japanese forms is salted like a Greek epigram or American wisecrack. 33-34
