Collecte Works

by Lorine Niedecker

  Lonne Niedecker…will be remembered long and warmly in England, a country she never visited. She was, in the estimation of many, the most interesting woman poet America has yet produced. Her work was austere, free of all ornament, relying on the fundamental rhythms of concise statement, so that to many readers it must have seemed strange and bare. She was only beginning to be appreciated when she died, but I have no doubt at all that in 10 years time Wisconsin will know that she was its most considerable literary figure.

  * * *

  1. Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931–1970, ed. Jenny Penberthy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 146.

  2. “Extracts from Letters to Kenneth Cox,” The Full Note: Lorine Niedecker, ed. Peter Dent (Budleigh Salterton, U.K.: Interim, 1983) 36.

  3. Lorine Niedecker Collection, Dwight Foster Public Library.

  4. Lorine Niedecker: Woman & Poet, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1996) 177.

  5. Lorine Niedecker: Woman & Poet 85.

  6. Poetry 37.5 (February 1931): 292.

  7. Noted by Edward Dahlberg on his copy of New Directions 12 (1950). Eliot Weinberger's private collection.

  8. Lorine Niedecker: Woman & Poet 182.

  9. Lorine Niedecker: Woman & Poet 88.

  10. Lorine Niedecker: Woman & Poet 188.

  11. The Full Note 36.

  12. New Mexico Quarterly (Spring 1951): 205.

  13. “Editor's Corner,” New Mexico Quarterly (Summer 1950).

  14. “Between your House and Mine”: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960 to 1970, ed. Lisa Pater Faranda (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986) 24.

  15. Edward Dahlberg Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  16. Cid Corman's transcription from his brief tape-recorded interview with Niedecker. The recording is held at Simon Fraser University in the Contemporary Literature Collection. The quotation appears in Blue Chicory (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Elizabeth, 1976), n.p.

  THIS EDITION

  In the last two years of Niedecker's life, two books of her collected poems were published—T&G: The Collected Poems (1936-1966), prepared in 1965 and published in 1969, and My Life by Water: Collected Poems, 1936-1968, an expanded edition prepared in 1968 and published in 1970. Jonathan Williams's timely offer to publish her collected poems reached Niedecker in 1965, when she was sixty-two years old. Since her first magazine publication in 1928, she had seen two books to press: New Goose in 1946 and My Friend Tree in 1961. Given this spare publication record, the collected poems she now had to compile could not be a conventional alignment of previously published books. Instead she chose to organize an edited selection of poems in a loose chronology of named categories—generic in the case of “Ballads,” “In Exchange for Haiku,” and the folk poems “New Goose/My Friend Tree,” and thematic in the case of “For Paul,” “The Years Go By,” and “Home/World”—a schema that provided the barest allusion to the ambitious provenance of poems written in the course of thirty-five years. The usual autobiographical or biographical cues of an edition of collected poems are muted in T&G to the point where the collection gives the impression of an authorless text. This was perhaps a deliberate choice, consistent with her anti-authorial practice throughout her career—and a locus of her appeal for many readers. However, it was also a choice that may explain her near invisibility on the American scene.

  This new edition of Niedecker's collected works aims to establish her position among twentieth-century American poets. Furthermore, it aims to restore the profile of her writing life. To this end it dismantles the previous attempts at selected and collected poems and presents the work in the sequence of its composition. This collection adds previously omitted work such as all the surviving instances of her early surrealism, the impulse that Zukofsky and Pound would disparage in her work but that would remain a steady influence throughout her career. It supplements the published New Goose volume and the even smaller selection of folk poems from T&G and My Life by Water with the many unpublished poems from the same project. It recovers the “FOR PAUL AND OTHER POEMS” manuscript, which she had planned as her second volume, ten years after the first, New Goose.

  This edition organizes the work chronologically by collections, both published and projected. Not all of these can be represented here because of their overlapping content—a particular problem with the 1960s books and typescripts. I have included as many of the major groupings of her work as chronology and the need to avoid duplication will allow: collections published in her lifetime (New Goose, North Central); manuscripts intended for publication (“NEW GOOSE,” “FOR PAUL AND OTHER POEMS,” “HARPSICHORD & SALT FISH”); and the gift-books made by hand for her poet-friends at a time when publication still seemed unlikely (“homemade poems” and “HANDMADE POEMS”). In between these collections, the remaining poems are placed in the chronology by first traceable date of composition—dates of manuscripts and letters; dates of magazine appearance; or, in very few cases, conjectured dates. There are five cases where duplication has been necessary in order to maintain the integrity of a collection. These are flagged in the notes at the back of the book. The arrangement of the 1960s collections not represented in the text can be found in the contents lists that follow the notes.

  Smaller groupings of poems are also acknowledged in this edition. When Niedecker submitted her work to magazines, she typically arranged the poems in groups. In many cases, the groupings were retrospective and transitory, made in fresh attempts to see the poems into print. “The poems in this envelope are chosen from many,” she told Robert Creeley in January 1955: “If you wish to make a further choice you may do so, re-numbering them.” She told Creeley again in June 1955, “You need not hold to my groupings….”1 To Cid Corman in September 1960, she said, “The short poems with Roman numerals have no real sequence in case you want to break them up.”2 Her openness to intervention is surely the pragmatism of a poet eager, if not desperate, to be published. Partly because she was published so irregularly, she had a growing body of work to draw from when she made submissions to magazines or when she compiled her books. As she revisited her poems—both published and unpublished—she revised them and altered their groupings. These groupings are always interesting and revealing—inevitably the poems accrue meaning through their proximity with others—but because of their fluctuating boundaries, they are difficult to preserve in a collection such as this. They can, however, be reconstructed with the help of the notes.

  The frequently revised individual poems present further challenge to an editor's desire for a stable text. T&G and My Life by Water stand at the end of a much-edited life's work. Marianne Moore's pronouncement—“Omissions are not accidents”—at the start of her Complete Poems (1967) could as well function as an epigraph for Niedecker's work. But unlike Moore, Niedecker left no published record of her early versions. The drama of Niedecker's omissions and revisions occurred off-stage. This edition aims to restore that record by presenting all the surviving drafts and their revisions.

  For copytext, I have settled on My Life by Water (1970) as Niedecker's latest and most substantial revised text, or, when a poem is not included in My Life by Water, the last extant version. This is a gesture toward recording final intentions made with the awareness that Niedecker's final intentions are often difficult to assess. Since, at times, her intentions are masked by the convolutions of her close relationship with Zukofsky, the original form of the poems, recorded in the notes, will be of interest to many readers. Some begin in lengthy drafts and emerge years later much condensed. Her ambivalent statements about the practice of “condensery” suggest that this compositional record should be preserved.

  My choice of the last version for copytext is in some ways at odds with my decision to preserve collections that predate My Life by Water, a particular problem when many earlier poems are substantially revised for My Life by Water. The most striking example is “Dear
Paul,” which was condensed from its 198 lines in the “FOR PAUL AND OTHER POEMS” typescript to 33 lines in My Life by Water. In all such instances, the revised poem displaces the earlier poem, whose text can be found in the notes. This practice is less than ideal, but must suffice until an electronic edition can present all of her published and unpublished collections intact.

  In the notes, each work is listed by title or first line followed by a list of book and major typescript appearances. A poem listed as “Unpublished” did not appear in print during her lifetime, and a poem listed as “Unpublished in book form” appeared only in magazine form. The note then cites in chronological order the poem's composition and publication record. All drafts and variants are listed except for minor revisions of lineation and punctuation. Posthumous publications are ignored unless they constitute the first or a variant appearance of a poem. Some of the notes include relevant comments by Niedecker or others.

  The disposition of Niedecker's manuscripts is not entirely known. Few manuscripts and papers from her own collection have survived: her husband followed her instructions to destroy them after her death. Those in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin formed part of Louis Zukofsky's large bequest to the Center in 1964. In the collection are early surrealist poems from the 1930s, the unpublished “NEW GOOSE” manuscript, the “FOR PAUL” poems in their eight groups and in the “FOR PAUL AND OTHER POEMS” collection, the “HANDMADE POEMS” gift-book, and roughly two dozen other poems written between the years 1956 and 1964. The largest concentration of manuscripts belongs to the “FOR PAUL” project that occupied her between 1949 and 1956 and that generated a substantial traffic of manuscripts between the two poets. Niedecker's revisions can be traced from one manuscript to another. At times, Zukofsky noted his suggestions directly on the manuscript. Why then did these annotated manuscripts remain in his possession? Very likely he asked her to return them to him. But given the indeterminate character of this exchange of manuscripts, his annotations need to be read with care. In at least two cases, he appears to have inscribed onto early drafts subsequent revisions that are clearly Niedecker's own. It is easy to mistake these annotations for his revisions of the poems. See the notes to “Thure Kumlien” and “In Europe they grow a new bean.” Throughout the notes, I have indicated apparent interventions by Zukofsky.

  In the same section as the poems, I include Niedecker's early plays. Both “THE PRESIDENT OF THE HOLDING COMPANY” and “FANCY ANOTHER DAY GONE,” titled “TWO POEMS” in their first published appearance, were part of her experiment in expanding the boundaries of poetry. This was true of “DOMESTIC AND UNAVOIDABLE” too. There is no evidence of these pieces being composed for radio. Reluctantly I have positioned “UNCLE,” the long prose piece from the same period, in a separate section devoted to prose and radio plays later in the book. While I'm keen for the piece to be read as part of her multi-genre experimentation, its length would make a significant intrusion in the poems section. The two other prose pieces—“SWITCHBOARD GIRL” and “The evening's automobiles…”—are placed in the later section too. They appear alongside the scripts written explicitly for radio, “AS I LAY DYING” and “TASTE AND TENDERNESS.” Space constraints have prevented me from including her critical essays on the poetry of Zukofsky and Corman.

  Many of Niedecker's poems are untitled; with the few that are, the titles tend to be placed off center: “in all cases I prefer subtitle at right and no main title.”3 Longer poems and sequences retain her fully capitalized titles. Niedecker's blend of American and British spelling conventions are retained.

  There have been several posthumous publications of Niedecker's poems. The first was Blue Chicory, Cid Corman's 1976 edition of the poems not yet published in book form. The volume draws on those published in the poetry magazine Origin and her 1964 holograph gift-book to Corman, “HOMEMADE POEMS,” plus Corman's transcription of his cassette tape recording of her November 15, 1970, reading from the “HARPSICHORD & SALT FISH” typescript. Discrepancies of lineation occur in the transcriptions from Corman's tape recording. Blue Chicory was followed in 1985 by From This Condensery: The Complete Writing of Lorine Niedecker, a highly flawed and unreliable text. Because of its pervasive textual errors—mistranscriptions, misattributions, inaccurate dating, misunderstood sequencing, etc.—I have avoided all reference to it. Cid Corman's edition of The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker also appeared in 1985. (An expanded edition published by Gnomon in 1996 is still in print.) In 1991, Pig Press in Durham, U.K., published my edition of Niedecker's final collection, Harpsichord & Salt Fish.

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  1. Robert Creeley Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

  2. “Between Your House and Mine” 23.

  3. Lorine Niedecker: Woman & Poet 89.

  Poems

  1928–1936

  Transition

  Colours of October

  wait with easy dignity

  for the big change—

  like gorgeous quill-pens

  in old inkwells

  almost dry.

  Mourning Dove

  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

  SPIRALS

  Promise of 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.)

  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.

  PROGRESSION

  I

  Here's good health, friends,

  and soothing syrup for sleeplessness

  and Lincoln said he thought a good deal

  in an abstract way

  about a steam plow;

  secure and transcendental, Emerson avowed

  that money is a spiritual force;

  the Big Shot of Gangland declared he never really believed

  in wanton murder;

  Shelley, Shelley, off on the new romance

  wrote inconsolable Harriet,

  “Are you above the world?

  And to what extent?”

 
And it's the Almanac-Maker joyous

  when the prisoner-lad asked the pastor

  “Who is Americus Vespucius?”

  and an artist labored over the middle tone

  that carried the light

  into the shadow.

  But that was before the library burned.

  II

  As one Somnambulist to another

  our sleep could be more perfect.

  Surmising planed squares of wood with legs are tables,

  or poppies watched and brooded over flare finally

  out of bud-shell hatched

  is admitting such superstitions only wait

  to beset us outright.

  III

  Home is on the land

  though drought be solid fact,

  though you tell by the summer sky

  how you'll pare your potatoes next winter;

  you murmur your magic (what help is the past?):

  opera is an oversight

  on the part of the Milky Way

  and the squash blossom subsides

  with the Fourth Internationale

  and it's obviously not theatre.

  But what can you do that yellowing season of earth

  with more than nine hundred ninety

  recombinations of yellows

  since rain crossed the modes

  of your brooding?

  IV

  Last lines being sentimental, reaction

  is in the first of the cold. The contemporary scene is,

  said the green frog by the charcoal wood, false

  in every particular but no less admirable for that,

  and isn't it humorous to designate at all?

  I take into my hole, said he, the curse

  that hangs over more than one critic, this

  that if forgiven tassels are lost.

  Well, and the sun does set short in winter….