Paean to Place

by Lorine Niedecker

Poetry. William Carlos Williams proclaimed Lorine Niedecker "the Emily Dickinson of our time." It's taken a while for more than a handful of poets with extremely acute ears and sensibilities to see how true that is. This is something that comes from the poetry itself, not in the projection of Dickinson's semi-mythical reclusiveness onto Niedecker, but in the way both women wrote poetry that can be read for a lifetime without losing its magic or becoming dull. This book, produced as a celebration of the author's 100th birthday, is the first to follow Niedecker's conception of how her most intensely autobiographical poem should be presented. This is the first time Niedecker's work has been thus treated in print. The work chronicles her life and the lives of her parents, all three of which included great sorrow and loss, but Niedecker's clarity and sparkling verse never descend into sentimentality, bringing out that which makes life worth living despite its disasters. Edited by Cid Corman.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Niedecker's earliest poetry was marked by her reading of the Imagists, whose work she greatly admired and of surrealism. In 1931, she read the Objectivist issue of Poetry. She was fascinated by what she saw and immediately wrote to Louis Zukofsky, who had edited the issue, sending him her latest poems. This was the beginning of what proved to be a most important relationship for her development as a poet.

Zukofsky suggested sending them to Poetry, where they were accepted for publication. Suddenly, Niedecker found herself in direct contact with the American poetic avant-garde. Near the end of 1933, Niedecker visited Zukofsky in New York City for the first time and became pregnant with his child. He insisted that she have an abortion, which she did, although they remained friends and continued to carry on a mutually beneficial correspondence following Niedecker's return to Fort Atkinson.

From the mid 1930s, Niedecker moved away from surrealism and started writing poems that engaged more directly with social and political realities and on her own immediate rural surroundings. Her first book, New Goose
Niedecker was not to publish another book for fifteen years. In 1949, she began work on a poem sequence called For Paul, named for Zukofsky's son. Unfortunately, Zukofsky was uncomfortable with what he viewed as the overly personal and intrusive nature of the content of the 72 poems she eventually collected under this title and discouraged publication. Partly because of her geographical isolation, even magazine publication was not easily available and in 1955 she claimed that she had published work only six times in the previous ten years.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a single poem, which is printed from the author's own handwritten script, a single stanza to each page. The presentation adds power to the words, and makes you feel closer to the poet's process. It is said that Niedecker did not like to read her poems out loud, and as Karl Young relates in the afterward: "In a letter to Gail Roub she wrote: 'I like planting poems in deep silence, each person gets at the poem for himself. He has to come to the poems with an ear for all the music they can give and he'll hear that as Beethoven heard tho deaf.' "

[Shai]

O my floating life
Do not save love
For things.
Throw things
To the flood.

I would like to thank Ms. Niedecker for singlehandedly saving my Goodreads challenge with her poems on this fine Saturday morning.

[Li Chesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A deeply moving book, composed in LN's handwriting on the top half of the recto pages.