“Why would I even want to compose my own music, when I can play the masters?” This retort by a cellist friend challenged my assumptions. In writing, I placed value on originality—whether innovation or novelty, I was willing to read a work so long as it was not clichéd.
But. Different orchestras play the same composition differently. Two conductors will arrive at the same point in a symphony at different times. Notes may be darker or lighter. It all depends on who is playing and how they interpret the composition. This is not like ventriloquism, and more like mediation. It’s a paean to the composer who is renewed by the conductor. And we don’t call it a “cover.”
Could such an attitude be adopted in writing? Surely, the finest way to appreciate Niedecker would be to read her well. And then repeated reading, reading aloud, transcribing the vibrant phrases on to paper, oh and even framing then. But how to linger in the presence of this voice, and let it echo within oneself, make her a part of oneself? Perhaps by applying Niedecker to Niedecker, I would arrive at a new condensary. De- and re- constructing her poems, deleting words, conflating words, writing through her writing.
Niedecker spends considerable time over the physical shape of a poem, considering the poem as well as the page as an artifact – “I should like a poem to be seen as well as read”(Woman and Poet, 181). She values the “homemade / handmade” natural organic as opposed to the “lust that will never rust” (Collected Works, 336). She witnesses how capitalism swallows the brave entrepreneur and is dismayed by big presses. I take cues from this for the poem here. I use American typewriter font. I use a landscape format, forcing – by sheer contrast to the regular portrait format of books – a visual appraisal of space. She takes the scissors to her letters to Zukofsky; I take the scissors to her poetry, cutting and pasting for a new condensary.
The aural details she notes say something about where she is, but her attention says even more about who she is; her detailed ear is a poignant contrast to her mother’s deafness, and a pointer of her choice to not be like her mother. The inverted rhyme within her name – “Lorine” and “Niedecker” – the nasal syllable pressing down the nose and resonating through the ear begins her life of love with poetry, as well as marks her separation from her mother, and this yet again resonates in the motherhood that is denied her, all the while as she is “motherinfested.”
Birds surround her space. She relates to birds, even identifies with them (“Next year or I fly my rounds tempestuous” CW 41; “If I were a bird [….] I’d sit on a quiet fence and sing” CW 131). The poem about the plover has become a standard quotation about her own writing (“I was a solitary plover / a pencil for a wingbone” CW 265). But birds are also loved ones (“I like a loved one to be apt in the wing” CW 64). And birds are snipers (“Trees full of snipers, the new kind of bird” CW 273), and bombers, and even guns and choppers (“bomber in feathers” CW 128, “song of gun” CW 145 “hummingbirds … blurred propellers” CW 128). I take Niedecker’s plover, and just as she might see the music of the syllables visually, I open it to reveal the lover, who of course, is soon over because we are in Niedecker’s world, which is organic.
Niedecker seems quietly proud of her poetry; one detects defiance in her tone when she says to Gail Roub, “William Carlos Williams has said that I am the Emily Dickinson of my time” (WP 79). Her solitude is self-chosen and speaks of the significance she places on her work and its posterity, rather than of retreat and helplessness. Her peers focus on “things,” her repression emerges in the way she uses the word in her poems: “throw things to the flood” (CW 268). She writes to realize the non-expressive unconscious self: “This would be what no one else has written — else why write?” (Letter to Mary Hoard, WP 88). She sees herself as writing very little, but this is not a regret: for “silence if intense explodes.”
References
Niedecker, Lorine. Collected Works: Lorine Niedecker. Ed. Jenny Penberthy. (Uni of California Press, 2004)
Penberthy, Jenny. Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931-1970. (New York: Cambridge UP, 1993).
_. Lorine Niedecker – Woman and Poet. (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation University of Maine,1996).
