Collecte Works (3 page)

When Ian Hamilton Finlay in Scotland read
New Goose
in 1961, the folk poems struck an immediate chord with him, caught up as he was in the Scottish folk poetry revival. He wrote to Niedecker with lavish praise and offered to reprint some of the poems. Within a year
My Friend Tree
was published. It reprinted nine of the original
New Goose
poems and added seven new ones. Niedecker planned the book as a selected poems including several more from
New Goose;
however, budget constraints kept the book trim. Buoyed by the sudden interest from a publisher, Niedecker returned to thinking of herself as a folk poet. She made the too-modest comment to Jonathan Williams that her folk poetry might be her only claim to difference between herself and other poets.

In 1963, Niedecker married Al Millen, a housepainter from Milwaukee. The marriage allowed her to retire from the hospital job (she identified herself as “laborer” on her marriage license) and return to full-time writing. She moved to Al's apartment in Milwaukee; they spent their weekends on the island and their summers on road trips into the surrounding states and Canada. In 1964 she collected her current short poems—the product of ten months of new freedom—into three handmade, handwritten gift-books for Corman, Zukofsky, and Jonathan Williams, an acknowledgment of friendship but also of the difficulty of finding a publisher.

In August 1965, Jonathan Williams offered to publish the manuscript of collected poems that she had prepared and titled
T&G.
She explained the title as an abbreviation of Lawrence Durrell's “Tenderness and Gristle” to which Williams added, much to her delight, “Tongue and Groove (if you're a carpenter).” But Jargon Society financial troubles kept the book in production limbo for four years. Niedecker waited with growing despair until it appeared in 1969. Meanwhile, in 1967, Stuart Montgomery of Fulcrum Press in London had solicited poems for another collection. In 1968,
North Central
was published. It included her two travel- and research-based poems, “
LAKE SUPERIOR
” and “
WINTERGREEN RIDGE.
” The same year Stuart Montgomery accepted
My Life by Water
, which Fulcrum would publish in 1970. Originally planned as the British edition of
T&G
, it was now expanded to include the contents of
North Central
plus “
PAEAN TO PLACE,
” her extended reflection on Black Hawk Island.
T&G
appeared in 1969, and soon after, Niedecker received Cid Corman's offer to publish a selected poems. She prepared two typescripts, “
THE EARTH AND ITS ATMOSPHERE
” and “
THE VERY VEERY,
” both of which select from the same work represented in
North Central, T&G
, and
My Life by Water.
Neither of the typescripts was published. Her final manuscript, “
HARPSICHORD & SALT FISH,
” ready in 1970 and including the text-derived poems such as “
THOMAS JEFFERSON,” “HIS CARPETS FLOWERED,
” and “
DARWIN,
” was also unpublished at the time of her death.

Throughout the 1960s, she was regularly published in little magazines. Her preference for quiet led her to refuse offers to read in public, but she enjoyed enormously visits from fellow poets such as Jonathan Williams, Basil Bunting, Tom Pickard, Carl Rakosi, Stuart Montgomery, and a month before her death, Cid Corman. She savored her contact with local friends Gail and Bonnie Roub and her correspondence with Clayton Eshleman, Bob Nero, and Kenneth Cox. After the mid-1960s, letters to Zukofsky were less routine. Niedecker died of a cerebral hemorrhage on December 31, 1970, at the height of her career. Two weeks before her death she told Cid Corman, “I think lines of poetry that I might use—all day long and even in the night.”
¹⁶

During her life, she attracted high praise from her peers. Her work was much admired by Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Edward Dahlberg, Charles Reznikoff, Jonathan Williams, Cid Corman, and many others. On January 5, 1971, six days after her death, the
Wisconsin State Journal
published the following letter, written by Basil Bunting from his home in Wylam, U.K.:

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.

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.

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

2
. “
Between Your House and Mine
” 23.

3
.
Lorine Niedecker: Woman & Poet
89.