Lorine Niedecker was a wonderful poet. She was associated with the Imagist poets of the 1930s. It was an aesthetic that held that the heart of a poem is its image. She was better at it than the theorists of the movement.
Niedecker, 1903-1970, was born in Fort Atkinson, Wis., where her father was a commercial fisherman. Her poems are built around sharp images from nature.
Niedecker was in contact with Louis Zukofsky and other Imagist poets. But her neighbors didn’t know she was a poet.
The first work I saw by her was “Seven Poems.” It’s series of short poems linking the natural world to a person, an individual life. We are changed by the woods as well as by the town, and she could have pointed that out. Instead, she focused on an image: a child who brings green toads inside “so grandmother can see.” Such small, simple things change child and grandmother.
This short cycle includes:
• a bit of autobiography: Her father seined fish;
• a bit of observation: Birds in midlife are too busy to talk but, like humans in old age, have a “gabbling gathering” before flying off on migration;
• a bit of advice:
For best work
you ought to put forth
some effort
to stand
in north woods
among birch.
I’m far from the north woods, but I follow her advice in spirit, if not in geography. Yesterday, I was in the oak thickets along the Medina River.
LN is terrific, one of the great American poets. She’s more specifically associated with the so-called Objectivists (Zukofsky and others, no connection to Ayn Rand), but I think if her as standing apart.
ReplyDeleteThere’s still no obituary for her in The New York Times. I suggested her name years ago for the Overlooked No More series. Maybe someday.