RE: LORINE NIEDECKER

I was moved from Niedecker's poetry to her life, a life I learned was devoted to poetry for no more important reason than survival. The principle of "enough" governed LN's vision and underlies her "condensery". . . . For Niedecker, such economy was clearly more than poetic technique; it was a physical, psychological and moral necessity.. . for the woman who had grown up on Blackhawk Island, a place intimately connected to "the soft / and serious-- / Water", writing poetry was the means to "float" or "fly", and she employed images of both to characterize the act itself. She learned to condense, to: "be alone / Throw it over- / all fashion / feud" .. because the poetry was enough, "enough to carry [her] thru". . . .

To many it seems as though Niedecker sacrificed much to achieve such a precious balance. Ironically, she remained isolated from the established centers of literary activity in order to write the poetry of the American idiom and modern experience. She was, nonetheless, always alert to the "fashion and feud" of the literary world; she tells Cid Corman in a letter of 12 December 1964 that when she was eighteen and still reading Wordsworth, she "was vaguely aware that the poetry current (1921) was beginning to change." She was, in fact, a contributor to such avant-garde journals as New Democracy, and contributed along with Pound and William Carlos Williams, to the first annual edition of New Directions . . . . Zukofsky first published LN in A Test of Poetry, in which he placed "There's a better shine" in the section called Recurrence. According to LN, she did not introduce herself to LZ until six months after February Poetry, (1931), when she finally worked up enough courage to write him. By this time Zukofsky was back in New York, so contrary to many people's claim, LN did not work with Bunting and Zukofsky in Madison, Wisconsin. In the letters to Cid Corman, Niedecker describes her meet ing with Bunting in 1967. She saw herself "on the periphery" of the Objectivist movement, and while she maintained a warm and affectionate correspondence with Zukofsky, she developed her art on the delicate line where individual imagination and culture meet . . . .

At bottom, it is LN's ability to make me engage the words, experience syncretism and the associative power of language that I find thrilling. Her poetry makes me know, without discourse, what it is like to be alive, to feel alive:

The eye
of the leaf
into leaf
and all parts
spine
into spine
neverending
head
to see

Lisa Pater Faranda has edited the complete annotated edition of The Letters of Lorine Niedecker, a selection of which appears in the Fall, 1983, issue of Conjunction. Her introduction to that collection will appear in a future issue of Origin. Her lengthy biographical sketch of LN, containing much important information for scholars, will appear in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, (Modern American Poets volume), Fall, 1984.

alerts will be an on-going section of this publication set aside for informal commentary and information on new or neglected books by relevant women poets, in brief letter, journal or notation form. We intentionally think of these comments as not complete in the scholarly sense, with the hope of removing prohibitions linked with thinking/writing critically. Your response is invited.