“I was the solitary plover,” wrote Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker in “Paean to Place.” “A pencil / for a wing-bone / From the secret notes / I must tilt / upon the pressure / execute and adjust / In us sea-air rhythm / ‘We live by the urgent wave / of the verse.’” The spare lines compare the hollowness of bird bones with the pencil, an extension of the poet’s hand–or perhaps a bone filled with lead. But it’s the mention of the common plover, a shorebird that pretends to be injured when an enemy approaches its nest, that most strongly reveals the autobiographical foundation of Niedecker’s long poem; the precise, compact phrases suggest that the solitary writer is both cunning and fragile, a bird who must deceive others to survive.
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Born in 1903, Niedecker grew up on the Lake Koshkonong island near Fort Atkinson, 30-odd miles southeast of Madison. Her father ran a carp-fishing business, and Niedecker, an only child, recalled (in a letter to poet Kenneth Cox) a comfortable childhood spent outdoors among “twittering and squawking noises from the marsh.” In 1928 she married Frank Hartwig, a former employee of her father’s, but when she and Hartwig lost their jobs during the Depression and couldn’t pay the rent, both returned to live with their parents and the marriage withered.
Around the same time, in 1931, Niedecker read the journal that would set her course as a writer: modernist poet Louis Zukofsky’s objectivist issue of Poetry magazine, a manifesto of sorts for the New York-based objectivist poetry movement. Niedecker was captivated by the movement’s rejection of emotion and sentimentality: objectivist poets wanted to capture the observed world in a “nonexpressive” manner, using flat, nonconnotative language. They favored surrealist techniques and rejected authorial glamour, preferring to focus on the words themselves. In 1931 Niedecker wrote to Zukofsky and sent some of her poetry along. Zukofsky, impressed, wrote back, and the two began a 40-year correspondence. This mostly epistolary friendship (as well as correspondence with other objectivists) sustained Niedecker as a serious writer throughout her life, providing a link between the world of avant-garde poetics and tiny Fort Atkinson.
Her outsider status–like her chosen labor–seem to some degree a deliberate rejection of the mainstream, which was as full of hyperbolic personalities, glitz, and commercialism at midcentury as it is today. Niedecker’s lean lines do what the best of Western literature can–speak to us about aspects of life removed from our culture’s deafening noise.
“Lake Superior” (1968) is similarly sensual, thickly packed with awe and science: “In every part of every living thing / is stuff that once was rock / In blood the minerals / of the rock.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/courtesy the Roub Collection, Fort Atkinson.
