“A Few Cool Years After These”: Midlife at Mid-century in Lorine Niedecker's Lyrics

Abstract

In its restoration of the poet’s history of writing, revision and publishing, Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works answers many important questions about Niedecker’s poetry and the extent to which it registers the sexist attitudes and tropes of the male poetic tradition.1 Jenny Penberthy’s careful, deliberate editing places Nie decker’s published poems alongside unpublished work she was writing at that same time so that a poem published in isolation in a magazine or with other poems the author also selected as her best for a book collection returns to its original context. Thus, with the help of Penberthy’s copious notes, a reader gains some insight into Niedecker’s — and literary editors’ — judgments about her poems, what she considered worthy or wise to share, and what she kept to herself. Moreover, these reconstructions often make obvious her poetry’s exploration of contemporary social pressures and ideals, particularly the ideas, assumptions and practices developing in the public mind and the ways they extend to and resonate with those established in a presumably isolated poetic culture. Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, the 2008 collection of essays on Niedecker, includes a number of approaches appreciative of Niedecker’s involvement with public matters and popular culture, including her poetry’s interactions with jazz and blues, John Cage’s music and Buddhism, Warhol’s pop art, war and politics, and mental depression. 2 In the context of a writing process in which Lorine Niedecker reworked and relocated many poems for decades (CW 13–16), even early poems that scholars tend to read primarily as Niedecker’s personal expressions now reveal a concern with the social and historical frameworks through which the poetic tradition asserts itself as a masculine domain in which women have little authority.