Bodily Significations in an Agricultural World: The Multiple Meanings of Materiality in Lorine Niedecker’s New Goose Poems

Abstract

This paper argues that Lorine Niedecker’s New Goose poems evoke the material particularity of individual human, crop, and livestock bodies in the agricultural world they inhabit. This materiality is both irreducible to itself and gestures to networks of structural economic forces, histories of US settler colonialism, and the forms of other bodies. Critics have articulated Niedecker’s complication of an Objectivist focus on materiality with regard to her own psychic and bodily experience. This paper argues that Niedecker similarly complicates the materiality of the bodies that make up her poems to construct a bodily intersubjectivity between humans and nonhumans. The networks that these bodies illuminate reveal human and nonhuman entanglements in transforming the landscape and in human sociality, even while these individual bodies always resolve again into their own particular forms. In doing so, Niedecker constructs an expansive intersubjectivity between humans and nonhumans as a demand for attention to the irreducible particularity of individual bodies alongside the networks within which they are located.