Lyric Space in Lorine Niedecker’s Poetry

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge Bob Arnold, Literary Executor for the Lorine Niedecker Estate, for generously granting permission to reproduce Niedecker’s poems. We are also very grateful to the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad for its support. Special thanks to the Internet Archive, without which we couldn’t have completed this work.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 “Old mother” and “Dead” were published separately in two separate magazines; “I hear the weather” remained unpublished until the complete “For Paul and Other Poems” manuscript was published in Collected Poems. “Old mother” also appears in an early draft of the For Paul manuscript as the last two stanzas of another poem (Penberthy, Collected Poems 393, 394). Yet Niedecker’s decision to arrange these poems sequentially in the “For Paul and Other Poems” manuscript indicates, we believe, conceptual continuities that enable a progressive development of the themes of death, gender, and space. For further discussion, see Penberthy’s lecture “A little too little: Re-reading Lorine Niedecker.”.

2 The most important philosophical exploration of the origin and development of the metaphor of interiority in Western notions of selfhood is Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1989). For a general overview of the discussions around lyric interiority in Anglo-American lyric theory, see Burt 427.

3 Niedecker describes to Zukofsky her mother’s last words: “Her last words … to me were “Wash the floors, wash the clothes and pull weeds”“(Penberthy, Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 181).

4 The few critics who have commented on this poem remain vague about this line. See Duplessis 113 and Jowett 80.

5 See, for instance, Raphael-Leff for a discussion of the maternal body as container. Motherhood is a fraught issue in “For Paul and Other Poems.” In 1935, Niedecker aborted—at Louis Zukofsky’s insistence—the twins she had conceived with him and she never had any children of her own. But Paul, Zukofsky’s son with Celia Thaew, became in Niedecker’s imaginative world a near-surrogate for the children she might have had (Peters 49, 105). The death of the mother that haunts these poems can thus also be read as the death of Niedecker herself as a mother; we are very grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this paper for calling attention to this reading.

6 Little has been written about the history of the purse as a material object. Cuming’s brief essay offers a useful but dated overview.

7 For socio-historical contextualizations of the thimble, see Beaudry, chapter 4; McKenny 2-3 and passim.

8 See, for instance, Hutchins pp. 3 on women and the textile industry.

9 See Grogan pp. 255-74 and Willis pp. 228-29 for discussions of labor in “For Paul and Other Poems.”.

10 For an introduction to Objectivist poetry, see DuPlessis and Quartermain 1-22.

11 Also see Grogan, passim.