By the late 1950s, Lorine Niedecker was resigned to stake her reputation and legacy on the poems of New Goose, a collection from the 1930s that worked out folk sensibility and nursery rhymes in the abbreviated, lapidary slate of imagism. Without lining up behind a part, these poems owe something to the socialist and communist stirrings of the 1930s that ran through factories and fields. Niedecker wrote among, for, and to Louis Zukofsky (a friend and a lover), Charles Reznikoff, and George Oppen. They are the heirs of Pound, of HD, of Amy Lowell, with a political and historical sensibility all their own. But the particular force of Niedecker’s poetry does not owe to the doctrines and dogmas of the poetic movement called Objectivism or to the politics of the 1930s, though these are elements in its making. Instead, as with all poets, it is her capacity to release and calibrate the potential charges of language in the poem’s defined field. Famously:

Remember my little granite pail?

The handle of it was blue.

Think what’s got away in my life—

Was enough to carry me through.[i]

In the final two lines, the poem opens to a depth of experience that its brevity belies, and it is held open by the tension between “what’s got away” and “carry me through,” with the dash coordinating the pressures they exert. The key is to see first that “what’s got away” refers not merely to loss of objects, lost opportunities, and lost relationships, but to something that escaped, that made a getaway, as in “the man who got away.” And in that colloquial phrase, “got away,” overriding the ironic suggestion of acquisition in “got,” overriding the sense that life has unfairly “gotten away” with something, there is an acknowledgment of failure and responsibility: things get away from someone. Someone holds tight to things. Then we notice that the phrase is neither “has gotten away” (something that bears on the immediate present, something recent) nor “got away” (at a greater remove in time) but a bit of both, uncertainly divided between them, fostering an ambivalence over the immediacy of the loss itself, as well the distance from the responsibility, whether one remains the person who let it get away, or whether it was a past self. But there is nothing pointed in the language: self-accusation, ironies, injustice, and uncertainty are smoothed and worn as the colloquial phrase. “What’s got away” is nonchalant, folksy, a way of speaking that may not be a deliberate judgment by the poet so much as it’s a deliberate representation of a person unaware of the judgment implied by their words. The ironies, the injustice, the open question of the nearness or distance of the losses, we cannot know whether it is felt through the phrase, by and in specific form of the words. And this in turn reveals something about a broader attitude: a resigned fortitude that absorbs and reflects the full range of circumstances even without being swayed to react against them. 

Colloquial phrases are rounded and faded by time. They are convenient and necessary social adhesives because they do not obtrude. They endure and allow people to endure. So it is with the speaker of this poem. But the passage of time that has run over the phrase is not only the time of generations, or social time; it is also the wash of an entire life, realized in the next line. The phrasing, when we think about it is baffling: how could what has gotten away or what got away be there to carry her? To resolve it, she must mean: what got away was hers long enough to carry her through; everything passes, including life, and the passing of what makes up a life is what makes a life pass. This way of thinking is continuous with the conceit of the poem, which comes to fruition with the phrase “carry through”: these things that got away, they are to her life as the handle is to the pail; she is the pail that she lost, the loss is the handle on the pail; and the memory of the handle, and the recognition of its loss, has been enough to carry her through.

But the phrase “carry her through” is more poignantly searching than the equation of a conceit. Consider again what she is saying: the things got away from her, but they carried her through; so she did not carry them, did not hold them close to her, or in her possession even, and the self-accusation of failure implied “got away” is met with the passiveness, even the helplessness, of “carry me through.” And the final poignancy is that this close of the poem is made to feel like the end of something that extends far beyond it: “enough” to what end, “through” to what destination? At the poem’s end, the word “through” does not find a destination or object. How long is the arc of the life in this poem? “Remember my little granite pail”: “pail,” not “bucket” and “little,” not “small.” These suggest something a child might have; in the four lines an entire life traversed. “What got away” is “what’s gotten away” because in a final accounting, it has all gotten away. The dash marks just how much—so much, unknowable, unsayable—but enough: all of the time that escapes in a life being the time that has also carried a life to its close.

The dash also permits us to recognize a subterranean syntactical pressure. For the dash occludes the subject, “it,” that would mark the last line as an assertion, and in so doing it leaves open the possibility that there is a question pushing upwards, not allowed to issue in a question mark. The question would be “Do you think what’s got away in my life was enough to carry me through?” Maybe it is not asked because it could not be, because it would be too deep and painful a reckoning, or because it could receive no meaningful answer. In either case, the implication is that such a question grants that the speaker has not been carried through but has instead also been lost, along with everything else: the poem is a remnant of a life that has been wasted beyond recovery.

The poem was written relatively early in Niedecker’s life and career, when she was in her thirties. Other poems written around the same time demonstrate her political commitments more than this one does. It demonstrates, though, in exemplary fashion, the sort of reading her poetry demands—hers is difficult poetry. It also brings into focus a question that animates the poems that do take up, or take in, politics and history: what holds a life together, when so much runs through it, when so much gets away from it? And this question—basic to many poets, at some point in the process of writing—becomes a source of poetic invention for Niedecker as it moves her to rethink what holds a poem together. 

This is a question upon which Niedecker’s poetry evolves. Her (unpublished) series of poems from the 1950s, For Paul, might be seen as searching for unity of life and poem alike, but it is in the poems of the 1960s that the search results in the greatest discoveries. These are also the poems where the question of what holds a life together extends to a question of what a life (and the life of a particular place or region) holds together, with politics and history among the elements that find a place in it.

Among her champions in the 1960s, Donald Davie offers a learned and astute analysis of “Lake Superior,” a long poem that offers a meditation on “heroism” and that sets the records of geology against and beneath the historical records of Wisconsin’s early founding. But this poem, although in it “the disconcerting potencies simply of language are suddenly released,” lacks, Davie concedes in a later essay, what Samuel Johsnon calls “human interest” and with it, what Davie calls, “historicity,” by which he means the first-hand experience of history. Though it lacks some of the dazzling lapidary language of “Lake Superior,” this openness to history and politics is present in “Wintergreen Ridge,” Davie notes. It’s this poem that I want to address, though not in its fullest extent since it is, as “Lake Superior” is not, a single poem, neither a sequence nor a series.[ii]

The full poem can be found—and should be read—here. It is about the sources of life in matter, about the disjunctions of life as earth and life with others on earth. The politics that gets into the poem is that of the Vietnam War, and part of the effect of the poem is to show how an awareness of the war anchors consciousness even in a rural existence absorbed by the evolutions of seasonal growth:

Sometimes it’s a pleasure

       to grieve

                or dump

the leaves most brilliant

      as do trees

               when they’ve no need

of an overload

      of cellulose

              for a cool while

Nobody, nothing

      ever gave me

               greater thing

than time

        unless light

                and silence

which if intense

         makes sound

                 Unaffected

by man

       thin to nothing lichens

                 grind with their acid

granite to sand

         These may survive

                  the grand blow-up

the bomb

         When visited

                   by the poet

From Newcastle on Tyne

          I neglected to ask

                   what wild plants

have you there

          how dark

                  how inconsiderate

.

“Grand” does not arrive out of nowhere: “grind” and “granite” precede it, so it is the third in the phonetic series, with a distinctly jarring register, the drawl of a socialite rather than the patient exposition of the naturalist-historian. It is phonetically of a piece with the rhyming “sand” and near-rhyming “man,”; these too tie it into the poem formally, even as it bucks against it tonally. It is tempting to leap ahead, to see “the grand blow-up” as necessarily referring to the bomb, but the poem’s lineation pulls us back; the grand blow-up could be anything destructive or apocalyptic, but the fact that Niedecker does not call it “the bomb” right away, that she evades, almost euphemistically, “the bomb” with the phrase “grand blow-up,” tells us something about our own reluctance to consider the scale of nature on the scale of history and civilizations, even though she knows that they cannot be separated. Not separated, but also not reconciled into the language of the poem: “the bomb” would be too flat, too easy in its claim of mastery over the total waste. “Grand” feels embarrassed, is willing to let itself be embarrassing even, in our knowing what it has decided not to say, and in this shift of register in the word “grand,” and the false-note of judgment that is a sarcasm that cannot reach the nuance of irony, the poem sets natural history at odds with human history. It does not pretend the former can be an emblem of the latter, even where the lichens possess their own destructive capacity, grinding with acid. Phonetically, then, the word arises from the poem, as the thought of the destruction of the bomb arises from its thought of the dissolution of granite to sand. But against this, it arises only to flounder against the poem, to feel itself apart from the world that it shadows. Set “grand blow-up” against the yearning of the fourth, fifth, and sixth stanzas of this stretch, where the language strains in a totally other direction, the phrase “greater thing” inadequate because it looks to widen out into meaning more than it can, rather than, as in the case of “grand blow-up” narrowing something immense into awkwardly small confines. 

And yet I’m hard pressed to say where the one mode or feeling ends and where the other begins, so subtle are the gradients by which she moves from section to section. Davie complains about her absence of punctuation, but it feels perfectly apt and effective in this poem, since the capitalizations inform without insisting where another thought is beginning—that is to say, another thought begins without the prior thought definitively having closed. This is beautiful in the lines”  “which if intense | makes sound | Unaffected    by man,” since it is the lichens that are unaffected by man, and which, so unaffected will survive even the bomb, at the same time as it is light and silence which, if intense, become a sound unaffected by man. The flash of atomic light and the silence after the bomb are the grotesque other, of this beatific intensity of silence and light, this sound that is not a human sound because it is purer and set apart.  

The thought that all lichens effect erosion and possess a power to destroy as well as to endure summons the bomb to mind. What is peculiar about it, we realize, is that it is both an epitome of the political, the technological, and the artificial, and so extreme in its force as to be describable only in terms of the most basic fact of life, which it threatens. In a wincing flicker of terror, we are invited to read “the bomb | When visited” as another mild gradient of syntax, so that “when visited” suggests that the bomb’s arrival is inevitable too. Then, as if to recover itself in a place of solace, the final line “by the poet” sets itself up as a defense against the implications of the first line, “the bomb.”

What we are reading is something akin to stream of consciousness, but without the immediate surroundings impressing on the poem or poet with the force of contingency and spontaneity we might find in a Frank O’Hara poem. Instead, the poem has been occasioned by the arrival at the place; being there, the poem takes shape. But once it takes shape, it is as if it dictates its own course, from within. Even if it seems to be responding obliquely to what is at hand in that place, “Wintergreen Ridge,” it does so only because the last of the thoughts in the poem invites it to do so. Because it generates its own momentum, it does not subordinate itself to an object; it does not serve any one thing or even owe its movements of thought to the sustained attention on any one object, as a poem by Marianne Moore might. 

This means that, even though the reference to the bomb seems offhand, its being present at all in the poem suggests that it has become organic in the substance of her thought. She does not reach for the bomb; the bomb cannot even be said to enter her poem. Instead, it emerges from within it, as the poem emerges from the place. It has become an extension of the world and her mind alike.

It is this inner momentum, line to line, stanza to stanza, and a feat of syntax, that prevents the poem from seeming willfully eccentric in its movements (like some of Marianne Moore), and that makes the political both at one with and jarring against what has come before and what comes after. For most of the poem, the effect is delicacy that is not precious, sensitivity that is not fragile, equipoise that is not precarious, and movement that is not frenetic. But the movement is never easy, and without being frenetic, and without feeling arbitrary or forcefully choreographed, as the poem moves to its close, it becomes more disjointed, as if buckling under its momentum:

So far out of flowers

            human parts found

                  wrapped in newspaper

left at the church

          near College Avenue

                    More news: the war

Which “cannot be stopped”

           ragweed pollen

                   sneezeweed

The rising strain coincides with the concentration of political and social awareness. The Vietnam War “cannot be stopped,” but neither can the thought of it, and even when the poem reorients to “ragweed pollen,” the reorientation is not a break, since the persistent reminders of the war, and the recurrent thoughts of it, are irritants, akin to the allergens and as ubiquitous as pollen, without serving life. That phrase, “ragweed pollen,” has a similar effect as “grand blow-up,” insofar as it deflects and looks away, albeit here it does so after the political element, and it seems a stumbling forward; if the war cannot be stopped, and if thoughts of the war cannot be stopped, then they can at least be deflected—only coming to a rest at the final word of the poem.

Both in these lines and elsewhere in this poem, we need to recognize that Niedecker does not want to be writing a poem that engages with these political-technological realities. In this poem, especially, she is staking herself to a particular place, and to the history of the United States, and the contemporary references to Vietnam and the bomb do not further the growth of the poem, even though they emerge from it; they are, it might be said, cancerous, outgrowths of life, a part of the life that they threaten. She contains them, they do not kill the poem, but they mar the health upon which they depend. They are part of its organic growth, but alien to the poem’s sense of its own well-being.

Consider a few alternatives that Niedecker refuses: first, a poem that merely turns away from the political in favor of natural history; second, a poem that choreographs a clearer opposition, that marks the political as an interruption to the poem’s movement and momentum; third, a poem that dwells upon, or within, the diagnoses of the ills of the world as it emerges from the poem, and in doing so, turns the poem to a new end and shape. 

She does none of these, because she seeks neither to reject the political, nor to specify its tension in opposition to whatever is not political, nor to diagnose it by a measure of the world’s other aspects and histories. She allows the political to happen in and to her poem, and in “Wintergreen Ridge,” where the political is violent and destructive, she allows the poem to place it, and for it to direct the poem’s course, as unobtrusively as she can, feeling its weight and threat as she does so. She writes a poem that exemplifies how to have the worst of politics in mind, without holding it in mind or allowing it to hold her mind hostage. The political is part of the unity of things, part of the unity of the poem, but it does not define that whole any more than it governs the other parts. 

Davie reads “Lake Superior” as being a poem about the heroism of natural history and natural historians (some having no notion of it). “Wintergreen Ridge” exemplifies another heroism: the heroism of staying sane despite political madness.  The poem ends:

Ahead—home town

         second shift steamfitter

                ran arms out

as tho to fly

        dived to concrete

               from loading dock

lost his head 

       Pigeons

               (I miss the gulls)

mourn the loss

        of people

                 no wild bird does

It rained

      mud squash

             willow leaves

in the eaves

        Old sunflower

              you bowed

to no one

        but Great Storm

               of Equinox

“[L]ost his head” literally as well as figuratively, mad and dead, a grim pun, grimmer for picking up “Ahead,” but this is not frivolous play but the detached revolving of a memory, finding in it a lesson about staying grounded, upright, and alive. There is something like the following thought within this poem: to try to fly is mad, to be like a bird, because to do so will be to die, and the only mourners for such a death in the city are pigeons, mourning because they are doves (and related to mourning doves), whereas far from the city, in the countryside, rural birds do not mourn at all. Having no bird mourn is worse but only a pigeon to mourn is small comfort; the choice is absurd, the thought whimsical. Even before she has fully developed the arc of the lines, and so before we know why she is mentioning the birds, she has betrayed—knowingly—the swerve of her mind and mood: the parentheses around “I miss the gulls” both permit her to look elsewhere than at death and to acknowledge, by muffling what she says, that it is not the right time to say it. The sum effect of all these lines taken together is very peculiar and hard to describe, but I hear it as deadpan, slyly comic, refusing to dignify death, madness, the indifference of the world, or any of it with grandeur or blame; it is sad, but it is passing and it is absorbed. What I am calling sanity comes close to indifference, but Niedecker provides us with a better emblem: the sunflower that will not bow its head, in submission, in grief, or in defeat, except to the “Great Storm | of Equinox,” a final image that sets the energies of the storm upon the fulcrum of the year’s balance.