The Collected Works by Lorine Niedecker University of California Press, 2004 Lorine Niedecker, unknown titan, goddess of menagerie and puppies, is a poet whose works span both the personal and experimental, formal and lyrical. Expansive manifestations of pride, tenderness and love fill the pages of her writing like no other. Beyond just her writing, though, is her commitment to engaging her community within and outside of her poems — constantly writing things with direct personal references to friends, loves, desires, and experiences. While, it feels like most times Niedecker and publication go together like oil and water, through the diligence of her friends and interested readers, much of her work lives. Her most widely published books, Mother Goose, and, North Central, with about two decades of writing, development, and experiences between, feel almost as though they arrive from completely different people. In this most recent collected works, you can find the collection of poems, For Paul, as well as Next Year or I Fly My Rounds Tempestuous along with a horde of other sequences and collections either never published officially, or that were attempted to be destroyed (Niedecker instructed her husband that, upon her death, he was to burn most of her archive). It is with no measurable amount of great care that Lorine Niedecker’s Collected Works (University of California Press, 2004) has come into this world. The diligence in tracking and recovering pieces like her radio plays, and sequences like Homemade/Handmade, is laudable in its own right. The Collected Works, largely, presents Niedecker’s poems in a chronological order so you, reader, can experience and witness the development of Niedecker as a writer in the experience of reading her work. Her first book, New Goose, feels like a cross between the highly-vocalized style found within For Paul, and the bare image-oriented style found in even later collections and sequences. Within New Goose, you have poems like, I said to my head, Write something. It looked me dead in the face. Look around, dear head, you’ve never read of the ground that takes you away. Speed up, speed up, the frosted windshield’s a fern spray. which highlight both Niedecker’s fun, her penchant for internal rhymes and pet names, and also the sorrowful images that fuel so much of the powers of her work like, “the frosted windshield’s / a fern spray.” These earliest poems of Niedecker’s feel like they are most actively concerned with having that volta moment, wherein you can read the line which shifts the understanding of the poem irrevocably. This isn’t to say that later work does not have these moments, but rather that I think she found other means of generating impact and meaning in her poems than through the volta. From For Paul, Niedecker includes poems like this snippet: Not all that’s heard is music. We leave an air that for awhile was good, white cottage, spruce… What if the sky is gone and they hold the hill armed with tin cans — they’re not bad kids — you have the world. These poems tend to speak more to Niedecker’s melancholic tenderness, full of distant remorse and intensely personal. The story revolving around For Paul is that Paul is Louis Zukofsky’s son; Zukofsky being someone who Niedecker had a relationship with for several years and who, it is rumored, forced Niedecker to abort a child with. The story behind a sequence of poems for the son of an ex can be nothing but personal, and yet these poems are still full of tender snippets, wisdom, and, unique for Niedecker, music and musical references. Homemade/Handmade Poems are potentially the most bare works that Niedecker has to offer. The poems found within this sequence are sparse, and operate through observations from the mundane into the poetic. Within, poems like “Watching dancers on skates,” Ten thousand women and I the only one in boots Life’s dance: they meet he holds her leg up. Niedecker, like in the above poem, doesn’t even risk the closing period in much of the work found in Homemade/Handmade. These anecdotes, environments, descriptions, and poems are largely some of the ones which inspire return thought from me - often realizing that, upon watching a particular scene or moment, I have come upon the same conclusion as Niedecker. The piece of Niedecker’s work which stands out to me most, and that has now joined the ranks within her archive, is Next Year or I Fly My Rounds Tempestuous. This book was originally a Christmas present given by Niedecker to Louis Zukofsky and, in it, contains 26 poems written on 2-week timespan calendar pages. One of these poems, the May 5th through 18th poem (Niedecker’s birthday poem) is read, Don’t worry about the comma, darling, nobody ekes out a more facile distend — bathroom luxury. This gift is something I read and re-read and re-read again. Next Year or I Fly My Rounds Tempestuous contains poems that constantly refer to direct experiences, art works, and books that her and Zukofsky have talked about to each other in their letters. The personal and the poetic are so damningly intertwined. Coming from a community where I didn’t really know anybody who was interested in poetry, my library didn’t have any poetry stocked, and my school was largely uninterested in pursuing or encouraging poetry and poetic arts, community is something that I have always struggled with. Reading about Niedecker’s commitment to community, constantly exchanging letters with poets she admired or thought through, is something that spoke to me on a very personal level. Furthermore, as a millennial, the almost masochistic-commitment to poetry from Niedecker (despite some of her peers literally responding to her work with variations of “I don’t think this is so good”) is profoundly relatable. Niedecker’s collected poems don’t address the personal nature and relationships that have been maintained and included in her archive, now, in various collections of her letters to both all friends and Zukofsky specifically; however, if you are interested in her and her correspondences I can’t recommend enough, also, to read her letters and the community that she involved herself with. Of course this review is incomplete without adding a small note of gratitude: thank you to Jenny Penberthy, whose work on Niedecker has produced two volumes of collected letters by Niedecker, countless studies, reviews, and essays, this complete collected poems of Niedecker, as well as the most recent work on collected journal entries and writings in Lake Superior. Penberthy has made it not only possible but easy for me to try and fulfill my utter fascination with such a tremendous poet. Niedecker, means many worlds to me. Visit Lorine Niedecker' Website Visit University of California Press' Website

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.