The Granite Pail by Lorine Niedecker

First published: 1985

Type of work: Poetry

Form and Content

The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker, edited by Cid Corman, presents an intriguing, if somewhat familiar, picture of Niedecker as a highly autobiographical poet whose primary concern is that which occurs in the domestic realm. Much of the work in this text focuses on the experiences of a female poet living on Blackhawk Island in rural Wisconsin; it tends to be devoid of the political concerns that critic Jenny Penberthy has argued are the source of many of Niedecker’s lesser-known poems. The poet whom Corman reveals understands the complex way in which humans coexist with their environments, observing and rendering them in the language of experience and intellect. His Niedecker is thoughtful and fully engaged in the world around her, and though these “domestic,” autobiographical poems are sometimes characterized as mere local color pieces, they tend to be highly learned. Several of the poems commonly considered Niedecker’s best—poems that reveal the poet’s strong interest and extensive reading in science, philosophy, Oriental poetry, and biography—are among those included in The Granite Pail.

Niedecker began her poetic career as a student of the Surrealists and ended it working toward an aesthetic theory she called “reflectivism,” but the largest portion of her work shows great respect for the Objectivist ideals that Louis Zukofsky set forth in the February, 1931, issue of Poetry magazine. Zukofsky proclaimed that poets should think with “things as they exist” and write poems that exist as objects intrinsic to the environments from which they arise. To many, Zukofsky’s mandate was difficult both to understand and to follow, but Niedecker was instantly drawn to it—and to Zukofsky; six months after reading that issue of Poetry, she initiated a correspondence with him which would continue for the next forty years of their lives. As a result, a number of Niedecker’s earliest critics claimed Zukofsky as her mentor and argued that her best work was written under his tutelage. The poems that appear in The Granite Pail are highly influenced by Zukofsky’s aesthetic, but they are also influenced by Niedecker’s own reading and experimentation in such poetic movements as Surrealism and by her minimalist tendencies, her ability to capture in a word or two the complex realities of human existence.

The Granite Pail is arranged in three sections—“My Friend Tree,” “North Central,” and “Harpsichord & Salt Fish”—which Corman says represent the “earlier work,” “central work,” and “final work.” While the chronology is accurate, this sectioning of Niedecker’s career can be a bit misleading, for the sections overlap considerably: The “earlier” work was written between 1935 and 1963, the “central” between 1958 and 1968, and the “final” between 1964 and 1970. Still, Corman’s groupings are useful because they reveal the evolution of Niedecker’s willingness to speak about and explore the unique experiences of the woman artist living and writing in the rural United States. Corman presents readers with a selection of Niedecker’s poetry which highlights its allegiance to colloquial speech, the domestic realm, and personal growth, and the book’s arrangement both within and throughout the sections illustrates the growth of Niedecker’s aesthetic and intellectual awareness. Readers are likely to get from The Granite Pail some sense of the scope of Niedecker’s art, as the poems in this book are simultaneously domestic and worldly, emotional and intellectual.

Context

Because Niedecker is most closely identified with Objectivism, a poetic movement whose other members are all male, and because her letters to Zukofsky and Corman never explicitly state an interest in feminist ideology, she is often seen as a “male-identified” poet. Further, even though such critics as Penberthy have shown that the relationship between Zukofsky and Niedecker was egalitarian, the critical tradition has been to view Niedecker as dependent upon Zukofsky both for recognition and for tutelage. This perception of her is not entirely unfounded: In her letters to Corman, Niedecker expresses very little interest in developing relationships with other female poets; her most pressing concerns seem to be her ongoing relationship with Zukofsky, domestic issues, and her art. It is necessary, though, to resist placing too much importance on the gender of the poets with whom Niedecker associated, for nothing mattered as much to this poet as did her art—not gender and not ideology. When read with this in mind, Niedecker’s letters reveal a highly independent, motivated, and committed woman who devoted as much of her life as possible to her art.

While Niedecker did not consider herself a feminist, many of her poems actively reject the social ideologies that keep women from fully engaging in the world around them, and much of her work challenges those customs that value men’s lives and art over those of women. Several of her poems deal with the implications of marriage in the lives of women, “I rose from marsh mud” and “I married” among them; others—“Who was Mary Shelley,” for example—contemplate the manner in which women’s identities are sometimes subsumed by those of their male counterparts. Further, Niedecker’s autobiographical poems, especially those that appear in the “North Central” section of The Granite Pail, reveal that she shared with many feminists a belief in the validity and importance of personal knowledge and voice. Hence, Niedecker’s work brings to American literature an organic feminism which arises from need and experience rather than from ideology.

Bibliography

Booklist. LXXXII, November 15, 1985, p. 462.

Christian Science Monitor. LXXVII, November 20, 1985, p. 25.

Heller, Michael. Conviction’s Net of Branches:Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. This book is the first to be entirely devoted to Objectivist poetics, to discuss in some depth the work of all the best-known poets in this movement. The chapter devoted to Zukofsky provides useful explanations of the Objectivist tenets that he set forth in the 1931 issue of Poetry. While it is perhaps true that Heller identifies Niedecker too singularly with the Objectivist movement, his readings of her work provide a number of useful insights into her poems.

Library Journal. CX, November 1, 1985, p. 99.

New Statesman. CVIII, August 31, 1984, p. 24.

Niedecker, Lorine. “Between Your House and Mine”: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960 to 1970. Edited by Lisa Pater Faranda. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986. A complete collection of the letters that Niedecker wrote to Corman, this is as much a critical as it is an epistolary text because it contains lengthy, informative notes about Niedecker’s intellectual, personal, and aesthetic life. Faranda also provides readings of several of Niedecker’s poems and places her letters in a historical context.

Niedecker, Lorine. From This Condensery: The Complete Writing of Lorine Niedecker. Edited by Robert Bertholf. Highlands, N.C.: Jargon Society, 1985. Unlike The Granite Pail, this book purports to be intended for Niedecker scholars and enthusiasts. While it has come under attack by Jenny Penberthy and others who lament its lack of scholarly apparatus and accuracy, it is the most complete collection available and is responsible for much of the recent scholarly interest in Niedecker.

Penberthy, Jenny. Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931-1979. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. This book not only makes available Niedecker’s side of the correspondence with Zukofsky but also provides a discussion of the importance of the relationship to the personal and professional lives of both poets. Contains extensive readings of several of Niedecker’s poems and discussions of the political dimensions of her canon.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXVIII, September 13, 1985, p. 129.