Niedecker’s Binoculars
This text was originally delivered, in slightly different form, as a talk hosted by the Friends of Lorine Niedecker on November 10, 2024.
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1. Binoculars
I’ve carried Lorine Niedecker’s poems with me for many years. Her lines and phrases echo in my head and in my own poems so often that I almost take them for granted. The constancy of her language in my daily life and writing is a case of deep and thorough influence: the flowing in of something fluid, subtle, as of water or astral forces, sometimes almost imperceptible yet always powerfully moving. Niedecker’s poetry is a secret that keeps whispering in my mind’s ear, and I’m thinking of these words as an amplification of that whisper—at least to the level of a secret we all might share—for I take it I’m not the only one for whom Niedecker’s is an essential voice.
Back in graduate school I wrote a dissertation chapter on Niedecker and gave a talk or two about her, but I put that work aside long ago. I sometimes discuss her poems with my students, and last year I wrote and published a single paragraph about a single poem of hers, but until now I’ve shied away from the task of writing “my Niedecker” essay because it has indeed seemed too deep. Where to begin? I read all the poems again and kept returning to this one, written around 1955 and originally included in the unpublished manuscript For Paul and Other Poems:
The death of my poor father
leaves debts
and two small houses.
To settle this estate
a thousand fees arise—
I enrich the law.
Before my own death is certified,
recorded, final judgement
judged
taxes taxed
I shall own a book
of old Chinese poems
and binoculars
to probe the river
trees. [1]
In writing about this poem years ago, I focused on the way it pits poetry against economic law. With the death of Henry Niedecker, Lorine must face the economic exigencies her father held at bay. We might hear a weary joke in “estate,” which plays his debts and small properties off an image of landed affluence. In this poem, wealth is held by lenders and “the law” itself, and Niedecker wryly acknowledges the way her own status as a property owner, however tenuous, helps sustain that distribution. She invokes the New Testament, but this “final judgement” takes place in the office of municipal records, and the tax collectors win in the end. Yet the bureaucratic capture of the poet is not total; some part of her life exceeds the law—the part that persists in poetry and in the birds perched above the Rock River. We might say that Niedecker wishes to turn ownership against itself, paring down her property to only two objects, both of which almost undo their own objecthood by becoming see-through. A book of Chinese poems and a pair of binoculars—both are instruments of attention to the natural world that survives as wild substrate, even as land is bounded, bought, and sold. Birds trespass without knowing it, and water heeds no property line. Thus the poem counters “fees” with “river / trees.”
But what most interests and puzzles me now upon rereading is the poem’s peculiar pattern of doubles, which is perhaps most obvious in the phrases “final judgement / judged” and “taxes taxed.” The primary emphasis of those past participles would seem to be the completion or execution of a task, i.e., “judgement made” or “taxes collected.” Yet the simple repetition simultaneously seems to turn the nouns back on themselves, as if final judgement itself might be questioned and reassessed—say “second-guessed” and thus made less final—or as if something might be demanded or exacted from taxes themselves. As if the offices of power might finally be held to account even as they measure and “certify” one’s life and death.
Another double is the pair of binoculars Niedecker claims as her own. Binocular vision is, of course, the capacity to see with two eyes, which provides depth perception, among other things. Those of us who see with two eyes always see a single thing from two angles at once and effectively synthesize two images into one before we know it. That’s how we see in three dimensions. And a pair of binoculars doubles our naked eyes, thus creating a doubly complex experience of scale. We can see what’s distant as near even as we know it remains far away. By lowering and raising binoculars to our eyes, we quickly reframe our view, displacing or perhaps overlaying one field of vision with another. Done too quickly, the effect can be dizzying, but done with some patience, it affords a vivid glimpse of details-in-space, a sense of simultaneous focus and expansion. That Niedecker pairs binoculars with “a book / of old Chinese poems” suggests that poetry—particularly the lucid, attentive poems of the Tang Dynasty poets that deeply influenced both Niedecker and her beloved Basho—also serves as such a lens, a compact way of seeing that might be taken from a pocket or summoned from memory, considered for a moment, overlaid upon one’s present view, and then folded away again for future use. In the end, the poet seeks not to confront the law but to survive it, to see otherwise than its officers would have us see, perhaps to evade the law by letting property slip away and be replaced, as Niedecker has it elsewhere, by poetry.
2. Television, Clams, and Veerys
“Traces of Living Things,” with what Stuart Montgomery called its “strange feeling of sequence,” is one of my favorite texts by Niedecker. She worked on its pieces during the mid-1960s, and the entire sequence first appeared in her 1968 collection North Central. Its second poem is a marvel of binocular focus:
Far reach
of sandA man
bends to inspect
a shellHimself
part coral
and mudclam [2]
Kenneth Cox writes that “[a]t length [Niedecker’s] versification came to consist of nothing but syllables placed one under another at different angles and different distances.”[3] Here her simple, unpunctuated arrangement of words and syllables affords multiple angles of vision and a complex interaction of distances. We might first notice that the poem lays two frames—one syntactical, the other stanzaic—atop one another. But rather than coincide with the poem’s three syntactical units, each flagged gently by a capital letter (“Far reach of sand,” “A man bends to inspect a shell,” and “Himself part coral and mud clam”), its three-lined stepwise stanzas rest lightly askew from these phrases, so that we can read the poem doubly at each juncture. Taking just the first phrase, “Far reach / of sand,” we might imagine the long view of a beach, its gentle curve along the water. And then, completing the first stanza with a slant rhyme—“Far reach / of sand / A man”—we place in the distance, at the end of that curve, a small human figure. But at almost the same time, we must also uncouple “A man” from “sand” and take it as the start of a sentence that runs across the stanza break: “A man // bends to inspect / a shell[.]” With just a few syllables, we zoom in closely on this man’s figure, now curving in for a look at something small in the sand.
The second stanza concludes with another slant rhyme—“bends to inspect / a shell / Himself” —that transforms the discovery of another creature into a moment of self-encounter. But again the completion of this stanza doubles as the start of another phrase that takes us into the final stanza: “Himself // part coral / and mud / clam.” Here the poem zooms in even more to consider the microscopic genetic or elemental kinship of human beings, coral, mud, and mud clams while simultaneously zooming way out to conjure the vast time and space scales of natural history. In seventeen words the poem’s “far reach” extends at once across the beach, from a man down to a clam shell in the sand, across millennia of species’ evolution on Earth, and even into the hugeness of space in which stars first exploded to create the elements that compose living creatures.
The next of Niedecker’s “Traces” is subtitled “TV”:
See it explained—
compound interest
and the compound eye
of the insect
the wave-line
on shell, sand, wall
and forehead of the one
who speaks [4]
After prompting us to “see,” the poem presents another double: a financial instrument that makes the most of itself and an optical organ that provides an especially wide view and special sensitivity to quick movement. Both are “compound”—a single thing made by binding multiple elements tightly together—and the poem itself is a kind of compound. Thus Niedecker asks us to consider a complex likeness between animal anatomy and human finance while also comically conjuring the world of mid-century informational television programming. The second stanza doubles the first by repeating its formal shape and its homological thinking: wavy striations echo across crustacean shells, drifting sand, rock faces, and now in the rhythmic imperfections of the cathode ray tube, slightly disturbing the talking head beamed in from a studio somewhere. With subtle swiftness Niedecker places mass media and its apparatus in the continuum of geological time. The form of the wave ripples through the earth, across the seas, and right through our living room.
The next poem in the sequence continues to shift scales, opening wide, both spatially and temporally, and then narrowing to a very fine here and now:
We are what the seas
have made us
longingly immense
the very veery
on the fence [5]
My first thought when reading the first two lines is of oceans as the original scene of life on earth. I think then of the seas as the way people have moved around the earth, shores as the places they’ve built settlements and cultures, and waterways as their routes inland. And when I arrive at “longingly immense,” I imagine both the oceanic vastness of what Douglas Crase has called Niedecker’s “evolutional sublime” and the plainer longing one might feel for someone gone across the sea, as countless shanties render in song.[6] With the final lines, though, the expansive sea gives way to a bounded yard or field; “longingly immense” gives way to the confines of property. Yet the property line itself becomes the site of song, the place where the “veery” perches. And another double or two: it’s not just any “veery,” it’s the “very veery”—a bird that harmonizes with itself, its split voice box producing two notes at once. Its uncanny song becomes an acoustic emblem of Niedecker’s binocular vision. A poetry that sings and sees at once, that follows its sounds into vision. Even while caught within the strictures of property, Niedecker never loses sight of the earth before or beyond its enclosures.
3. Embarrassment
What I’ve been describing is a kind of ambition in Niedecker’s poetry—a sense of imaginative vastness even in poems that take up very little space on the page. I also think of her sheer persistence as a poet, especially when no one was publishing and very few were reading her poems, as a kind of ambition. Not professional ambition, but poetic ambition. And not the ambition to write a “great” poem (though I believe she did write great poems) but the ambition to live with, in, and through poetry. Her example is inspiring. Yet Niedecker also articulates, more sharply than any other poet I’ve read, the embarrassment of being a poet, of having committed oneself to something as weird and seemingly pointless as writing little lines that almost no one ever reads. (Many poets, perhaps, are beyond embarrassment.) Consider the last two stanzas of a 1950 poem about her work as a stenographer and proofreader in the print shop at Hoard’s Dairyman:
I heard their rehashed radio barbs—
more barbarous among hirelings
as higher-ups grow more corrupt.
But what vitality! The women hold jobs—
clean house, cook, raise children, bowl
and go to church.
What would they say if they knew
I sit for two months on six lines
of poetry? [7]
Like “The death of my poor father,” this poem holds poetry in tension with economic conditions. Here Niedecker compares herself to the “folk” among whom she works, ambivalently expressing both solidarity and distance. She critiques management’s corruption while noting the workers’ “barbarous”—pointed, if a bit uncouth— quips against their conditions. Their language is “rehashed”—prefab mass media cliches reproduced and recombined for their own critique. Her awe at her coworkers’ busy lives seems both sincere and slightly superior. There’s also perhaps a note of regret in the list of responsibilities and pastimes Niedecker had not accumulated by middle age. She holds herself apart with a poet’s pride while also worrying about her coworkers’ opinion of her, perhaps with good reason. There is something ridiculous about the extremely inefficient, self-indulgent labor of writing—sitting two months on six lines (such as the six lines of the previous stanza)—especially contrasted with the labor of women who are simultaneously wives, mothers, and office workers. What would they say?
Yet Niedecker cops to her indulgence, at least on the page. She leaves the poetry for us—her more distant or hypothetical readers—to see but keeps it from her coworkers and neighbors, so there’s also the slightest air of defiance in these lines. Hatching only poems, the poet withholds part of herself from the economy with an ascetic’s resolve. But while the ascetic makes a public performance of his withholding, the final lines frame the poem itself as a secret she keeps from those immediately around her, as though something embarrassing might also be a sustaining secret, something that thrives on privacy. A vision held close, a sense of possibility that survives within enclosure.
I find an image of this possibility in a short 1957 poem, a five-liner Niedecker wrote while working at Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital:
Fog-thick morning—
I see only
where I now walk. I carry
my clarity
with me. [8]
Here I think again of pocket binoculars or a small book of small poems—ways of seeing that might be folded up and carried close to one’s person. A person moving through the world, taking stock of her immediate surroundings, subject to shifts in weather and other conditions, ready with a rhyme perhaps only she hears, seeing things as clearly as she can: this is the poet’s essential privacy, her self-sufficiency. How many of them—of us—are walking through the fog now, unseen yet seeing, sustained by a handful of syllables?
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[1] Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 157-8.
[2] Ibid, 239.
[3] Kenneth Cox, "Lorine Niedecker's Poetry," Jacket 28 (2005).
[4] Niedecker, Collected Works, 239.
[5] Ibid, 240.
[6] Douglas Crase, "Niedecker and the Evolutional Sublime," in Lines from London Terrace: Essays and Addresses (New York: Pressed Wafer, 2018), 105-126.
[7] Niedecker, Collected Works, 143.
[8] Ibid, 181.
Patrick Morrissey’s most recent publications are the pamphlet Makeshift (Ben Tinterstices Editions, 2024) and the book Light Box (Verge Books, 2023). His essays have appeared in Annulet, Chicago Review, Textual Practice, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of Chicago.