What do you think?
Rate this book
Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931–1970
The forty-year correspondence between Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky is one of the closest and most productive in recent literary history. Beginning in 1931, the correspondence was tutelary but it quickly grew into a collaborative enterprise of emotional and artistic significance for both poets. This volume presents Niedecker's side of the correspondence. It opens with a substantial introduction tracing the life and work of Niedecker and how her relationship with Zukofsky influenced her poetry. At the same time Jenny Penberthy attempts to disengage Niedecker from her own myth of Zukofsky. She examines the emergence of Niedecker's quiet but rigorously experimental poetry: her rejection of hierarchies of genre, structure, and syntax, and her questioning of relationships among author, world, and text. Penberthy also reconstructs the early years of Niedecker's career, looking particularly at her surrealism and its impact on her poems. The book is not only about the impact Zukofsky had on Niedecker's work, it is also about a woman poet's struggle for recognition both within and without.
395 pages, Hardcover
First published September 24, 1993
1 person is currently reading
13 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 14, 2018
We have to be grateful to Jenny Penberthy for delivering to us Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, but not for the more than 100 pages of academic folderol we have to wade through before the correspondence begins. I was left with the feeling that Penberthy would be content to hold forth at length on the possible readings of the comma in the expression “Hello, John.”
The introductory material does include biographical information and is relieved by an occasional anecdote, such as the revelation that in 1969 Niedecker sold Zukovsky’s correspondence to The Humanities Research Center and used the proceeds to build a garage that she and her husband named The University of Texas. [If you’ve read Between Your House and Mine: The Correspondence of Lorine Niedecker and Cid Corman (Duke University Press, 1986), there is little new information in Penberthy’s introduction and you might proceed guilt-free directly to the correspondence.]
Oh, the correspondence! From a letter to Zukofsky dated February 5, 1951: “Have decided I must do something folky for the next section of For Paul (her long poem.) Only it’s getting so you go almost anywhere for it but to the people — in their barbarity — no wonder I keep going to the birds and the animals.”
You need read no further than March 15 of that same year to come to another memorable letter: “Herbert Read — my god these people who set themselves up as the embalmers and the morticians and frosters and defrosters of Shakespeare — and they themselves were half dead long ago. They want to own Shakespeare and he’d run and hide among the Negrite Pygmies to get away from them, among the gibbons in the trees, Zu-Zu (her affectionate term for Zukofsky) where he’d find you. How he’d love to come and sit down with the Zukoskies! Maybe you should have sent Read Test (Zukofsky’s anthology A Test of Poetry) — never know when a winter thaw strikes the heads of these scholars.”
Then on July 31, after burying her mother, she quickly tosses off sharply conflicting observations about funeral customs: “What a show a funeral can get to be. We finally chose a burnished metal casket for $646 (this sum included embalming and a couple of other services) and all in all the funeral expenses will run over $1,000. (This is 1951!) I said to the undertaker ‘Of what real value is the casket — we have the cement vault anyhow?’ He ‘Well, people seem to want ‘em — look at your automobiles.’
“The way people act at such a time, even tho it’s part of convention, gives one an idea of the way we should live all the time.”
April 7, 1954: “Northern water thrush in my back yard. Last night, very warm, frogs making the air jump, a whippoorwill sounding that plaint for an hour or so. (It must be nice never to get tired of your own song.)”
A little light is shed on Niedecker’s sense of poetics in a February 4, 1962 letter in which she discusses a book by Cid Corman: It just touches me. You can tell he not only lives sometimes in Japan, he has absorbed that way of writing, of breathing. I love it like I love haiku. No. 15 — ‘listen’ and ‘glistens’ and the one where the beetle weighs grass and walks to the end, the beer bottle with the flower in it. He and Jonathan (Williams) aren’t dogged by the sentence (of course don’t seem to be aware of much melody either) but i am yet — the sentence with all those prepositions and connectives lies in wait for me like — as I wrote to Cid — an early spring flood, but without an instinctive feeling to condense I could never have started writing at all. J. is all go, passionate motion, Cid is still, timeless.”
One more ( I can’t resist) from a footnote to her December 134, 1963 letter: Late in life, Niedecker took a new husband, who turned out to be an alcoholic but also a cook. For Christmas 1964, she prepared at least two handwritten books of his recipes, one of which is now part of the Lorine Niedecker Collection in the Dwight Foster Public Library, Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. This is a passage from the booklet:’
“First, Bacon! At once the crisp core of cookery and the fatty fruit of life. Without it one does not even get up in the morning. Says Al.
“Al: You (looking at me) should eat cooked marrow —
I: What’s marrow?
Al: Beef marrow in the bones — there is no delicacy, absolutely no delicacy like this.”
“As to liquor in food — sure, pour wine over cabbage. Over almost anything.”
I was of a mind to say that this is not a book for the general reader, but I’m not sure: maybe a general reader with little awareness of our interest in poetry but a healthy nosiness might enjoy it as if discovering a curious trove in an attic.
The introductory material does include biographical information and is relieved by an occasional anecdote, such as the revelation that in 1969 Niedecker sold Zukovsky’s correspondence to The Humanities Research Center and used the proceeds to build a garage that she and her husband named The University of Texas. [If you’ve read Between Your House and Mine: The Correspondence of Lorine Niedecker and Cid Corman (Duke University Press, 1986), there is little new information in Penberthy’s introduction and you might proceed guilt-free directly to the correspondence.]
Oh, the correspondence! From a letter to Zukofsky dated February 5, 1951: “Have decided I must do something folky for the next section of For Paul (her long poem.) Only it’s getting so you go almost anywhere for it but to the people — in their barbarity — no wonder I keep going to the birds and the animals.”
You need read no further than March 15 of that same year to come to another memorable letter: “Herbert Read — my god these people who set themselves up as the embalmers and the morticians and frosters and defrosters of Shakespeare — and they themselves were half dead long ago. They want to own Shakespeare and he’d run and hide among the Negrite Pygmies to get away from them, among the gibbons in the trees, Zu-Zu (her affectionate term for Zukofsky) where he’d find you. How he’d love to come and sit down with the Zukoskies! Maybe you should have sent Read Test (Zukofsky’s anthology A Test of Poetry) — never know when a winter thaw strikes the heads of these scholars.”
Then on July 31, after burying her mother, she quickly tosses off sharply conflicting observations about funeral customs: “What a show a funeral can get to be. We finally chose a burnished metal casket for $646 (this sum included embalming and a couple of other services) and all in all the funeral expenses will run over $1,000. (This is 1951!) I said to the undertaker ‘Of what real value is the casket — we have the cement vault anyhow?’ He ‘Well, people seem to want ‘em — look at your automobiles.’
“The way people act at such a time, even tho it’s part of convention, gives one an idea of the way we should live all the time.”
April 7, 1954: “Northern water thrush in my back yard. Last night, very warm, frogs making the air jump, a whippoorwill sounding that plaint for an hour or so. (It must be nice never to get tired of your own song.)”
A little light is shed on Niedecker’s sense of poetics in a February 4, 1962 letter in which she discusses a book by Cid Corman: It just touches me. You can tell he not only lives sometimes in Japan, he has absorbed that way of writing, of breathing. I love it like I love haiku. No. 15 — ‘listen’ and ‘glistens’ and the one where the beetle weighs grass and walks to the end, the beer bottle with the flower in it. He and Jonathan (Williams) aren’t dogged by the sentence (of course don’t seem to be aware of much melody either) but i am yet — the sentence with all those prepositions and connectives lies in wait for me like — as I wrote to Cid — an early spring flood, but without an instinctive feeling to condense I could never have started writing at all. J. is all go, passionate motion, Cid is still, timeless.”
One more ( I can’t resist) from a footnote to her December 134, 1963 letter: Late in life, Niedecker took a new husband, who turned out to be an alcoholic but also a cook. For Christmas 1964, she prepared at least two handwritten books of his recipes, one of which is now part of the Lorine Niedecker Collection in the Dwight Foster Public Library, Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. This is a passage from the booklet:’
“First, Bacon! At once the crisp core of cookery and the fatty fruit of life. Without it one does not even get up in the morning. Says Al.
“Al: You (looking at me) should eat cooked marrow —
I: What’s marrow?
Al: Beef marrow in the bones — there is no delicacy, absolutely no delicacy like this.”
“As to liquor in food — sure, pour wine over cabbage. Over almost anything.”
I was of a mind to say that this is not a book for the general reader, but I’m not sure: maybe a general reader with little awareness of our interest in poetry but a healthy nosiness might enjoy it as if discovering a curious trove in an attic.
Displaying 1 of 1 review