2 Dwelling With: On the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker
In this chapter, I will focus particularly on how two particular concepts: the Land Ethic explicated in Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and ecophenomenological insights derived from the insights of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, might be used to change our mental structuring of place and alter our feelings about where (and with what) we dwell. The resulting theorization of dwelling with place, I will argue, can be seen as already partially imminent in the writing of certain poets and prose writers. At that point, I will consider the poetry of Wisconsin native Lorine Niedecker.
In order to imagine ourselves as capable of dwelling with place, we must first see land (place, earth, or environment) as an entity towards which we are capable of having responsibilities. We need not suppose it as possessing sentience, consciousness, desires, will, or even life (though we are free to do any of those things), but we must at least acknowledge its reality, its primacy, and our necessary involvement with it as embodied beings. Many models for doing this exist, but I will focus here primarily on the work of Aldo Leopold, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and pioneer in the field of conservation biology. Among his most notable contributions to the field of ecological thought is his formulation of what he termed “the land ethic.” To understand what Leopold meant by this term, we should first consider how he defined each of the terms singly. Leopold believed conservation to be the struggle to attain “a state of harmony between man and land”; however, his understanding of land was much more extensive than the standard definition (189).[1] He considered land to be “all of the things on, over, or in the earth,” and wrote or land as an organism made up of several competing and cooperative parts. These several parts, he felt, could be regulated, but none could be eliminated or removed without the possibility of serious complications. The interconnectivity of the components that made up biotic systems, which he called the “complexity of the land organism,” was, he felt, “the outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century” (Leopold 189-190). In his lexicon, land conservation was the term used to refer to the human effort to understand and preserve the land’s own capacity for self-renewal (258).
For Leopold, the central human problem in relation to land was that we did not sufficiently integrate land-centered considerations into our decision making.[2] In one particularly poetic passage, Leopold describes a Midwestern bus trip as demonstrating an all-too-common common indifference towards place. For those taking this trip:
The highway stretches like a taut tape across the corn, oats, and clover fields; the bus ticks off the opulent miles; the passengers talk and talk and talk. About what? About baseball, taxes, sons-in-law, movies, motors, and funerals, but never about the heaving groundswell of Illinois that washes the windows of the speeding bus. Illinois has no genesis, no history, no shoals or deeps, no tides of life and death. To them Illinois is only the sea on which they sail to ports unknown. (Leopold 127)
Because the public remained generally ignorant of the complexity of the land organism, including the biological and historical processes that shape the places they live in, Leopold advocated a more engaged form of ecological education as a means of changing the way that humans perceived their relationship to land and their practice of conservation.[3] He hoped that as people adopted the conception of land as an organism made up of “all of the things on, over, or in the earth,” they would come to perceive themselves not as independent, completely sovereign masters, but as “only a member of a biotic team” (241).[4]
The second part of the term “land ethic” is, of course, the ethic. Leopold described his sense of this term by writing that “an ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence” and noted that “there is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus’ slave-girls, is still property” (Leopold 238). He argued that
all ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate … The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. (Leopold 239)
This then, is the meaning of Leopold’s land ethic: it is a voluntary restraint of action undertaken by human beings in favor of co-operation with the biotic and environmental system as a whole. Leopold acknowledged that while such an ethic would not prohibit human use and interaction with land, it “does affirm [its] right to continued existence” (Leopold 240).
It must also be stressed that Leopold’s concern for developing this land ethic was eminently practical, and in certain ways quintessentially American, even as he gained much of his insight from the great European schools of forestry. He was not concerned primarily with abstraction and theorization, but with action, consequences, and practicable conservation. As such, he devoted considerable energy to a critique of the existing educational framework which he felt made “no mention of obligations to the land over and above those dictated by [economic] self-interest” (245). Leopold argued that any land ethic which was governed solely by economic self interest was fundamentally flawed, since it would seek to eliminate those elements in the land “that lack commercial value, but that are … essential to its healthy functioning,” erring in its assumption “that the economic parts of the biotic clock [would] function without the uneconomic parts (Leopold 246, 251). Beyond economic considerations, Leopold suggested that a working land ethic must also incorporate aesthetic and ethical concerns, [5] culminating in his famous claim, often taken as the core of the land ethic, that “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (Leopold 262).
Such an ethic is impressive, urging humans to enlarge their communities to include the land. It is obvious that we can still dwell with place or with land and still objectify it, still treat it as an object to be shaped, used, and manipulated. In fact, it is difficult to avoid doing this. The mere fact of our presence in the world marks it, and our nature (as tool-builders and users, as a technological species) seems to require that we shape, alter, or change the places in which we dwell. While this may be the case, our nature as technological (tool-using) beings does not determine how deeply felt, or how malign our presence upon the world will be. This is not determined by nature, but by our voluntary deployment of particular technologies in the act of making a place in the world. However, our mental conception of the properties of place (its own nature) and our idea of what is good for the land (the community in which we dwell), are each determined in large measure by what we include in our idea of ‘community.’ In one particularly intriguing passage in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold meditates on how aesthetic perception might be used to influence this sense of community:
There are those who are willing to be herded in droves through ‘scenic’ places; who find mountains grand if they be proper mountains with waterfalls, cliffs, and lakes. To such the Kansas plains are tedious. They see the endless corn, but not the heave and the grunt of ox teams breaking the prairie. History, for them, grows on campuses. They look at the low horizon, but they cannot see it, as de Vaca did, under the bellies of the buffalo. In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with. Nothing is more monotonous than the juniper foothills, until some veteran of a thousand summers, laden blue with berries, explodes in a blue burst of chattering jays. The drab sogginess of a March cornfield, saluted by one honker from the sky, is drab no more. (Leopold 179-180, italics added)
In this passage, Leopold shows a great and subtle perceptiveness, indicating that hidden riches in place are perceived only through “much living in and with.” Not content to merely think of land as a mere passivity, Leopold’s introduction of this additional dimension, living with, provides an opportunity for land or country to become an active participant in our life-world, a vital force in our perceptions. It is important to note that such a conviction is not the result of pure rationality and calculation, but of subjective perception.[6] Another curious aspect of Leopold’s prose is that in both of his examples an aural event which introduces unexpected sound into our consciousness is the catalyst which transforms our understanding of place. In Leopold’s account, these sonic events are place-constitutive, integral to the meaning, importance, and phenomenological impact of that place within an embodied epistemology, an idea that will return in the discussion of Niedecker’s poetry. [Thought experiment—what do you live with?]
This passage also points to Leopold’s belief that an ethical relationship to land is not simply an outgrowth of abstract education, but is the consequence of a perceptual shift instigated by personal sensorial experience, by embodied contact with a real place. Leopold, who felt that an ethical relation to land must be founded upon genuine “love, respect, and admiration for land,” was clear that such feeling required a proper mental image of land formed from the conjunction of proper education and lived experience. Hence his insistence that “we can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in” (Leopold 261). For Leopold, our mental image of the land community remained grounded in prior perception, fostered and nourished by the body’s regular engagement with land. Such perception, he felt, could be
split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas. Perception, in short, cannot be purchased with either learned degrees or dollars; it grows at home as well as abroad, and he who has a little may use it to the good advantage as he who has much. (Leopold 292)
Leopold’s ecological education is not the only perspective from which such perception can be developed. The idea of a land as a responsive organism to which we have definite responsibilities has a number of adherents from across a fairly diverse array of disciplines. In the empirical sciences, the nearest such view might be James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’ controversial Gaia theory, which posits that the earth is a living super-organism[7] and that present planetary conditions are the outcome of a tightly-coupled evolutionary system consisting of the earth’s biota and its natural environment: the atmosphere, the oceans and surface rocks. Gaia theory is also distinctive in eschewing the conventional top-down reductive approach to scientific inquiry, preferring an integrative, collaborative approach where the whole system, and not its constitutive parts, is considered the proper place of focus (imagine it as systems ecology writ large).[8]
Lovelock and Margulis’ ideas, while frequently contested, have contributed greatly to the discipline of geophysiology, a scientific field which has crept gradually closer towards mainstream acceptance. In the summer of 2001, for example, four leading international global climate change organizations (IGBP, IHDP, WCRP, and DIVERSITAS) adopted what is now known as the Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change. That document asserted that “the Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system, comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components. The interactions and feedbacks between the component parts are complex and exhibit multi-scale temporal and spatial variability,” a claim which sounds essentially interchangeable with many of Lovelock and Margulis’s ideas regarding Gaia (Moore et al.). The report also echoed Aldo Leopold’s earlier call by insisting that “an ethical framework for global stewardship and strategies for Earth System management are urgently needed” (Moore et al.). While Lovelock’s ideas may continue to undergo mutations in their nomenclature in order to ensure greater palatability to scientific communities (Earth Systems theory and geophysiology apparently go down easier than references to a Greek Earth Goddess), his basic insights—that we live on a living planet and that we are all bound up in global systems whose health is inseparably linked to our own—have already become entrenched within some quarters of the scientific community and large swaths of the public environmental imagination.
Such ideas are not limited only to the empirical sciences, but have received a detailed and sustained consideration in certain strains of philosophical and religious thought. Similar characteristics can be found, for example, in the recently collected writings of V.F. Cordova, the first Native American woman to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy.[9] Among Cordova’s central tenets were her assertions that human beings cannot be considered “something apart from the Earth and the rest of its creations; [they are] a natural part of the Earth”; that they are not alone in possessing “intelligence,” since “all life forms are understood to have intelligence in one form or another”; that they are not superior to other aspects of creation (and therefore should be thought of as dependent on the earth rather than stewards of it); and that they are born “humanoid” but can become “fully human” by demonstrating awareness that their actions have consequences on others and by integrating themselves into a cooperative balance with their social and environmental habitus (115-153). Cordova’s basic ideas, which are an attempt to articulate basic values shared by many Native American cultures, would likely find support from a wide assortment of environmental activists of various religious and philosophical persuasions.
If the Heideggerian ethic of dwelling can be aided by a perception of land as a holistic system towards which we are responsible, the other supplement which would seem to contribute to a more sustained conception of dwelling with place can be supplied by phenomenology, particularly the insights into perception, embodiment, and environmental relations developed within the burgeoning subfield of ecophenomenology.[10] Drawing heavily on Edmund Husserl’s concept of the life-world, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ideas regarding “the flesh,” many ecophenomenologists contend that embodiment, the materiality of our flesh, is both the source and origin of all aspects of consciousness, including the human capacity for perception, thought, and language (both speech and writing).[11] Merleau-Ponty was particularly concerned with the event of perception, the ongoing exchange between our bodies and their surroundings, a concept he explores in great detail in Phenomenology of Perception. In that book, Merleau-Ponty writes that
the relations of sentient to sensible are comparable with those of the sleeper to his slumber: sleep suddenly comes when a certain voluntary attitude suddenly receives from outside the confirmation for which it was waiting. I am breathing deeply and slowly in order to summon sleep, and suddenly it is as if my mouth were connected to some great lung outside myself which alternately calls forth and forces back my breath A certain rhythm of respiration, which a moment ago I voluntarily maintained, now becomes my very being … In the same way I give ear, or look, in the expectation of a sensation, and suddenly the sensible takes possession of my ear or my gaze, and I surrender a part of my body, even my whole body, to this particular manner of vibrating and filling space known as blue or red. (211-212)
Sensible qualities, Merleau-Ponty suggests, are not purely mental constructions, but “muddled problem[s] for my body to solve. I must find the attitude which will provide it with the means of becoming determinate … I must find the reply to a question which is obscurely expressed. And yet I do so only when I am invited by it; my attitude is never sufficient to make me really see blue or really touch a hard surface” (Phenomenology of Perception 214). Monika Langer suggests that Merleau-Ponty’s central concern is “to prompt us to recognize that objective thought fundamentally distorts the phenomena of our lived experience, thereby estranging us from our own selves, the world in which we live and other people with whom we interact … In exposing the bias of objective thought, Merleau-Ponty seeks to re-establish our roots in corporeality and the perceptual world, while awakening us to an appreciation of the inherent ambiguity of our lived experience” (149). In this view of perception, all things engage us reciprocally in the act of perception, inviting us to participate with them in the construction of reality. There are, quite literally, no ideas but in things. Merleau-Ponty also focuses on re-awakening an appreciation of the reciprocity of primary sense perception as a response to the pervasive sense of modern alienation. While we are primordially anchored in the world, captive to a pre-reflective bond with the sensate world, our reflective consciousness also causes us to feel sufficiently apart from that we can see ourselves as participating in a dialogue between ourselves and the world.
Ecophenomenologists are particularly interested in this reciprocity between our bodies and the world. One of the most prominent contemporary ecophenomenologists is David Abram, the current director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics. Abram is best known for his 1996 book, The Spell of the Sensuous, in which he endeavors to show, following Merleau-Ponty, that sensual perception is neither comprehensive nor monodirectional, but “an experience of reciprocal encounter” through which we enter into a “sympathetic relation with the perceived” (56, 54). As Abram puts it,
If we wish to describe a particular phenomenon without repressing our direct experience, then we cannot avoid speaking of the phenomenon as an active, animate entity … To the sensing body, no thing presents itself as utterly passive or inert. (56)
In such a view, Heidegger’s earth as “serving bearer” has no place, giving way to a living landscape in which we are corporeally enmeshed. Abram suggests that by cultivating and remembering “the incarnate, sensorial dimension of experience,” we gradually become aware that our sensations are simply part of “a vast, interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations borne by countless other bodies,” perhaps including the body of the earth itself (Abram 65). Such an earth can never be solely something we live on or upon, but something that we are always already dwelling with. Ecophenomenology also addresses Heidegger’s troubling insistence that “among all the appeals that we human beings … may help to be voiced, language is the highest and everywhere the first” (146). Instead of language being the first and highest appeal that humans help to be voiced, Abram and other phenomenologists seek to locate the origins of language itself as emerging from the body’s sensual relationship with other human beings and with the earth, the ongoing reciprocity with the world as a place that invites the body to sensual perception.
Language, which Abram sees as originating in bodily experience rather than mental conceptualization, may also be complicit in failures to appropriately perceive the world. For Abram, the practice of writing changes the structure of human thought, estranging us from an attentive embodiment within an animate world.[12] Despite the dangers of alienation from sensuous experience that Abram sees in writing, he does not advocate abandoning the alphabet. Instead, he suggests our task is to “writ[e] language back into the land … releasing the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things themselves” (273). His concern for the “things themselves” is clearly derived from Edmund Husserl via Merleau-Ponty, who wrote:
All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless. The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced … To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is. (viii-ix)
This aim “to return to the things themselves” is strikingly similar to the ambitions of what Leonard Scigaj terms ecopoetry, a strain of writing which “conveys a profound distrust of language severed from the “real” world where it originated and to which its meanings refer” (7). Scigaj argues that ecopoetry refuses to participate in the “mainline postmodern flight from referentiality and social praxis” and engages instead in a Derridean practice of référance, marking “the difference between the linguistic and referential world and immediately direct[ing] the reader toward the richer, less limited, world of nature” (15, 18).[13] Similarly, Abram sees the optimal goal of written language as telling “stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local landscape, tales for the tongue” (273). It is not difficult to see how this task, like the task of dwelling with place, would lend itself especially to poetry, particularly poetry that is attentive to its sonic, musical qualities.
If poets are those who best help us in performing the special work of dwelling (whether in or with a place), by weaving or carving poems with the “rhythm and lilt of the local,” this is the point at which it seems most natural to introduce the poets I have promised to consider: Lorine Niedecker and Basil Bunting. These two poets, while not often treated together by critics,[14] share a number of affinities, including a deep mutual appreciation for the other’s work. In fact, Jenny Penberthy, Niedecker’s most devoted champion, credits an interview Bunting gave to Jonathan Williams and Tom Meyer for her discovery of Niedecker in 1981, claiming that it Bunting’s praise first apprised her of Niedecker’s existence. Bunting continuously promoted Niedecker’s poetry, telling Williams and Meyer that “Lorine Niedecker never fails; whatever she writes is excellent,” and appraising her as “one of the finest American poets at all, besides being easily the finest female American poet.” He also praised her in a 1967 letter to Tom Pickard, suggesting that her poetry was: “very delicate; many implications, none obvious” and described her elsewhere as “a poet of great power and continual pleasure.” (Basil Bunting on Poetry 180, 161). Following her death, a letter from Bunting was published in the Wisconsin State Journal on January 5, 1971, which declared that Niedecker
will be remembered long and warmly in England … [as] the most interesting woman poet America has yet produced. Her work was austere, free of all ornament, relying on the fundamental rhythms of concise statement … She was only beginning to be appreciated when she died, but I have no doubt at all that in 10 years time Wisconsin will know that she was its most considerable literary figure.
Niedecker reciprocated Bunting’s appreciation, writing to Cid Corman in 1966 that she had “always enjoyed his [Bunting’s] poetry” (Between Your House and Mine 88).[15] The following year, Bunting came with his two daughters to visit Niedecker at her Black Hawk Island home.[16] After Bunting’s visit, Niedecker wrote Corman that Bunting’s “manner is timid and tender. Withal so kindly. O lovely day for me!,” describing the visit as “a high point in my later life” in a letter to Jonathan Williams (Between Your House and Mine 127-128).
Apart from their mutual friendship with Louis Zukofsky and their affiliation with what has come to be known as the “Objectivist” tradition of poetry, there are plenty of reasons that the two poets would admire each other. Both were intensely private individuals, serious about their craft and devoted to their poetry, but self-effacing and generally quite modest about their personal importance.[17] Both destroyed most of their correspondence, leaving a comparative dearth of resources from their life for potential scholars, including, sadly the letters that they presumably wrote one another beginning in the 1930s. Both were largely overshadowed in their own lifetimes by their association and affiliation with more charismatic figures, though each have begun to emerge in the past two decades as more independent and significant figures than they had been considered previously.[18] Both endured long stretches with very little opportunities for publication, and both experienced drastic life changes between 1965 and 1970 that allowed them to write the uncharacteristically long poems that are widely considered their finest poetic accomplishments. [19] Both were sympathetic to progressive political movements, though neither aligned themselves with a political party nor idealized the plight and nobility of the working-class.[20] Neither completed university degrees, though both read widely and cultivated keen interests in a wide range of subjects.[21] Both spent large portions of their lives in relative poverty, with real concern about their financial prospects, and each worked a number of menial subsistence jobs, including a time in each of their lives spent reading proof for local publications.[22] Both struggled with poor eyesight, fostered a life-long love of music, and demonstrated a remarkable ear for rhythms and sound patterns in their own poetry. Both endured failed marriages early in their lives, remarrying in middle age.[23] Both were loosely attached to the Objectivist nexus of poets, fringe members of a group that are themselves still mostly regarded as marginal to the literary mainstream.[24] Strangely, each was underappreciated in their native country during their lifetime and was more widely known in the other’s home nation, which, ironically, allowed each to have better access to the other’s work.[25] Both were deeply interested in local culture, demonstrating a sincere interest in folk poetry and the peculiarities of regional variants in diction and speech.[26] Writing of their poetry, Peter Quartermain has described their work as “clear of all sentimentality, … hard-headed, practical, suspicious of government and institutions, and remarkably free of abstraction” (278).
In addition to all these things, what I consider to be their most intriguing similarity is their shared insistence that we train our perceptive powers on the immediacy of our places, attending to both the traces of history and present sensation, the life now cycling in our neighborhoods. I admire the plainness of their song, their ideal of clear sight and deep engagement, their openness to sensuousness, to the richness of their perceptual life-worlds. They hear the sounds, see the interconnectedness of the life and location, and touch the textures and richness of their chosen places with an openness and attention that is as remarkable as it is inspiring. Niedecker and Bunting are particularly noteworthy for their commitment to a poetics which asserts and acknowledges the centrality of embodied experience as it unfolds in a particular known, sensed, and lived place. Both disliked urban areas, having visited or lived in national centers of art and culture while relatively young and then choosing to return to decidedly out of the way home places, where they embraced bioregional distinctiveness.[27] While neither enjoyed being neglected, both cherished the positions they chose to occupy at the margins of their respective countries’ spheres of intellectual and cultural influence.
Life at the margins was important for both poets for a number of reasons. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram describes the magician-healer’s role in many traditional cultures, pointing out that they
rarely dwell at the heart of their village; rather their dwellings are commonly at the spatial periphery of the community, or more often, out beyond the edges of the village … providing a spatial expression of his or her symbolic position with regard to the community. For the magician’s intelligence is not encompassed within the society; its place is at the edge of the community, mediating between the human community and the larger community of beings upon with the village depends for its nourishment and sustenance. The larger community includes, along with the humans, the multiple nonhuman entities that constitute the local landscape, from the diverse plants and the myriad animals … to the particular winds and weather patterns that inform the local geography, as well as the various landforms—forests, rivers, caves, mountains—that lend their specific character to the surrounding earth. (6-7)
Because of their peripheral dwelling place, the traditional magician is able to mediate “between the human community and the larger ecological field” (Abram 7). Neither Neidecker nor Bunting saw themselves as shamans or magicians per se, but both poets did identify as living “with the persons / on the edge,” as Niedecker put it in the final lines of “Paean to Place” (Collected Works 269). Both used this life on the edge to remarkably similar ends as the traditional magicians Abram describes, interrogating the human relationship with the larger community of beings within personally significant places at the spatial peripheries of their national communities.
The place of Niedecker’s poetry was her home on Black Hawk Island,[28] a peninsula which juts into Lake Koshkonong along the Rock River near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, though she wrote long poems about late-life trips to Lake Superior and Wintergreen Ridge, a part of Wisconsin’s Ridges Sanctuary.[29] While her isolation from the centers of cultural production was the source of frequent loneliness,[30] leading Bunting to tell Jonathan Williams that “nobody else has been buried quite so deep,” my sense is that it wasn’t the being buried deep that Niedecker minded so much as the inability to get much of her work published. Being “buried in deep” in fact, is precisely what Niedecker cherished about her relationship to place, celebrating such burial in “Paean to Place,” where she wrote that “all things move toward / the light //except those / that freely work down / to ocean’s black depths / in us an impulse tests / the unknown” (Collected Works 267). However, Niedecker’s marginality also froze her out not just from public notoriety or recognition, which she would have likely shunned with her characteristic modesty and discretion, but from publication, which she craved.
Bunting’s relationship to place is slightly more complex. Charles Tomlinson has pointed out that Bunting “approache[d] British history from a northern, that is to say more local than national, viewpoint (7). Bunting’s first allegiance, deeply felt and historically rich, was regional (to the North of England, generally). Bunting identifies himself as a Northumbrian, a reference to the medieval kingdom of Northumbria and not merely the modern county of Northumberland.[31] Hence “Briggflatts,” the long poem which was his autobiographical masterwork, is set in various Northumbrian locations, ranging from Northumberland to Cumbria to the Yorkshire Dales.[32] This regional affiliation with an archaic location has been frequently credited for his relative neglect. While Bunting is more widely known now than it was in 1989, when the influential critic Donald Davie (a fellow Northerner) titled his post-1960 survey of British poetry Under Briggflatts, Christian Wiman could still accurately lament in 2004 that Bunting remained a largely unread and overlooked figure, “still somewhat off the radar” even among academics (234).[33]
There are also two related but ultimately contradictory, justifications commonly given for Bunting’s exclusion from the list of vital twentieth-century poets. One the one hand, Bunting has historically been dismissed in Britain by the London and Oxbridge-based cultural elite (those he would call “southrons”) as a “regional” poet with only limited, local appeal; while on the other, strangely, more nationally-minded critics have disparaged him for being a “rootless cosmopolitan”[34] tainted by his association with American poets, particularly Pound and Zukofsky (Davie 41). Note that both justifications for dismissal are less responses to Bunting’s work itself than stock responses to anything that would attempt to resist or subvert culturally hegemonic forces from the periphery.[35] Davie’s analysis of Bunting’s relationship to the “American-inspired distraction” of modernism highlights one crucial element of this historical neglect of Bunting in Britain, namely, his nonconformism to hegemonic political, aesthetic, and regional forces of consolidation. Distressingly, Bunting’s work has been ignored not because of its perceived aesthetic defects, but because it refuses to conform nicely to totalizing theories of historical continuity, processes of canonical formation surrounding national literatures, urban hegemony, and neo-Romantic models of poetic engagement with nature.
Though he was widely traveled, Bunting’s “Briggflatts” presents perhaps the most rooted and home-based model of poetic and personal emplacedness in the last century of British poetry. As for the charge that he is merely a “regional” poet, it is absurd to suggest that his self-association with a region necessitates a limitation of either his poetry’s geographic appeal or its applicability to other places.[36] Of course the irony is that Bunting, rare among Modernists because he sought to perform the vital work of dwelling in and with a place without also wedding himself to empire, capital, or the desire for political order, may be overlooked because he had the audacity to choose a peripheral ecosystem far from Britain’s institutional center as his dwelling site.[37]
This choice points to another reason why marginality was useful to both Niedecker and Bunting. By grounding their work in out of the way home places, both celebrated periphery by challenging the hegemonic power of the center.[38] Read in this way, Bunting’s stirring defense of his own regional identity as a Northumbrian and his disdain for the “southrons who would maul the music of many lines of “Briggflatts”” is not simply a form of parochial regionalism but a deliberate rejection of urban alienation and an effort to produce an alternate, ecologically sensitive theory of human dwelling in which the periphery is no longer subservient to the center (Complete Poems 224). While Bunting’s bioregional attachment may have initially been responsible his exclusion from the canon of international Modernism, it is precisely the reason that now, in a time of growing ecological awareness and increased emphasis on the ethical benefits of being regionally and locally grounded, his sensitivity to the natural rhythms of a known, local place should actually raise our esteem of his poetry.[39]
It may be also that Niedecker and Bunting’s life on the margins was a principal cause of the sensual awareness that so deeply pervades their poems. Niedecker certainly acted as if this was the case, writing to Kenneth Cox that “I spent my childhood outdoors—redwinged blackbirds, willows, maples, boats, fishing (the smell of tarred nets), twittering and squawking noises from the marsh ” (The Full Note 36). Jenny Penberthy is right to note that Niedecker’s “work is distinguished by its attentive use of sound, a consequence perhaps of her poor eyesight and her experience of her mother’s deafness, but also of her immersion of the rich soundscape of Black Hawk Island.” This attention to the body’s reception of sound is present from the beginning of her career. She writes in “Mourning Dove,” one of her earliest published poems, that: “the sound of the mourning dove / slows the dawn / there is a dee round silence / in the sound” (23).[40] [MORE COMMENTARY HERE?? ABOUT THE WAY THAT BIRD SOUND Bunting’s attention to embodied sensation also seems to begin in a childhood spent on the margins. Peter Quartermain has suggested that “subject races [and] underdogs turn to the concrete, the physical, the practical: to the flesh, they resort to fact, to the tangible, to objects. Bunting’s poetry is remarkably full of things, of facts … [insisting on] the sheer physicality of a world which is above all, opaque and complex” (Basil Bunting 10, 14). Quartermain explains this turn towards the physical as a response to the tone struck by a remote and centralized ruling class, which is necessarily divorced from “the immediacy of the local … the messy business of daily living, the details of ordinary life, the physical world of the body, the tangibility of bodily senses, detached from sensation” (Basil Bunting 12-13).[41] Such concerns may well have been Bunting’s mind in 1954, when he wrote to Dorothy Pound, “our only hope for our children is to destroy uniformity, centralization, big states and big factories and give men a chance to vary and live without more interference than it is the nature of their neighbors to insist on” (qtd. in Basil Bunting 12).
Bunting and Niedecker also deserve appreciation because they attend to the task of dwelling with places near at hand. They cannot be classed with those nature poets who show us merely how to be awestruck tourists in pristine, inhospitable wildernesses. As environmental historian William Cronon ably points out: “idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home. Most of our most serious environmental problems start right here, at home, and if we are to solve those problems, we need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it” (85). If poets are to help us dwell, they must direct their attention not only to the wild unknown, but also towards those places where we “actually live … [and] make our homes” (Cronon 86). By attending to the kinds of places where they (and many other human beings) actually live and exploring the reciprocal nature of their embodiment, Niedecker and Bunting each provide a model for dwelling that meditates, often quite exceptionally, upon what it means to make a home within and alongside the proximate world.
Niedecker is especially good at showing that responsible dwelling requires our acknowledgment of the proximity of other beings, including the land itself. Whenever Niedecker shows our separation from our perceived environment, from other living systems, this separation is nearly always shown to be minimal, tenuous, under threat. When walls appear, they are most commonly amended by the adjective thin, as in the concluding lines of this poem about the burdens of owning property: “these walls thin / as the back / of my writing tablet” (Collected Works 195). This nearness of the self to the outside, however, is not always the source of pure pleasure, or even delight. In the case of the “wild / wet rat, muskrat” who is heard “grinding his frogs and mice / the other side of a thin door / in the flood” such proximity may even be terrifying (the poet grips her “melting container” at the sound), but in every case these lush, sensation-rich experiences are invigorating and vitalizing, forming an essential part of Niedecker’s dwelling with Black Hawk Island. This may be because, as she notes in a later poem, “Not all harsh sounds displease— / Yellowhead blackbirds cough / through reeds and fonds / as through pronged bronze” (Collected Works 271).
Niedecker, to be sure, seemed to care little for traditional aesthetic distinctions, or a conventional marriage between harmony and beauty. What she was after was something else entirely. In discussing what has been often described as a surrealist thread that runs through much of Niedecker’s work, Rachel Blau DuPlessis hints in a general way that “what Niedecker meant by “surrealist” might be a phenomenology of consciousness” (154). While she followed this insight in another direction than I will, her sense that Niedecker’s poetry sought to follow a phenomenology of consciousness seems just about right. In one short poem, Niedecker begins by remarking that “I suppose there is nothing / so good as human / immediacy,” and concludes the poem not with human community, but with the presentation of lilies and these twinned imperatives: “stand closer— / smell” (Collected Works 222). The insistence on sensation as a part of embodied experience permeates Niedecker’s work, as we are made aware continually of our proximity to and neighborliness with an animate, living environment.[42] In one particularly striking instance, Niedecker writes: “I hear the weather / through the house / or is it breathing / mother” (Collected Works 150). I can think of few other poets who capture so well the feeling of reciprocity in the act of perception insisted upon by ecophenomenologists. David Abram argues that “our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth—our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices … is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human” (Abram 22). This sense of reciprocity, our eyes evolving in subtle interaction with other eyes, also appears throughout Niedecker’s writing.[43] In a letter to Kenneth Cox, Niedecker writes “O fall coming on. My husband goes to the door before bedtime to see eyes – animals’ you know, their eyes shining in the dark. We have ‘possum, coon, skunk, cats” (The Full Note 39).
If dwelling in and with place is the most basic task for human beings, and poetry can assist in that task when it acknowledges the land as a proximate other and the phenomenological basic of consciousness, it follows that poetry that encourages a proper view of dwelling must attend carefully to directly sensed experience.[44] Heidegger seemed to indicate his belief that this was his case when he wrote: “the more poetic a poet is – the freer (that is, the more open and ready for the unforeseen) his saying – the greater is the purity with which he submits what he says to an ever more painstaking listening” (216). Submitting what we say to a painstaking listening is at the core of both Niedecker and Bunting’s poetic engagement with place. It is why Bunting presents, throughout “Briggflatts,” the poet’s continual efforts to tune his song not to a pre-originary language, but to a more-than-human world whose sounds (songs, actually), while deeply meaningful and full of interpreted significance, are not coincident with human speech. What is he tuning it towards? Not just received language, but the living music of a particular place, derived from the body’s presence as part of a specifically lived, local environment, whether in the form of the mason tapping letters into stone, the lark’s song, or the movement of the slow-worm, the swirl of maggots over cast flesh. The body’s engagement within a real spatial location becomes the acknowledged source of language, of poetry, as well as the proper location for dwelling to unfold.
Such a project also seems closely linked to Heidegger’s suggestions that “the taking of measure is what is poetic in dwelling” and that poetry is a “special kind of measuring” (219). The “taking of measure” that Bunting and Niedecker engage in is a special kind of non-commercial[45] measuring made against the works of the past, the history of the place, and the directly sensed conditions of present embodiment. Additionally, for both poets, we might see them as taking the measure in a non-Heideggerian musical sense, as engaging in a kind of dictation work, the transcription of melody or music (thought both are careful as to what they transcribe since, as Niedecker reminds us: “Not all that’s heard is music” (Collected Works 143). What is crucial to understand is that the music that these poets take measure of is neither an ethereal music of the spheres nor sounds unheard to mere mortals but only there for poets—it’s likely that neither would have much sympathy for the Keatsian “heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter”—but a very earthly song of living things in a particular place.[46] This song cannot be heard without a body any more than it can be heard outside of the place of its origin. While site specific, this kind of poetry is not parochial but vast, rooted but not possessive, attentive to detail but not empirically minded. It’s not just clear sight, but sharp sound—we might call it “deep listening”.
It’s their listening, their attentivity to sound, that has so frequently dazzled and entranced critics of both Niedecker and Bunting.[47] Lisa Robertson has noted that Niedecker’s method of listening is “an active, shaped, and responsive attentiveness to, and among, environmental acoustics … a compositional practice rather than a mode of consumption” (Robertson 86). She writes that the act of thinking appears “as an attunement receptive to material silence, perceptual shift, and vibration,” such that “the thinker, try as she might, never stops hearing a world, and that hearing unfolds in at least two times: in the bodily, environmental present, and in the laterally displaced time of sound’s representation in thinking” (Robertson 89-90). Robertson’s argument is that as sound is attended to in the body, the body becomes a “syntonic vehicle” allowing the sound it is receiving to “twist inwardly” revealing thought itself to be “a non-autonomous responsive medium which indeed stutters, wavers, snaps, twists” (89-90). Niedecker puts it much more succinctly when she writes in “Progression” that “the emotion of fall has its seat in the acoustic gland” (Collected Works 31). Earlier in that same poem, Niedecker imagines her birth (getting “my start in life”) as a sonic event: “I must have been washed in listenably across the landscape / to merge with bitterns unheard but pumping, and saw / and hammer a hill away; sounds, then whatsound, then / by church bell or locomotive volubility, what, so unto / the one constriction: what am I and why not” (Collected Works 29). For something to happen listenably assumes the existence of a listener, showing again Niedecker’s early awareness of perception as a reciprocal activity.
It should also be noted that Niedecker’s practice of deep listening and her ideal of clear sight directed at plain objects are undertaken for a radically different purpose than the same actions were put to use in Romanticism. Her intent is not to peer through Nature into a world beyond, but to look at nature in order to gain “an awareness of everything influencing everything,” a phrase she used to describe her sense of poetics in a 1967 letter (Roub 86).[48] This becomes immediately clear in “Wintergreen Ridge” as Niedecker declares “Life is natural / in the evolution / of matter // Nothing supra-rock / about it / simply // butterflies / are quicker / than rock” (Collected Works 247). In choosing rock as the object of her affinity, Niedecker quite literally fulfills Leopold’s injunction to expand our idea of community to include the land. Eschewing sentimentality or sappy mystic invocations, Niedecker’s clear-eyed look at rock nevertheless insists upon our literal kinship with seemingly lifeless elements.[49] She writes wryly that “it all comes down / to the family,” suggesting that geological insight allows humans to discover their “lovely / finite parentage / mineral // vegetable / animal” (Collected Works 252). Rather than cheapening the human by reminding us of our animal, vegetable, and mineral heritage, Niedecker shows that such a reminder might endow us with a certain humility, a capacity for self-deprecating humor, and a deeper appreciation for the “sea water running / in [our] veins” (Collected Works 268).[50]
This mode of perception quickly contrasted with another way of seeing, the way practiced by “Man,” who “imagines / durable worlds // in creation here / as in the center / of the world” (Collected Works 247-248). By isolating the word imagines on its own line, Niedecker makes it that much more lonely, stripping imagination of the positive connotation it holds within other philosophical systems so that it functions in an ironic sense, suggesting the fallaciousness of both anthropocentric thought and the notion that human activity will prove enduring on a scale of geologic time. Consequently, atop the ridge Niedecker finds “Evolution’s wild ones / saved / continuous life // through change / from Time Began” (Collected Works 249). Here the agent of salvation for the wild is decidedly not divine, but biological: evolutionary processes have preserved all she sees.
While evolution’s salvific processes are both originary and relentless, the particular scene described in “Wintergreen Ridge” also benefited from human protectors: “Women / of good wild stock / [who] stood stolid / before machines” because they “want[ed] it for all time” (Collected Works 249-250). This passage is particularly important to the poem because it presents a model of human desire that seems both healthy and praiseworthy. The desire of these women is appropriate because it seeks as its primary objective to preserve what evolution has already saved, those horsetails and club mosses which “stayed alive / after dinosaurs / died” (Collected Works 250). In so doing, these “women saved / a pretty thing: Truth” (252). By standing in opposition to the bulldozers which threatened not evolution (the saving agent) but the ridge (the evidence of its salvation), the women Niedecker valorizes preserve the place with its “natural history” intact, so that it remains a place where one could (as the poet does) read the record of millions of years of life, quite a pretty thing indeed. Here, preservation is figured as the salvation of a beauty that derives its force both from its aesthetic sense (the Ridges are gorgeous, after all) and from its pedagogical or historical sense (as custodian of the truth of geologic and evolutionary processes), so that the poet’s task in such a place is primarily to continue an already initiated protectiveness.
The most revealing detail of “Wintergreen Ridge,” however, is that Niedecker chooses to praise neither the sublimity of rock formations nor any of the charismatic mega-fauna so commonly lauded in nature poetry,[51] instead reserving her praise for the “thin to nothing lichens,” which “unaffected by man…grind with their acid // granite to sand” and which “may survive / the grand blow-up” (Collected Works 253). Lee Upton may well have been thinking of this passage when he wrote that Niedecker’s poems “actually merge on breaking down matter, on shaking any presumption to solidity in language” an effect it achieves “through a particular fidelity to the physical materials of her experience as they are being abraded, dissolved, or put to other uses” (43, 55). In addition to the effect noted by Upton, by moving the site of praise and admiration from the rock to the lichen, the rock eaters, she shifts our attention to life that only survives by being attached in a very real and profound sense to the particularities of place. Her celebration of the little living things that live on granite and eat it up is also a celebration of the very things that ensure the vanity of the aforementioned imaginings of a “durable world.”[52] The final sense that one takes from this poem, however, is not that the transience of things should lead to despair, but that even when we come to see life as protected and perpetuated by chance instead of divine ordinance, the fact of our mere survival need be no less wondrous.[53] In “Wintergreen Ridge,” as elsewhere in Niedecker’s work, there is the strong sense that life is much the way she described good poetry: proceeding “not from one point to the next linearly, but in a circle” (Roub 86).
On this point, Niedecker aligns nicely with Bunting, who, despite seeing hierarchy and order as “expedients that chafe almost as vilely as the crimes they cry to restrain,” still considered the art of poetry as “seeking to make not meaning, but beauty” (Note on “Briggflatts” n.p., Williams n.p.). Through its careful registration of sensory perception in pursuit of a satisfactory aesthetic,[54] “Briggflatts” destabilizes the linear order of the hegemonic center, replacing it with a model of ethically and aesthetically responsible dwelling at the margins, where human actors can fill their proper places within complex ecosystems. Such an aim is discernible from the opening lines, where we are immediately instructed to engage in song:
Brag, sweet tenor bull,
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
each pebble its part
for the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe, bull,
black against may. (Complete Poems 59)
The poem begins by directing the young poet, figured here as a bull, to overlay a musical theme upon “Rawthey’s madrigal.” In an otherwise perceptive reading of the relationship between Bunting and his chosen place, Charles Tomlinson has the bull bellowing his descant to what he calls “imagined music” (7). If this is what Tomlinson actually supposes, he is deeply mistaken. To understand Bunting’s poem, we must acknowledge that Rawthey’s madrigal is far from imagined music, but that it is the actual soundscape of a real river and its surrounding valley (each called Rawthey) in Cumbria, a place that the young poet physically experienced in a very significant way. Thus “Briggflatts” itself, as the song made by the poet/bull, must be heard as a descant (a harmony overlaid or played upon a fixed theme) upon an already existent, perceptible, and quite real madrigal (a song with parts for multiple voices).[55] The pattern, repeated throughout the first section, is one in which human activity is carried out in harmony with natural rhythms. It appears when a local mason, the poet’s teacher and mentor, carves gravestones later in the poem, “tim[ing] his mallet / to a lark’s twitter, / listening while the marble rests,” then “lay[ing] his rule / at a letter’s edge, / fingertips checking” (Complete Poems 59). The mason in this passage times his mallet to the lark’s song, uniting his craft with a natural, heard rhythm, and that confirms the accuracy of his composition by touch, through felt sensation. We err if we imagine that the lark’s twitter is heard only in the mind, of that the mason is simply a figure of poetic imagination. Both the sound of birdsong, and the tactile sensation of the fingertips on stone are essential parts of the poem’s attempt to trace the phenomenology of the place, to recall the lived meaning of the body’s experience in an actual location. Throughout this section, and the poem entire, the body is central to the narrative. Furthermore, Rawthey is consistently presented as an active presence, as in the following passage, which opens the poem’s third stanza:
Decay thrusts in the blade,
wheat stands in excrement
trembling. Rawthey trembles.
Tongue stumbles, ears err
for fear of spring.
Rub the stone with sand,
wet sandstone rending
roughness away. Fingers
ache on the rubbing stone. (Complete Poems 59)
In this passage, Bunting traces a physically perceptible affinity between the human and more-than-human worlds. The wheat trembles, the river (or the entire valley) trembles, and because this trembling motion is phenomenologically perceived, so too does the tongue stumble. The body is figured here as deeply responsive to the conditions of its environment, reciprocating and mirroring the life-world in which it is entangled. Note also, as previously, the persistence of sensate experience in the stumbling tongue, the erring ears, the aching fingers. All retain traces of the way that the body and its location mutually shape and compose each other. Rather than presenting the place as a mere landscape, a spectacle to be consumed and appreciated by sight alone (the mode of sensory perception most easily replicated, manufactured, and reproduced), Bunting insists on the body’s literal inhabitation through a full range of sensations, particularly the conjoining textures of sound and touch. For instance, his description of lying together with his young lover shows with an unrelenting concern for the particularities of embodied experience:
Under sacks on the stone
two children lie,
hear the horse stale,
the mason whistle,
harness mutter to shaft,
felloe to axle squeak,
rut thud the rim,
crushed grit …In such soft air
they trudge and sing,
laying the tune frankly on the air.
All sounds fall still,
fellside bleat,
hide-and-seek peewit …Gentle generous voices weave
over bare night
words to confirm and delight
till bird dawn (Complete Poems 60-61).
In addition to the emphasis on auditory and tactile sensation, Bunting introduces two important themes to the poem in the passages just cited: the act of “laying the tune frankly on the air” and the notion that the music of voices might weave a form of speech that both confirms and delights. Both prove essential to the rediscovery of dwelling presented in the poem’s final section. This rediscovery is necessary because the poet’s abandons both Rawthey and Peggy, the mason’s daughter and his childhood love. After a depressing stay in London, [56] where he produces only “still-born” poetry, Bunting heads south to Italy, a place that appeals to him because of how unlike home it is.[57] En route, a vision of natural rhythm and beauty is once again presented, this time in the guise of the flying fish the poet observes following the boat:
delicate wings blue, grace
on flick of a tissue tail,
the water’s surface between
appetite and attainment.
Flexible, unrepetitive line
to sing, not paint; sing, sing
laying the tune on the air (Complete Poems 64)
From the motion of the flying fish the poet learns how to weave the space between memory and desire. As with the lark “laboring painfully to rise” in the first section, the flying fish’s delicate navigation of two worlds (sea and air), and its acquaintance with the “water’s surface between / appetite and attainment” allow it to provide a melody for the poet to hear and imitate. Again, as in the first section, things seen or heard in the natural world provide models for the poet to emulate, teaching him here with “flexible, unrepetitive line” how to “sing / laying the tune on the air / nimble and easy.” In providing the impetus for song, perception of the natural world teaches Bunting a crucial lesson about his craft that London had been unable to provide. The rest of the section is spent in Italy, where life is comfortable and the adorned earth provides a rich bounty. Though many things are lovely in the south, Bunting feels acutely that such a place can never fully be his home. Unlike the stillborn lines produced in London, the verse he composes here has nearly everything right:
It looks well on the page, but never
well enough. Something is lost
when wind, sun, sea upbraid
justly an unconvinced deserter. (Complete Poems 65)
This passage is quickly followed by a description in which “white marble stained like a urinal” is cut from the Alps (Complete Poems 65). Rather than the naturally tuned rhythms and fingertip sensitivity of the Cumbrian mason’s carving of gravestones, the Italian quarry is a site of mechanical clamor, a place where “paraffin pistons rap, saws rip” (Complete Poems 65). The loss of tactile contact with natural objects continues in his depiction of an Italian harvest where “grease mingles with sweat / on the threshing floor” (Complete Poems 65). Bunting’s distaste for this scene seems motivated by the way that mechanization separates human beings from physical contact with the objects they should be handling and sensing directly. However, these mechanical sounds are soon replaced by sounds from the natural world:
Frogs, grasshoppers
Drape the rice in sound,
tortoise deep in dust or
muzzled bear capering
punctuate a text whose initial,
lost in Lindisfarne plaited lines,
stands for discarded love. (Complete Poems 66)
Again, it is the sound of animal voices which pierce and prod the poet to memory, reminding him of “discarded love,” his betrayal of Peggy and his home place. No longer “an unconvinced deserter”, the poet is now figured as a “reproached / uneasy mason / shaping evasive ornament,” and “litter[ing] his yard / with flawed fragments” (66). This shift from “unconvinced deserter” to “reproached uneasy mason” was instigated by direct sensory apprehension of the natural world, as was his earlier acknowledgment of his inability to capture exactly his perceptions of Italy. The songs of the frogs and grasshoppers that provoke the shift in this case, while the earlier upbraiding was performed by a triumvirate of elements (wind, sea, and sun) common to both Italy and Northumberland.
Having introduced the sense that he ought to return to the place he initially deserted, Bunting now faces the grim prospects of tuning a song for a region not generally known for its natural beauty. Though he finds inspiration in two musical composers (Byrd and Monteverdi) who provide him with examples of successful responses to natural scenes not traditionally considered worthy of aesthetic representation, he nonetheless faces with a seemingly bleak task, wondering:
who will entune a bogged orchard,
its blossom gone,
fruit unformed, where hunger and
damp hush the hive?
A disappointed July full of codling
moth and ragged lettuces? (Complete Poems 67)
While this bogged orchard might be representative of Bunting’s previous failures, personal and artistic, it must also be seen literally as his Northumbrian home, an actual place with considerably less fecundity that the scenes of southern lushness described earlier.[58] The question is not simply personal, it is regional, asking as it does who will sing this place, bogged and disappointing as it is? Bunting seems to be suggesting that poetry has the capacity to enjoy a special relationship with landscapes and natural environments, the capacity to make them into places or homelands. In Bunting’s model, poets “entune” these places by knowing and loving them intimately, learning their rhythms, and then singing them into language. While it is a productive model, it is also one that is based on sensate mimesis. While the non-dweller may see only “a bogged orchard” and “a disappointed July,” the poet-dweller peers more attentively at the ecological workings of his home place and is rewarding by a surprising discovery:
Yet roe are there, rise to the fence, insolent;
a scared vixen cringes
red against privet stems as a mazurka;
and rat, grey, rummaging
behind the compost heap has daring
to thread, lithe and alert, Schoenberg’s maze. (Complete Poems 67)
This northern land, while not as obviously adorned as the verdant south, still bears signs of magnificence, evidence of life equally worthy of being seen, observed, and praised. This insight is deepened in the poem’s third section, which combines elements of Alexander the Great’s ascent of the mountains of Gog and Magog in the Persian poet Ferdosi’s Shahnameh with the descent to hell depicted in Dante’s Inferno. The section begins with a hero attempting an ascent into a sacred mountain and ends with him waking groggily “on a glistening moss by a spring,” to the song of the slowworm. The slowworm, a limbless reptile native to Northumberland, begins its song with a declaration of its being at home in the natural world:
I am neither snake nor lizard,
I am the slowworm.
Ripe wheat is my lodging. I polish
My side on pillars of its transept,
Gleam in its occasional light.
Its swaying copies my gait.
Vaults stored with slugs to relish,
my quilt a litter of husks, I prosper
lying low, little concerned.
My eyes sharpen
when I blink. (Complete Poems 71)
There are two important elements of this part of the slowworm’s song. First, its equation of its home among ripe wheat to a transept suggests a sacralization of natural fertility and the cycles of planting and harvest (echoing back to Rawthey’s trembling wheat from the poem’s opening section). Though the slowworm lacks Alexander’s considerable ambition, it also lacks his hubris. More significantly, it knows and accepts its ecological role, its place in and among other things belonging to a place. Its song calls for its human hearers to adopt a new world-view, one in which heroic ambitions are renounced in favor of humility and in which vanity gives way to greater attention and respect for the humble things of the world. Because it directly follows the Alexander’s failure to engage the angel Israfel atop the mountain, it can also be taken as a corrective to the excesses of Romantic transcendence, suggesting a greater holiness and value in holding one’s attention close to the earth than in attempts to ascend above or escape it.[59] As for the slowworm’s eyes sharpening when he blinks, the image suggests a clarity and focus of sight, an idea long cherished by Bunting and crucial to Objectivist poetics generally.[60] In a 1932 letter to Louis Zukofsky, Bunting wrote that “religion is no substitute for clearsight” (qtd. in Makin 18). The clearsight needed to perceive the world is not provided here by an angel (religion), but by a slowworm, an actual participant in the perceivable world (nature).
Second, like Rawthey’s madrigal, the lark’s song, and the tune laid upon the air by the flying fish, the slowworm’s song provides as a natural example for the poet to take measure of and emulate. The slowworm’s movement not only makes the wheat sway in imitation of its motion, it sings of a world full of exuberant motion:
Sycamore seed twirling,
O, writhe to its measure!
Dust swirling trims pleasure.
Thorns prance in a gale.
In air snow flickers,
twigs tap,
elms drip. (Complete Poems 72)
Peter Makin suggests that this part of the slowworm’s song provides a vision of coherence, pointing “to the great Oneness of Nature” in the way that it “teaches us humility and gives us security” (275). The slowworm’s key revelation, and his key difference from Alexander’s heroic ambition is that he “prosper[s]” by “lying low, little concerned.” The slowworm presents the failed hero with the possibility of a simple life lived in harmony with natural rhythms, offering the template for an existence that neither frets nor seeks to force nature. Choosing to follow this model, the poet/hero also chooses to ends his wandering: “he led home silently through clean woodland / where every bough repeated the slowworm’s song” (Complete Poems 72). The slowworm’s song, then, succeeds in turning the poet back home by showing him how to properly dwell in and with the land in a way that all his previous travels had been unable to do.
The fourth section of the poem marks the beginning of the poet’s return home and is set primarily in the Yorkshire Dales. Its primary aim is to link the contemporary act of inhabiting or dwelling with the historical past. To do this, Bunting introduces Northumbrian clerics Aidan and Cuthbert, priests who “put on daylight” by weaving a webbed brocade enmeshed with “wires of sharp western metal” (Complete Poems 73).[61] Bunting is careful to insist that this brocade is made “not for bodily welfare nor pauper theorems, / but splendour to splendour, excepting nothing that is” (Complete Poems 73). Bunting glossed this passage in a 1965 letter, noting:
the brocade is woven by shuttles, woven with extreme intricacy, for indeed it is nothing less than the whole universe…it bears the rainbow and the moon’s halo, things beautiful but hard to define, and it opposes the sharp sun that wants all things to be chained to the dictionary or the multiplication table. It gives, not so much tolerance as enthusiastic acceptance of a world in which things are not measured for their usefulness to man. (qtd. in Makin 146)
This is a message that seems might be able to please both the deep ecologist wary of those who measure the world only for its “usefulness to man” and the artist wary of the scientific reductionism that “wants all things to be chained to the dictionary or the multiplication table.” Bunting’s evocations of Aidan and Cuthbert cast them as something like poetically-minded Darwinists, non-humanists capable of comprehending and weaving the whole universe into their designs. In sharp contrast with those who center their lives in a smaller world of fantasy and tight control, unaware of larger designs and patterns of beauty not immediately useful to human beings, these figures are held forth as examples of previous Northerners who were also capable of seeing life as an interwoven web, whose art is unrestricted by either pedantic rules or “pauper theorems.” In this sense, Bunting is describing the exceptional perceptive shift that Leopold associated with chattering jays and honking geese, following which one suddenly sees the connection of everything to everything else. In so doing, Bunting seems to confirm David Abram’s assertion that “in contact with the native forms of the earth, one’s senses are slowly energized and awakened, combining and recombining in ever-shifting patterns” (63). For Bunting, as Leopold suggested, this perceptual shift was not obtained from bookish study but from experiences of sensation that the poet shared with his ancient predecessors, poets and priests who lived “before the rules made poetry a pedant’s game” (Complete Poems 73). Bunting’s invocation of the woven web, can be seen as strikingly parallel to David Abram’s suggestion that “the mutual inscription of others in my experience … effects the interweaving of our individual phenomenal fields into a single, ever-shifting fabric, a single phenomenal world or “reality” (39). By linking his perception of ecological interpenetration to the “clear Cymric voices” of Aneurin and Taliesin (historic poets associated anciently with the north) as well as Aidan and Cuthbert, Bunting suggests that that this kind of deep knowledge is tied not only to place, but to poetry, the way that human beings conceive of their relations with place by way of language.
Having learned to perceive the universe itself as an interlocking web of threads that cannot be separated and known in isolation, all that now impedes Bunting’s efforts to dwell is the shame of his past betrayal of place. The model for overcoming this difficulty comes through the example of Domenico Scarlatti:
It is time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti
condensed so much music into so few bars
with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence
never a boast or a see-here; and stars and lakes
echo him and the copse drums out his measure,
snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight
and the sun rises on an acknowledged land. (Complete Poems 74)
The things that Scarlatti are praised for are the very things that Bunting himself aspired to in his poetry, concise craftsmanship so superb that it attracts no attention to itself but provides a continual smooth pleasure. In paying tribute to Scarlatti’s ability, Bunting inverts what has been his traditional pattern of art imitating natural rhythms to suggest that it is the natural elements which echo Scarlatti’s music, and not the other way around. Scarlatti presents the possibility of an art so powerfully attuned to its place, composed with such respect and knowledge of the natural forms it follows that the elements themselves even seem to imitate or echo it. This is perceptual reciprocity in its highest and truest form. The other important effect that this kind of art has is its ability to effect the transformation of place from “bogged orchard” to “acknowledged land.” How is the land acknowledged? It is acknowledged through making (poesis), through the chisel song cut in stone and the tune lain freely on the air by the bragging bull alike. At long last, the poet is prepared to dwell with a place that he is no longer afraid to own and remember. It is under these conditions that the poet traverses the seashore in his Northumbrian homeland in the poem’s final section:
Conger skimped at the ebb, lobster
neither will I take, nor troll
roe of its like for salmon.
Let bass sleep, gentles
brisk, skim-grey,
group a nosegay
jostling on cast flesh,
frisk and compose decay
to side shot with flame,
unresting bluebottle wing. Sing,
strewing its notes on the air
as ripples skip in a shallow. Go
bare, the shore is adorned (Complete Poems 77).
In this image the poet refuses to possess or own the landscape (he will not take the fish from the sea), contenting himself letting things be, with belonging to the scene. Instead of thrusting his will upon the landscape, reshaping it into something more palatable, Bunting appreciates what is, celebrating the beauty that inheres in what is—even maggots (which are wonderfully called “gentles” in the Northumbrian dialect) “jostling on cast flesh” weaving a shimmering wing of motion as they “compose decay” are both already engaged in aesthetic activity and worthy of being seen and sung. This passage also ties in several themes heard earlier in the poem. Like the flying fish, these maggots sing, strewing their notes upon the air. Their song adorns the Northumbrian shore as the natural Mediterranean fecundity had earlier adorned the Italian shore, permitting its inhabitants to go bare. This is a composition wrought ironically, and yet with fitting grace, by decomposition. These are things in nature acting, as “Briggflatts” has shown them always to do, in their naturally appointed rhythms.[62] The difference here is that the poet is now in concert with them, now convinced and comfortable in his place, at home with the landscape and himself, able once again to descant upon the multi-voiced madrigal of the animate place.[63] There is a quietude in the final section, a stillness that seems to issue from the poet’s surrender of resistance to nature and his willingness to belong to a place, to dwell at last among things, with them, and not over or upon them. In his essay “The Sense of Place,” Wallace Stegner wrote that “neither the country nor the society we build out of it can be healthy until we stop raiding and running, and learn to be quiet part of the time, and acquire the sense not of ownership but of belonging. … Only in the act of submission is the sense of place realized and a sustainable relationship between people and earth established” (206). This seems as good a summation of the ecological moral of “Briggflatts” as can be written. As Makin notes, Bunting finally “assumes a place in, and responsibility to, a world of actualities existing before the poet began to see or to speak of them” (Makin 308). It is to fulfill these responsibilities, to attempt to dwell both among and with that he gazes carefully and patiently with clear sight at the world around him, listens with respectful silence to various natural songs, and finally tunes his own song in praise of the sensuous web in which he is embedded.
Like Niedecker, Bunting does not simply select favorable glimpses of his home place and produce from them a recaptured Eden. Nor does he try to make Northumberland appear overly heroic or fecund—it is not Italy or even the South of England, after all. Instead, the vision ultimately presented in “Briggflatts” is not an whitewashed heaven in which death is conquered and exiled, but a home place that, while flawed, is intimately known and loved, sensed closely and carefully. This is a place in and with which the poet can develop a life lived in harmony with the rhythms of his place and sing its beauties and its failings alike in that “strong song” that tows us seaward to unknown lands (Complete Poems 79). Our place may yet be a bogged orchard with disappointing Julys, as it was for Bunting, or prone to flooding and thus filled with “a weedy speech / a marshy retainer,” as it was for Niedecker, but it may also become what Bunting calls an acknowledged land, or a source, given to sustain us (Collected Works 170). And if that occurs, as Bunting and Niedecker each attest, it will certainly be enough.
Works Cited:
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott London: Verso Books, 1978
Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. London: Picador, 2000.
Bunting, Basil. A Note on “Briggflatts”. Durham, U.K.: Basil Bunting Poetry Archive, 1989.
———-. Basil Bunting On Poetry. Ed. Peter Makin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
———-. Complete Poems. New York: New Directions, 2000.
Caddel, Richard and Anthony Flowers. Basil Bunting – A Northern Life. Newcastle: Newcastle Libraries and Information Service, 1997.
Cordova, V.F. How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V.F. Cordova. Eds. Kathleen Dean Moore, Kurt Peters, Ted Jojola, and Amber Lacy. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007.
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York: Norton. 69-90.
Davie, Donald. After Briggflatts: A History of Poetry in Great Britain 1960-1988. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Lorine Niedecker’s “Paean to Place” and Its Reflective Fusions.” Ed. Elizabeth Willis. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008. 151-182.
Forde, Victoria. The Poetry of Basil Bunting. Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1991.
Hatlen, Burton. “Regionalism and Internationalism in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts” Yale Journal of Criticism. 13.1 (2000): 49-66.
Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
Horkheimer, Max. The Eclipse of Reason, New York: Oxford UP, 1947.
Kenner, Hugh. “Never a Boast or a See-Here” National Review. 31 October 1967. 1217-1218.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004.
Langer, Monika. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: A Guide and Commentary. Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1989.
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966.
Levinas, Emmanuel. The Levinas Reader. Ed. Sean Hand. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Lovelock, James. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Makin, Peter. Bunting: The Shaping of His Verse. Oxford: O.U.P., 1992.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.
Moore III, Berrien, Arild Underdal, Peter Lemke, and Michel Loreau. “The Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change.” 2001. International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. 4 Apr. 2009 <http://www.igbp.net/documents/amsterdam-declaration.pdf>.
Niedecker, Lorine. Between Your House and Mine: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960 to 1970. Ed. Lisa Pater Faranda. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1986.
———-. Collected Works. Ed. Jenny Penberthy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
———-. The Full Note: Lorine Niedecker. Ed. Peter Dent, Budleigh Salterton, U.K.: Interim, 1983.
Quartermain, Peter. Basil Bunting: Poet of the North. Durham, U.K.: Basil Bunting Poetry Archive, 1990.
———-. “Take Oil / and Hum.” Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place. Ed. Elizabeth Willis. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008. 271-284.
Robertson, Lisa. “In Phonographic Deep Song: Sounding Niedecker.” Ed. Elizabeth Willis. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008. 83-90.
Roub, Gail. “Getting to Know Lorine Niedecker.” Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet. Ed. Jenny Penberthy. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1996. 79-86.
Scigaj, Leonard. “Contemporary Ecological and Environmental Poetry: Differance or Referance?” ISLE 3.2 (1996): 1-25.
Stegner, Wallace. “A Sense of Place.” Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. New York: Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 199-206.
Tomlinson, Charles. The Sense of the Past: Three Twentieth-Century British Poets. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1983.
Upton, Lee. Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Glück, and Carson. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2005.
Williams, Jonathan. Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal: Conversations with Basil Bunting. Lexington, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1968
Willis, Elizabeth. “Who Was Lorine Niedecker.” 2006. Academy of American Poets. 20 Apr. 2009 <http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19229>.
Wiman, Christian. “Free of Our Humbug: Basil Bunting.” Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007. 228-236.
- The OED gives as its primary definition of land: “The solid portion of the earth's surface, as opposed to sea, water.” For Leopold, land “is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals” (Leopold 253). ↵
- Leopold displays a typically practical approach to this problem, wondering whether the educated citizen “know[s] he is only a cog in the ecological mechanism? … That if he does not work with it, it will ultimately grind him to dust? If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for? (Leopold 210) This is also the lesson of “Thinking Like a Mountain,” his famous essay about wolf extermination, in which he writes: “just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer … the cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea” (140). ↵
- He saw this changed as being necessarily internal and distributed across individuals, rather than concentrated in ruling agencies or organizations, writing that “A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land … No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions” (Leopold 258, 246). ↵
- He writes: “In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such” (Leopold 240). This sense contributes also to a reconsideration of history, anticipating the contemporary turn towards environmental history (in the place of, say, economic or social history). Leopold writes that “Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land. The characteristics of land determined the facts quite as potently as the characteristics of the men who lived on it” (Leopold 241). [LAND as a CHARACTER—which is how it frequently appears in Niedecker’s poetry—if not personified or anthropomorphized, it is still made into a character] ↵
- This is of course because none of us make decisions purely on the basis of economic considerations. Leopold demonstrated his prescience on this subject (now being explored by economists, who seem genuinely surprised to discover that human decision making is not as ‘economically rational’ as they supposed) that “an innumerable host of actions and attitudes, comprising perhaps the bulk of all land relations, is determined by the land-users’ tastes and predilections, rather than by his purse” (Leopold 263). ↵
- Leopold admitted that he could not “by logical deduction, prove that a thicket without the potential roar of a quail covey is only a thorny place. Yet every outdoorsman knows that this is true. That wildlife is merely something to shoot our or to look at is the grossest of fallacies. It often represents the difference between rich country and mere land” (178). ↵
- In the 1982 book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Lovelock writes that “The entire range of living matter , from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts” (9). ↵
- This approach would likely have pleased Leopold. As long ago as the 1940s Leopold expressed his frustration with the smallness of specialized knowledge, and the narrowness of university disciplines, writing that “to learn the hydrology of the biotic stream we must think at right angles to evolution and examine the collective behavior of biotic materials. This calls for a reversal of specialization; instead of learning more and more about less and less, we must learn more and more about the whole biotic landscape … Ecology is a science that attempts this feat of thinking … a belated attempt to convert our collective knowledge of biotic materials into a collective wisdom of biotic navigation” (Leopold 189). ↵
- She earned her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in 1992. Cordova was the daughter of a Hispanic mother and an Jicarilla Apache father and taught philosophy and ethnic studies at a number of universities in the Western United States before her death in 2002. Incidentally, she was familiar with Lovelock’s writing, suggesting at one point that among the work of writers and philosophers in the European tradition, his Gaia hypothesis “comes closest to the American Indian concept of the Earth as a living being” (115). ↵
- Seminal works in the field of ecophenomenology include Erazim Kohak’s The Embers and the Stars (Chicago UP, 1984), Neil Evernden’s The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment (Toronto UP, 1985) and The Social Creation of Nature (Johns Hopkins UP, 1992). An excellent overview of influences and recent concerns in the field can be found in Eco-Phenomenology edited by Ted Toadvine and Charles S. Brown (SUNY Press, 2003). ↵
- See especially George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh (Basic Books, 1999), which makes the case that any empirically responsible philosophy must acknowledge the essential role embodiment plays in the production of human consciousness. ↵
- His argument, far too complex to be represented adequately here, is that the advance of written technologies for representation (like the alphabet) displaced orality, “dispelling the air of ghosts and invisible influences—by stripping the air of its anima, its psychic depth”(253). ↵
- Scigaj writes that “Language and nature under référance constitutetwooppositesystems,withtheformer(language)onlytemporarilydeferringthelatter,nature,wherelanguagehaditsorigin”(6).C.f.Killingsworth’sclaimthatit’sstillvaluableto“reconstructanimageofwildernessand,whileacknowledgingthattheworldhasalteredunderhumaninfluence,rememberthatsomethingresistsus.Ithasbeensaidthatfactsarethethingsthatrefusetoyieldtothehumanwillinthoughtandlanguage,thatremainthesamenomatterwhatwethinkorsay(Latour93;Fleck98).WhileNature…iscertainlyaproductofhumanthinking,theearthcontinuestobeonethingthatresists(8-9). ↵
- Peter Quartermain’s essay “Take Oil / and hum” in Elizabeth Willis’ recent Radical Vernacular being the most notable exception. ↵
- In a later letter to Corman, Niedecker describes having received Bunting’s Collected Poems the previous day and writes, “How I love Chomei,” in reference to Bunting’s poem “Chomei at Toyama” (Between Your House and Mine 186). At the time of her death she owned three of Bunting’s books: Briggflatts, Poems: 1950, and Loquitor, essentially his entire oeuvre then in print. ↵
- This visit, their first and only meeting, is referenced in Niedecker’s poem “Wintergreen Ridge”: “When visited / by the poet // From Newcastle on Tyne / I neglected to ask / what wild plants // have you there / how dark / how inconsiderate // of me” (254). Both poets wrote poems for or about the other. Niedecker’s poem for Bunting is called “The Ballad of Basil” (Collected Works 282-283). Bunting’s poem for Niedecker was collected in Jonathan Williams’ book of epitaphs and is striking in its elegance and compression: “To abate what swells / use ice for scalpel. / It melts in its wound / and no one can tell / what the surgeon used. / Clear lymph, no scar, / no swathe from a cheek’s bloom (Complete Poems 196). ↵
- While preparing this essay I wrote Jenny Penberthy in search of some leads for research I was hoping to do on Bunting’s first marriage. I mentioned my interest in any extant Niedecker-Bunting correspondence. Penberthy replied that it was unlikely that any would exist, writing “You couldn't have chosen two poets more committed to privacy” (personal communication, April 13, 2009). As an illustration, at one point during his interview with Jonathan Williams, Bunting remarks “That’s the whole of my life story.” Williams objects, saying “there’s much more than that,” to which Bunting replies, “No doubt, but it doesn’t concern the public” (n.p.). Rachel Blau DuPlessis provides an excellent glimpse into Niedecker’s retiring personality in her article “Lorine Niedecker’s “Paean to Place” and Its Reflective Fusions,” using Niedecker’s remark that she “fights shy” of public appearances as grounds for describing her as “aggressively, decisively, contendingly shy, both presenting her shyness and maneuvering it” (152). ↵
- For Niedecker the figure was Louis Zukofsky, her early mentor and one-time lover. While the two engaged in a life-long correspondence in which Niedecker frequently presented herself as acolyte or disciple to Zukofsky, and Zukofsky’s editorial influence was in many instances strongly felt in Niedecker’s work, much recent scholarship, particularly from Jenny Penberthy, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Glenna Breslin has helped to bring Niedecker out from under Zukofsky’s shadow, showing that earlier assumptions about her reliance upon Zukofsky were poorly informed. In part, this was because only a portion of her work (often that which Zukofsky had championed) had been printed and was available to readers. Penberthy’s 2002 Collected Works demonstrates a far more complex and interesting poet than many had previously supposed. Niedecker herself, while acknowledging the influence of Zukofsky on her work, frequently insisted on other sources of inspiration, as in a 1969 letter to Kenneth Cox, where she writes “Tomlinson says I got my Wintergreen Ridge music from LZ! It seems to me nothing could be further from the truth” (The Full Note 38). For Bunting, the figure was Ezra Pound. Donald Davie observed that “there is a disposition to regard Bunting as a slavish disciple and imitator of that American poet [Ezra Pound]” (41). He also suggests an ideological motivation for Bunting’s obscurity, claiming that: “[his] existence is an embarrassment to the numerous English historians who would have it that modernism in poetry was a temporary American-inspired distraction from a native tradition which persisted, undeterred through for a time invisible, behind the marches and counter-marches of modernist polemics” (41-42). ↵
- For Niedecker it was her marriage to Al Millen, which allowed her to quit her job washing floors and freed her to go on car trips around the state. For Bunting, it was his rediscovery by Tom Pickard in the summer of 1964. The teenaged Pickard, a great admirer of Bunting’s early work, was told earlier that year by Jonathan Williams that Bunting was living near Newcastle in relative anonymity, and decided to contact him in hopes that Bunting might provide a contribution to a magazine Pickard was then compiling. Pickard was at that time in the process of establishing a poetry center in Newcastle’s Morden Tower and was later to become a central figure in the Newcastle poetry revival of the late 60’s and early 70’s. Having spent the greater part of his life in obscurity, the aging Bunting was only too happy to find himself transformed into the object of adulation for the group of literary-minded youth that had coalesced around Pickard; he wrote “Briggflatts” in no small part to show his young admirers how poetry was to be done properly. ↵
- In a letter to UW-Milwaukee professor Morgan Gibson in October of 1966, Niedecker wrote as a postscript: “I share your view for the most part as to Vietnam but for me to get involved would be for me to forget poetry. I speak from past experience” (The Full Note 90). In the early 1950s, Niedecker also wrote a poem in which she states: “I worked the print shop / right down among em / the folk from whom all poetry flows / and dreadfully much else.” After lamenting that “I’d never get anywhere / because I’d never had suction, / pull, you know, favor, drag / well-oiled protection” (Collected Works 142), she indicates that their speech frequently consisted of “rehashed radio barbs— / more barbarous among hirelings / as higher-ups grow more corrupt” (Collected Works 143). In a similar vein, Bunting wrote sardonically in a 1927 ode that there was “never a spark of sedition / amongst the uneducated workingmen” (Complete Poems 101). ↵
- Niedecker attended Beloit College for two years, but returned home to care for her mother, who was in poor health. Bunting attended the London School of Economics for a few years in the early 1920s, but left without a degree. ↵
- Niedecker was a proofreader for Hoard’s Dairyman, an influential trade publication that had been founded by W.D. Hoard, a Fort Atkinson resident and future governor of Wisconsin from 1945-1950. At the time that Niedecker was employed, the publication was managed by William D. Hoard Jr., the founder’s grandson, and had a circulation upwards of 300,000. Bunting spent several years after WWII in Teheran as the bureau chief for a London paper, was forced from the country in the early 1950s due to political pressures, and was a “night-shift drudge” for a small newspaper in Newcastle, reading proofs of railway timetables (Makin 317). Peter Quartermain indicates that there was a time in the 1950s when Bunting was reduced to partially subsisting on parcels of food sent by Pound from St. Elizabeth’s (“Take Oil / and Hum” 277). ↵
- In 1928, Niedecker married Frank Hartwig, a local road construction worker. At that time she was working as a librarian in the Dwight Foster Public Library in Fort Atkinson. Both lost their jobs during the depression, following which the two separated, each returning to their parents’ homes. Their divorce was consummated in 1942. For more on this marriage see Glenna Breslin’s essay “Lorine Niedecker: The Poet in her Homeplace” in Radical Vernacular. In 1963, Niedecker married Al Millen, a housepainter from Milwaukee. Bunting’s first marriage was to Marian Culver, a young woman from Eau Claire, Wisconsin that he had met in Venice, Italy. They had two daughters, Roudaba and Bourtai, and Marian was pregnant with a third child (a son, Rustam) when she left Bunting in 1937 to return to her family in Wisconsin. While in Persia in 1948, Bunting married Sima Alladadian, a woman several years his junior. They remained married until his death in 1985. Incidentally, Bunting and Marian Culver’s daughter Roudaba would go on to marry Lloyd Barbee, a prominent Milwaukee attorney and Wisconsin state legislator. Barbee was a leader of Wisconsin’s African-American community, a dedicated civil rights activist, and a crucial figure in successful efforts to integrate Milwaukee’s de-facto segregated schools. In the late 1960s, Barbee initiated two resolutions in the Wisconsin State Legislature honoring Bunting’s poetic achievement and congratulating him on the publication of “Briggflatts” and his obtaining a teaching position in the United States. ↵
- Niedecker was the only female poet among the objectivists, Bunting the only non-American. ↵
- Poems: 1950, Bunting’s first book (apart from a slim volume published privately in Milan in 1930), was published in Galveston, Texas by a Cleaner’s Press, a relatively small press. He did not find an English publisher until 1965, when Fulcrum Press published Loquitor. Niedecker’s first published books were printed by Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Wild Hawthorn Press and Stuart Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press, both based in the U.K. ↵
- From 1938 to 1941 Niedecker worked in Madison, Wisconsin for the WPA as a contributor to the Wisconsin State Guidebook Wisconsin: A Guide to the Badger State. In a letter to Kenneth Cox, Niedecker wrote that “the presence of the folk” was “always there” in her work, and that her first book New Goose “is based on the folk and a desire to get down direct speech (Williams influence and here was my mother, daughter of the rhyming … happy grandfather who somehow somewhere had got hold of nursery and folk rhymes to entrance me … speaking whole chunks of down-to-earth (o very earthy) magic, descendent for sure of Mother Goose” (The Full Note 36) Bunting claimed not to enjoy “literary society or literary conversation” and was exceptionally proud of his regional identity, telling Jonathan Williams that “I belong to Northumberland. I want to finish in Northumberland –if the bloody Northumbrians will let me” (n.p.). “Briggflatts” itself is liberally peppered with words from the Northumbrian dialect, though he included a small glossary of unfamiliar terms for the benefit of his American readers. ↵
- Niedecker visited Louis Zukofsky in New York City during the 1930s, but found the city not to her taste, returning home after a few months. Bunting lived in London as a young man, but when he received the promise of £200/month from wealthy American patron Margaret de Silver, he left London to return to Northumberland, where he lived for a time in a shepherd’s cottage. He told Jonathan Williams: “I was tired of London. I knew London very well, but I never did like towns, especially big ones” (n.p.) In rejecting urban centers for familiar home places, both poets embrace distinctive bioregions. M. Jimmie Killingsworth has suggested that bioregional thinking, which takes account of “long-standing cultural ties and the natural markers of waterways and other elements of physical geography—to which the author is born or is attached by choice or happenstance” allows for ecopoetic readings that “embrace renewal and resistance … in the search for beauty and meaning in local conditions” (100). Such insight seems particularly apt in the case of Niedecker and Bunting, for whom relationships with local conditions were more important than goings-on in distant capitals. ↵
- In a 1967 letter to her neighbor and friend Gail Roub, Niedecker wrote “Early in life I looked back of our buildings to the lake and said, “I am what I am because of all this—I am what is around me—those woods have made me” (Roub 86). She writes in one poem: “I rose from marsh mud, / algae equisetum, willows, / sweet green, noisy / birds and frogs” (Collected Works 170). ↵
- Both poems were the result of car trips made with her husband Al Millen. The trip to Lake Superior generated over 300 pages of handwritten notes, from which a 5-page poem was condensed. Niedecker considered “Wintergreen Ridge” her finest poem. ↵
- In her letters to friends there are occasional moments of strongly felt sadness, for instance in her remark after Jonathan Williams’ visit that “after being Queen for a day – two days –while Jonathan Williams was here reading at the university, my riches have returned to rage and I sit once more in my chimney corner” (The Full Note 36). In two other letters, she yearns for neighbors like Thoreau and for a life lived in a community of poets. ↵
- When asked if he had always intended to return to the North and write a specifically Northumbrian poem, Bunting answered: “Yes.” Elsewhere he claimed: “I am a Northumbrian man. It has always been my home, even when I’ve been living elsewhere” (Caddel and Flowers, title page). ↵
- The poem derives its name from Brigflatts, a small Quaker hamlet in the Rawthey River valley in Cumbria that played an important role in Bunting’s early life. ↵
- Most Bunting scholarship to date has had fairly similar motives: to praise his formidable talent and to suggest reasons why he should be more widely read. Richard Caddel and Anthony Flowers’ explain their wonderful book about Bunting’s relationship to Northumberland by reporting “that even here in his native North East the man and his work remain largely unknown.” (7). ↵
- While the adjective rootless is certainly unfair, cosmopolitan may not be far from the mark. Whatever is said about Bunting as a poet, he had an incredibly fascinating life, traveling much of the globe and participating in a stunningly varied number of occupations: stonemason’s apprentice, fugitive (after serving hard time as a C.O. during the first World War), sailor, British Intelligence officer in Iran (he was essentially a spy for much of this time), foreign correspondent, journalist, and university lecturer, to name just some of them. ↵
- John Seed makes a similar argument in “Irrelevant Objects: Basil Bunting’s Poetry of the 1930s.” ↵
- How else to explain his relative popularity in the United States, or the continued global popularity of ‘regional’ authors Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen, to name just two? ↵
- Peter Quartermain has written that Bunting’s position “has been notably marginal, and, I believe, deliberately so … His position as a Northumbrian writer makes him turn … to the margins of the culture. Or even beyond them” (Basil Bunting 8). ↵
- I am indebted for my reading of Bunting in this way in part to Burton Hatlen’s perceptive article “Regionalism and Internationalism in Bunting’s “Briggflatts””, particularly his claim that Bunting “defined his own poetic project…as a challenge to the center, in the name of a suppressed culture of the periphery” (49-50). The Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, friend of Bunting’s and himself a politically committed antagonist to the political, cultural, and geographical hegemony of Southern England, has professed his belief that Bunting’s “poems are the most important which have appeared in any form of the English language since T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land,” and likened Bunting’s case to that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, another figure whose great value was not established until long after his death (qtd. in Forde 252). Incidentally, Niedecker admired Hopkins a great deal; traces of his “Spring and Fall to a Young Child” can be found in “Paean to Place.” ↵
- The same, of course, being true of Niedecker. ↵
- Niedecker wrote to Kenneth Cox just a few months before her death: “Most birds don’t purr, I guess, or they don’t make a sound we’re able to hear. But doves and pigeons make that soft little coo (fluttering coo), you know. We have the mourning doves here – they do that low almost gasping sounds before rain” (The Full Note 41). The mourning dove also appears in a short, haiku-like poem about visiting her mother’s grave: “Hear / where her snow-grave is / the You / ah you / of mourning doves” (Collected Works 181). ↵
- This is because “in a marginalized culture, governed like a conquered province, the most urgent necessity is to find out where your choices lie, what you priorities are—and those priorities are always those of survival, so they are physical … Though Bunting’s notion or general intention for the poem is more or less clear … the act of comprehension and pleasure and ‘understanding’ is placed at the extremity of the local, in the reader. There’s a relinquishing of control you don’t find in say Auden or Spender. Zukofsky called it trusting the reader (Basil Bunting 15, 18). ↵
- In a variant draft from the For Paul collection, Niedecker wrote: “no fact is isolate— / grasses, heron, China, / days of light” (Collected Works 379). ↵
- Lee Upton observes that “Niedecker writes in especially complex ways about sense and sensing and how sensory phenomena impinge on our concepts. Bodily experience determines what a poet writes—whether a poet would attempt to escape bodily conditions or embed the poem with traces related to bodily conditions” (41) Because she embeds her poems with traces of embodied perception, “her authority as a poet is rooted in a dimension of the kinetics of auditory and visual experience … aligned with linguistic experience”” (Upton 34). In one wonderful short poem, Niedecker’s effect is accomplished almost entirely by the simple registration of an almost synaesthetic sensory perception: “frog noise / suddenly stops // Listen! / They turned off / their lights (Collected Works 203). ↵
- In a poem entitled “LZ’s” Niedecker explains that it was not abstraction but a certain capacity for sensory perception that first attracted her to the objectivists: “As you know mind / aint what attracts me / nor the wingspread / of Renaissance man // but what was sensed / by them guys / and their minds still carry / the sensing” (Collected Works 206-207). ↵
- C.f. Heidegger’s suggestion that “It might be that our unpoetic dwelling, its incapacity to take the measure, derives from a curious excess of frantic measuring and calculating,” which in turn evokes rather neatly Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us” (228). ↵
- There’s a lovely line in Bunting’s “The Well of Lycopolis,” in which he describes how those in the North of England adjusted themselves to life in a coal-mining environment: “We rhymed our breath / to the mumble of coke distilling” (38). ↵
- Donald Davie has written that “the trouble was that Bunting wrote always for the ear. And ever since…the science of English prosody had been generally and tacitly abandoned, writing with and for the ear had been not just disregarded but positively disapproved of” (40). ↵
- This is a sentiment shared with Bunting, who wrote as early as 1932 of his belief that “simultaneity, interdependence, continuous cross-reference and absence of simplification are characteristic of all fact, whether physical, mental, or emotional” (qtd. in Makin 149). ↵
- “Lake Superior” begins with the insistence that “in every part of every living thing / is stuff that once was rock // In blood the minerals / of the rock” (Collected Works 232). In another poems she speaks of “our relative the air” and “our rich friend / silt” (Collected Works 168. ↵
- C.f. Elizabeth Willis’ observation that Niedecker’s “perceived humility seems to stem less from midwestern decorum than from the modern acknowledgment that we live and work in a reality as much evolutionary as creationist, where the poem is a fossil-like record of both individual genius and the pressures of the various histories into which we are born” (Willis). ↵
- This is not the only place in which she subverts the conventions of the Romantic sublime. In “Paean to Place” she calls describes the sound of a pewee as “sublime / slime- / song” (Collected Works 265). DuPlessis offers a convincing reading of this passage and the whole of “Paean to Place” as a critique of both sublimity and the romantic lyric in “Lorine Niedecker’s “Paean to Place” and Its Reflective Fusions.” ↵
- Buntingstatedthat“Briggflatts”ismeanttoshowthat“maniscontemptiblynothingandyetmaylivecontentinhumility”(ANoteonBriggflatts,n.p.).A Note on Briggflatts, ggflatts”ismeanttoshowthat“maniscontemptiblynothingandyetmaylivecontentinhumility”(ANoteonBriggflatts,n.p.). ↵
- While Niedecker sees no use in going to church or discussing heaven, she contends that “effort lay in us / before religions,” and reminds us that there remains “the simple / the perfect // order / of that flower / water lily (Collected Works 256, 254-255). ↵
- I use perception here because “Briggflatts” is not merely the record of things seen by the poet, but also things touched, smelled, tasted, and especially heard (it is difficult to overstate the importance of songs and singing to the poem). ↵
- The OED defines a madrigal as “A part-song for several voices, spec. one of a style which originated in 16th-cent. Italy, with a secular text, and being arranged in elaborate counterpoint and sung without instrumental accompaniment.” Another definition notes that madrigals also have pastoral associations, both of which make it a fitting analogue to the multi-vocal music of a lived environment. Bunting, a former music critic, would have been sure to have known these definitions as well as the genre’s history. ↵
- In “Briggflatts” London is a sham, a city full of falseness and deceit, where the poet is appointed to “walk among the bogus,” a motley blend of “toadies,” “confidence men,” “kept boys,” and “whores,” and finds “nothing to authenticate” (Complete Poems 63). London is a place where life has gone out of harmony, where there are no natural rhythms for the poem to hear and understand, only the harsh sounds of industry and commerce: engines, wheels, pedals, clanking pipes. The city is a place of radical unfamiliarity where the poet is decidedly not at home. London is portrayed as unknowable, impenetrable, disproportionate, a place where he “cannot name the ratio of its curves” (Complete Poems 63). ↵
- In the south, people “go bare / because the soil is adorned,” something they would likely never do in Northumberland (Complete Poems 74) ↵
- Several years earlier, in a poem entitled “the Complaint of the Morpethshire Farmer,” Bunting had written: “Northumberland’s a bare land / for men have made her so” (Complete Poetry 112). ↵
- Bunting suggested something similar in a letter, writing “of a kind of reverence for the whole creation which I feel we all ought to have in our bones if we don’t, a kind of pantheism, I suppose. If the word ‘God’ is to have any use, it must include everything” (qtd. in Makin 15). ↵
- George Oppen was especially concerned with clarity, writing famously in his poem “Route”: “Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world / A limited, limiting clarity // I have not and never did have any motive of poetry / But to achieve clarity” (Collected Poems 185). Niedecker wrote the following (likely only partially about her failing eyesight): “I see only / where I now walk. I carry / my clarity / with me” (Collected Works 181). ↵
- The description given in the poem evokes the aforementioned “plaited lines” of the Lindisfarne Gospels, a beautifully illuminated biblical manuscript produced by 8th century Northumbrian monks in honor of St. Cuthbert (see Peter Makin’s Bunting: The Shaping of His Verse, 219-238). ↵
- Victoria Forde has written that “in Part V any sharp or better note of self-hatred and self-recrimination has disappeared. Here the tone is one of an alert and clear-eyed acceptance of himself, of his natural situation which is mirrored in the winter beauty of his surroundings, and finally an acceptance of the ultimate situation [his impending death]” (240). ↵
- Bunting remarked that in the poem’s final section “old age can see at last the loveliness of things overlooked or despised: frost, the dancing maggots, sheepdogs, and … the stars which make time a paradox and a joke till we can give up our own time, even though we wasted it” (qtd. in Forde 211). ↵