Laura Sims Looks at Lorine Niedecker

Fingers crossed that Laura Sims is now a Coldfront regular! In a new feature, Sims looks at Lorine Niedecker's North Central, which was published in 1968 by Fulcrum Press and is "Niedecker’s meditation on humankind’s place in the midst of infinite Nature and eternally cycling History." Sims continues:

[Niedecker] summarizes this predicament in the line: “Man / lives hard / on this stone perch / by sea / imagines / durable works,” which is followed closely by: “let’s say / of art / We climb.” Is art, then, the epitome of that “durable work” we struggle to create? Is it man’s only answer, or his only productive and positive answer, to being powerful yet ultimately undone by a world that survives each individual’s existence?

The contrast Niedecker strikes between the natural world and the manmade, highly industrialized world of pollution and war would seem to answer those questions affirmatively. In “Wintergreen Ridge,” as the speaker passes from pastoral to urban landscape, we leave “the simple / the perfect / order / of that flower” for monstrosities of human construction, action, and design, a world “So far out of flowers / human parts found / wrapped in newspaper / left at the church / near College Avenue.” And also, “the war / which ‘cannot be stopped.’” One thing remains in the poem’s last lines: “Old sunflower / you bowed / to no one.” But Niedecker does not present a straightforward dichotomy between Nature and Man; instead, she reveals how the mutable but resilient land is an integral part of us, our collective existence, deny it though we have, particularly in the last two hundred years. . . .

The full piece can be read here.