La poetisa de Wisconsin en la cabaña del lago

Lorine Niedecker (1903-70)

Lorine Niedecker es norteamericana. Su poesía, en los inicios, fue influenciada por el imaginismo y el objetivismo, en el cual es lugar común ubicarla, pero desarrolló su propia voz. Viviendo casi toda su vida en un ámbito rural, escribió sobre lo que la rodeaba: los vecinos, los árboles, los sucesos diarios. Con el correr del tiempo, incorporó preocupaciones sociales y políticas. Su estilo es limpio, vivaz, con ritmos sutiles, coloquial. Sus poemas están cuidadosamente escritos, cada palabra está puesta en función de la idea y, es muy difícil que emplee palabras sobrantes. Cierta ironía recorre los poemas, usualmente breves. La brevedad es, a veces, extrema, utilizada para acentuar la fuerza de la expresión.

NIEDECKER, Lorine (1903-70), was bom and died in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, living much of her adult life in a small cabin on Black Hawk Island on Lake Koshkonong, Wisconsin. An active correspondent with numerous poets such as Louis *Zukofsky, Cid *Corman, and William Carlos *Williams, all of whom both influenced and praised her work, she lived an essentially isolated life, one which appealed to both her affinity for nature and her innate shyness. From her earliest work on, Zukofsky was an encouraging mentor, and his notions of objectivity and sincerity as elaborated in his essay "An Objective" in Poetry magazine (193 1), were extremely important to her. A keen reader, her interests lay in history, the natural sciences, and pre-Socratic philosophy, subjects fiiu of resonance for her, which informed both the content and shape of her poetry.

Niedecker is an American miniaturist; in this, her work bears some comparison with the short poems of Robert *Creeley or the terseness of J. V. *Cunningham. Her natural register is the epigrammatic mode, one which renders a life or a landscape as though it were composed of a series of small, intense moments. Her mode of construction, something she obviously took from Zukofsky, airns for fidelity to the musical phrase, the leading of sound syllables, and the sense of closure afforded by rhyme-schemes and metrical attentiveness. By such a method she invests with a satisfying density and selfcontainment what might ordinarily escape into ephemerality. The consequent musical completeness and condensation in the poems transforms what could easily have become effusions into something like the workings of a scientist or botanist. Whether commenting on the life of Audubon or Thomas Jefferson or on the often deeply painful events of her own life, she exhibits a rigorous detachment, all the more moving for its precision and lack of self-indulgence.

The two most useful collections of Niedecker's work are From This Condensery: The Complete Writings of Lorine Niedecker, ed. Robert Bertolf (Highlands, NC, 1985) and The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker, ed. Cid Corman (Berkeley, Calif, 1985). See also Tmck 16, ed. David Wilk (1975) and Michael Heller's Conviction's Net of branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry (I 985).

poemas

La enfermedad económica del país

afecta la conversación de la gente.

Sin pan, ni queso, ni frutillas

No tengo dinero, dicen ellos.

Hasta que en la revolución surge

la fuerza para cambiar

la frase indigerible.

......................

La verdad

da calor

Se ruborizó

cuando le dije 

que antes de que él viniera 

nunca llevaba collares 

........................

Algo en el agua

como una flor 

devorará 

el agua 

la flor 

......................

Desde mi cama veo

el sauce al viento

la hierba.

Desde mi cabeza

emplumado viene

ligero. 

Pienso en un árbol

para hacerlo

durar. 

........................

Muchas cosas son mejores 

con sabor a tocino.

Dulce vida, 

mi amor: 

¿Nunca pretendiste

el mejor manjar? 

Y no tengas miedo 

para verter el vino sobre la col

Lorine Niedecker is a twentieth-century, second-wave, Modern American poet often identified with the Objectivists. Living most of her life on the shores of the Rock River near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, she is perhaps best known as a poet of place who wrote about the Blackhawk Island that she loved. Her work, however, ranges from modernist folk poetry (NEW GOOSE, 1946) to haiku-like forms to long poems like "Lake Superior" and "Wintergreen Ridge" (NORTH CENTRAL, 1968). She is admired for the subtlety of her tightly crafted, nuanced and deliciously ironic poems, as well as for her total devotion to her calling. (...)

Lorine's cabin on Blackhawk Island

Lorine Niedecker... born in Fort Atkinson, lived on Blackhawk Island. Niedecker is a poet of a single location, the area around Blackhawk Island. "I spent my childhood outdoors - red-winged blackbirds, willows, maples, boats, fishing..." wrote Niedecker. (...)

Lorine's cabin on Blackhawk Island

(...) Wisconsin's greatest poet Lorine Niedecker, who wrote about her island home in southern Wisconsin as well as the Ridges Sanctuary in Door County and the Lake Superior region. An avid student of geologic, natural, and human history, Niedecker weaves imagery of Wisconsin's waterways, birds, and plants into her intensely personal and political poems. For much of her adult life, she lived in a small cabin with no running water located on a flood plain on the Rock River. Like Henry David Thoreau, she made her home in close proximity to the seasonal changes of the natural world and found in them a rich source of inspiration for her work.(...)

Lorine's cabin on Blackhawk Island

http://www.lorineniedecker.org/biog.cfm

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/lorine-niedecker

http://www.woodlandpattern.org/niedecker/reading_the_ridges.shtml

http://steelwagstaff.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/lorine-niedecker-and-the-99/

http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/English_Literature/us_poetry/Niedecker/Niedecker_poem.html

http://boverijuancarlos.blogspot.com/2011/03/poemas-la-enfermedad-economica-del-pais.html