Necessity is an interesting test of a poet. It reveals itself most clearly in those projects that have almost no chance whatsoever of succeeding, where, in fact, pursuing the project is inconvenient, potentially even embarrassing.

 

Or worse. One could, I think, make a case that Gunslinger functionally destroyed Edward Dorn as a poet & that after its completion there was little left that he could do. It’s more complicated than that, of course, always — in Dorn’s case you could point to the drug use & a difficult personality as equally isolating factors — but all the extenuating circumstances can’t erase, finally, the fact that something compelled the man to take on a project that could only have been impossible.

 

Dorn is an extreme case, though. Many poets seem driven to pursue projects from time to time that are inevitably problematic, but hardly to such effect. To some degree, it’s a test of their integrity as artists. It’s not a bad gauge of a writer to see at just what (and how) he or she chooses to fail.

 

I’ve come across two such noble shipwrecks in the past week or so, both projects that I really like in theory, but can’t imagine how they could possibly work. One of these is Lorine Niedecker’s 19-part serial poem entitled “Thomas Jefferson.”

 

The problem with the Niedecker’s Jefferson is one of the question & function of knowledge in the poem. Can one write usefully from “book learning,” or, for that matter, any mode of secondary material? That’s a question that haunts more than a few writers — I see it, for example, in the poetry of Simon Perchik, many of whose poems start as riffs off of the photographs in The Family of Man, that sentimentalist celebration from the 1960s. The question, which in drama predates Shakespeare, is entangled throughout the work of other recent poets who’ve used research as source material for writing, sometimes thrillingly, as with much of Charles Olson’s Maximus, sometimes chillingly, as in the work of Charles Reznikoff, and at times even ploddingly, for which I nominate the writing of Paul Metcalf as my example. Indeed, Niedecker herself used research elsewhere in her poetry, bringing in material she obtained while working in the WPA on Wisconsin: A Guide to the Badger State and similar projects.

 

The ghost behind Niedecker’s Jefferson is not the third American president, but rather the eighth, Martin Van Buren. Ezra Pound’s Van Buren Cantos is at one level is what authorizes Niedecker’s use of Jefferson, as it does the use of historical materials in Williams, Zukofsky, even the early Eliot. Yet, on another level, Niedecker’s series is Pound’s rebuke — where Pound’s pres wanders about giving homespun lectures on the evils of debt, Niedecker’s Jefferson is all about the personal: about migraines, his daughters, Maria Cosway, his slaves, his debts, how he walked. Only one of the poem’s sections overtly addresses policy as its primary point, and that trade with Portugal.

 

The poem both does & doesn’t work, or rather, it functions in sections variously. The first —

 

My wife is ill!

And I sit

          waiting

for a quorum

 

— is reminiscent of a well-formed haiku, but the third —

 

Elk Hill destroyed —

Cornwallis

carried off 30 slaves

 

Jefferson:

Were it to give them freedom

he’d have done right

 

— groans with obviousness. And, frankly, there’s more of the latter than the former in this sequence.

 

Did Niedecker intend the poem as an answer to Pound, himself the author of Jefferson and/or Mussolini? It’s plausible, certainly. Niedecker appears to have been a Henry Wallace Democrat, her politics consistent overall with most of the other Objectivists, many of whom — the notable exception is the spy Bunting — were far enough left to work in or alongside the CP. But the Objectivist position with regards to “socialist writing” was always one of deep conflict &, I suspect, some personal recrimination. Oppen’s great political work Of Being Numerous doesn’t emerge until he returns from his Mexican exile, leaving at last his Stalinist past behind. Indeed, while in the Party, he doesn’t write at all. Of the rest, only Zukofsky publishes more or less continuously and demonstrates a political commitment in his poetry throughout, even as it shifts from incorporating Marx into “A”-9 to eulogizing JFK thirty years hence.

 

“Thomas Jefferson” is not a political poem or, if it is, achieves that status precisely through its argument for the personal, an anticipation of the central tenet of second-wave feminism. It’s not so much that the poem doesn’t “work” as it is that Niedecker won’t let it. The moments of the obvious, these little moral tableaus that undercut the poem’s force as a work of literature contrast precisely with the specificity of the particular, which is the predominate feature of the personal — it’s all, as Williams once put it, things. But because Niedecker is writing in some sense about the president of the particular — the Bill of Rights is aimed directly at the protection of the singular against the majority & against the power of the state — but is writing about him abstractly as a man, the crux of this poem is a knot that Niedecker can never untie.