I’ve been looking at unusual formats of late & one of the strangest to come across my door is Lorine Niedecker’s Paean to Place, co-published by Woodland Pattern & Light and Dust on the occasion of Niedecker’s 100^th birthday. It’s a standard enough book from the outside – but its heart beats to a different printer, if not drummer.

 

The book is holographic, but not in the poem-as-calligraphic-art-object we might be familiar with from the work of Phil Whalen or Robert Duncan. Rather, Paean to Place is a fairly straightforward 6-by-9 inch trade press book that reproduces a version of this famous poem Niedecker gave to her friend Florence Dollase in 1969, hand copied into an odd-shaped little “autograph” book, 5½ inches wide & 4¼ inches high. Although the paper in the original ran, as Karl Young notes in a lively & useful afterword, “a gamut or pastel colors in random order,” the paper of this edition is the whitest of whites. Acknowledgement of the original page size is made only with a horizontal line across the page (at the 4¾-inch mark, a full half inch lower than the original). In his afterword, Young makes a case for why the book was printed this way, though frankly I don’t buy the argument that an odd-shaped book necessarily damages the taller texts next to it – even standard book sizes vary considerably in any poetry book collection. And I disagree also with his assertion that Niedecker’s “penmanship seems exemplary according to the standards of her generation.” The Palmer Method had thoroughly infiltrated American curricula by the time Niedecker was in school. Rather, this seems the ordinary handwriting of a reasonable human being in her mid-60s, not so inscrutable as, say, James Joyce, but hardly apt to get even a passing grade on a fifth-grade cursive assignment. Since Light and Dust has been good enough to put the original manuscript itself on-line – here you can see the page color & get a sense (still imperfect, I think) of the page size – you can judge for yourself. Click on the page image & it will take you to the next page. Like Michael Waltuch’s online edition of Robert Grenier’s Sentences, it’s a great way to read a work.

 

So these are just quibbles. The real question, it seems to me, is does this version illuminate or detract from the poem itself, not how does it adhere to some standard of replication I have in my head – tho I concede I have it – as to what a holographic reproduction ought to entail? Especially with Jenny Penberthy’s marvelous edition of the Collected Works still quite fresh & new. The news on this front is very good indeed. Paean to Place re-presents (hyphen definitely intended) the poem in an entirely new & transformative light. The text functions, as I presume Niedecker’s original did, by placing each five-line stanza alone on the right-hand page, which visually – and intellectually – is very different from the (relatively) crowded run-on printing of the Collected Works. Thus the holographic edition gives us a 41-page text, interspersed with an equal number of blank left-hand pages, where the version in the Collected takes just nine pages.

 

A more radical change, however, occurs in how the holographic edition handles what the Collected treats as internal divisions, or individual poems. In the Collected, the 41 stanzas are divided into 13 clusters – one might call them poems. In the holographic edition, each stanza is radically distinct, but the work doesn’t appear to divide further into individual sections or poems. To my ear, it brings the sound organization of individual stanzas forward – Niedecker is one of the great musical poets & this for me is all to the good. Young, in his afterword, writes that “The page breaks in this edition make the silences and the major disjunctures of the work more apparent and more palpable.” I’m not sure that’s quite how I hear it, tho. Rather, it shifts them around, accentuating the space between one stanza & the next, but de-emphasizing whatever conceptual space exists between “sections.”

 

One result is to accentuate Niedecker’s formalism – she is, after all, the Objectivist most directly influenced by Louis Zukofsky. Her five-line stanza is impeccable & remarkable. One could profitably read this poem for no other purpose than to see the different ways in which a five-line free verse structure could be composed, how the weight can shift from line to line. The poem at this level is a study in dynamism that is as good as it gets:

 

Fish

        fowl

               flood

     Water lily mud

My life

 

by itself is very different – profoundly so – from the same stanza seen as running directly into

 

in the leaves and on water

My mother and I

                      born

in swale and swamp and sworn

to water

 

Indeed, set apart on its own, the rhyme of water is radically different in this stanza. The text casts the capitalization of My differently as well, making it an even larger quality than, say, the motherness of mother. The end-rhyme of third & forth line of both stanzas is an organizing principle that Niedecker moves away from gradually in this work – one can still hear her rhyming water & sora as well as tittle & giggle several stanzas later – in fact the first of those two captures for my ear the dialect in this poem.

 

Karl Young, tho I’ve disagreed with him a few times here, offers some superb close readings in his afterword & I won’t try to duplicate his effort. I did note – for the first time really – that the sea is a presence in this poem, one of Niedecker’s most personal, which would have surprised more I think if I hadn’t already noticed its presence active in the writing of a more recent Wisconsin poet, Stacy Szymaszek. Bi-coastal boy that I am, the idea that the sea lurks so palpably in the upper Midwest jars me, I must admit.

 

There is also, on the cover – also visible on the web – a photo of the poet as a young girl – maybe ten – that is worth noting. That intent look, which can be seen in all of her mature photos, is already firmly in place.