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Lorine Niedecker’s “Black Hawk held:”

This week, you will be learning about the 20th century American poet Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970). Niedecker, lived much of her life in relative obscurity in rural Wisconsin, was a significant poet working in the modernist tradition, and her poetic output shows a striking and singular blend of surrealist and ‘Objectivist’ influences. Very little of her ouevre was readily available in the United States at the time of her death, but she has come into greater appreciation in the subsequent decades, thanks in large part to the attention of Cid Corman, her literary executor, who published The Granite Pail, a selected poems in 1996, and the scholar Jenny Penberthy, who edited her Collected Works, which was published by the University of California Press in 2002.

Historical Context: The “Objectivists”

As a poet, Niedecker is often described as an ‘Objectivist’ — a group of poets named and loosely assembled in the early 1930s by the poet Louis Zukofsky. Niedecker was not published in either of the two “Objectivist” publications edited by Zukofsky, but was attracted to the group, and to Zukofsky in particular, after reading the February 1931 (The “Objectivists”) issue of Poetry which Zukofsky had edited in her local library. This encounter prompted Niedecker to write directly to Zukofsky sometime in mid-late 1931, and Niedecker’s first submission to Poetry magazine, dated November 5, 1931, mentions her having been encouraged to do so by Zukofsky. Niedecker’s first letter to Zukofsky marked the commencement of an intense, lifelong friendship, developed through frequent correspondence for nearly 40 years.[1]
Late in 1933, Niedecker traveled to New York City for an extended stay with Zukofsky, during which time she met Charles Reznikoff, George and Mary Oppen, and (probably) William Carlos Williams. In August 1934, Zukofsky wrote to T.C. Wilson, a young graduate student at the University of Michigan who was editing an issue of Bozart-Westminster along with Ezra Pound, indicating that he “[c]onsider[ed] it a grave error not to have included her in Objectivists Anthology, but she has travelled some since 1932.”[2] Later in life, Niedecker met both Carl Rakosi and Basil Bunting, who in particular had been a longtime admirer of her writing.[3]
Zukofsky was the primary theorist of the ‘group’, and would later write in the 12th movement of his long poem “A”: “I’ll tell you / About my poetics— / An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music”. As a mathematical expression, Zukofsky’s poetics might be expressed like this: [latex]\int_{music}^{speech}[/latex]. Niedecker’s own version of this feeling might be found in her poet “Wintergreen Ridge,” where she wrote “Nobody, nothing/ever gave me/greater thing// than time/unless light and silence//which if intense/makes sound”. As a group, the poets presented as “Objectivists” shared several poetic, political, and musical affinities with Niedecker, and she is often considered one of their members, largely on the strength and duration of her friendship with Zukofsky.

Publication history:

This short poem was probably written in 1941 and was included in Niedecker’s first book, New Goose, published in 1946 by the Press of James A. Decker.  One of Niedecker’s favorite poems, she also included it her second book, My Friend Tree published in 1961 by The Wild Hawthorn Press[4] in Edinburgh, Scotland as well as both of the collected editions of her work that appeared during her lifetime: T&G: The Collected Poems, 1936-1966, published in 1969 by Jonathan Williams’ The Jargon Society, and My Life By Water: Collected Poems 1936-1968, published by Stuart and Deidre Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press in London in 1970.

Black Hawk held: In reason
land cannot be sold,
only things to be carried away,
and I am old.

Young Lincoln’s general moved,
pawpaw in bloom,
and to this day, Black Hawk,
reason has small room.

Post-poem quiz:

Read the poem aloud, carefully, at least twice. Once you’ve read the poem in its entirety, view and interact with the annotations provided to delve deeper into your understanding of the work. Respond to the questions posed in the annotation layer and then complete this short post-poem quiz.

Additional Learning Material:

Sarah Day reads some of Niedecker’s autobiographical poetry in a short film with footage from her life and home place:

Several friends of Lorine Niedecker discussing Niedecker’s poem “Foreclosure” at her cabin on Blackhawk Island. The video includes a discussion of the “Black Hawk Held” poem:

  1. Niedecker and Zukofsky conducted one of the deepest, most fruitful, and longest lasting epistolary friendships among writers of which I know. They destroyed much of their correspondence, but a significant portion of the surviving letters from Niedecker were collected and edited by Jenny Penberthy in Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931–1970, published in 1993 by Cambridge University Press. Fragments of Zukofsky’s side of the correspondence are held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. ↵
  2. I am grateful to Jenny Penberthy for bringing this letter to my attention in September 2018. The rest of the letter is full of detailed, though qualified, praise for Niedecker, including the assertion that Niedecker was “the only woman in the U.S.A. as far as I know now writing poetry, with the exception of Marianne Moore – and promising more of a base to build on than Marianne. Suggest that you take something by her whether you like it or not, or whether E.P. [Ezra Pound] likes it or not — such exceptions should be made sometimes so as not to risk dogma.” Zukofsky’s letters to Wilson are held in the T.C. Wilson papers at Yale University. ↵
  3. Carl Rakosi visited Lorine Niedecker and her husband Al Millen at their home on Blackhawk Island in March 1970 while he was serving at the Writer-in-Residence at UW-Madison, writing that “moment I walked in her door, she was opposite of recluse: outgoing, of good cheer, very lively. Time flew. Delightful afternoon” (Carl Rakosi Papers, Mandeville Special Collections, UCSD, MSS 355, Box 4, Folder 4). Though Bunting and Niedecker did not meet in person until June 1967, when Bunting and his daughters visited Niedecker at her Blackhawk Island home, they had known each other through correspondence, and for a short time Bunting had explored the possibility of going into the carp-seining business with Niedecker’s father Henry. Niedecker wrote to Cid Corman on June 15, 1966: “Basil Bunting–yes, I came close to meeting him when he was in this country in the 30’s. Some mention at the time of his going into the fishing business (he had yeoman muscles LZ said and arrived in New York with a sextant) with my father on our lake and river but it was the depression and at that particular time my dad felt it best to ‘lay low’ so far as starting fresh with new equipment was concerned and a new partner – the market had dropped so low for our carp – and I believe BB merely lived a few weeks with Louie without engaging in any business. He’s probably a very fine person and I’ve always enjoyed his poetry” (Faranda, “Between Your House and Mine“: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960-1970, 88). ↵
  4. The Wild Hawthorn Press was operated by the iconoclastic Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. ↵
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