Convergences: Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, and the transatlantic avant-garde

English: Shared Futures conference, Newcastle Civic Centre, 5-7 July 2017 Convergences: Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, and the transatlantic avant-garde Neal Alexander, Aberystwyth University The 1960s were a key decade for creative exchanges between British and American poetry, particularly experimental poetry that took its bearings from European and Anglo-American modernisms. At the beginning of the decade, Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960), introduced Beat poetry, the New York poets, Black Mountain poetics, and the San Francisco Renaissance to a wide readership. Donald Allen, ed., The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (New York: Grove Press, 1960). The work of these American poets had a galvanising effect on the other side of the Atlantic, contributing much of the impetus for what has become known as the ‘British Poetry Revival’, which had its moment between 1960 and 1975. Eric Mottram, ‘The British Poetry Revival,’ in Robert Hampson and Peter Barry, eds., New British poetries: The scope of the possible (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 27, 39; Keith Tuma, Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 48, 52; Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents 1950-2000 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), pp. 38, 41. But the 1960s were also the scene of another kind of revival, for it was in this decade that a significant number of late modernist poets – most of whom had been either silent or invisible for decades – returned to print with what were often major works. Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), p. 40. These include: H.D.’s Helen in Egypt (1961); George Oppen’s The Materials (1962) and Of Being Numerous (1968); Louis Zukofsky’s All (1965) and “A” 13-21 (1969); Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1966); and Lorine Niedecker’s North Central (1968). It is also worth recalling that the first collected edition of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos was published by New Directions in 1964. Many of these late modernist poets acted as mentors or exemplars for younger British and American poets, but they were encouraged and energised in their turn by their younger peers. In this short paper I want to consider this transatlantic poetic conjuncture by sketching the relationship between two late modernist poets, Bunting and Niedecker, from their early involvements with Objectivist poetry in the 1930s to their publication of late works with Fulcrum Press, one of the most important small presses associated with the British Poetry Revival. Bunting and Niedecker met only once, at Niedecker’s home on Black Hawk Island, Wisconsin, in June 1967. Niedecker recalled the meeting as ‘a high point’ in her later life, and the two poets had a high regard for each other’s work; Bunting said of Niedecker: ‘No one is so subtle in so few words’. Margot Peters, Lorine Niedecker: A Poet’s Life (Madison, WN: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), p. 217; Richard Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting (Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2013), p. 425. The convergence between their poetic careers began more than three decades earlier, however, with the publication in 1931 of an ‘Objectivist’ issue of Poetry edited by Louis Zukofsky. Bunting was the only British poet to feature in this issue, which was intended to showcase the work of younger American poets, among them Zukofsky, Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Charles Reznikoff. Burton Hatlen, ‘A Poetics of Marginality and Resistance: The Objectivist Poets in Context,’ in Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, eds., The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1999), p. 37. Niedecker, who was already writing poems influenced by Imagism and Surrealism, read this issue of Poetry in the Fort Atkinson public library in February 1931, and ‘there found direction for her restless talent’. Jenny Penberthy, Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 18; Peters, Lorine Niedecker, pp. 34-6. She wrote to Zukofsky six months later, beginning a correspondence that would continue until her death in 1970, and which was enormously important to them both as poets. Penberthy, Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, pp. 7-8. Bunting was also a life-long friend and correspondent of Zukofsky’s, having been introduced through Pound in 1930, so that Zukofsky was a sort of mediating figure between Bunting and Niedecker, bringing them both into shared orbits and giving them news of each other long before they ever met. Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us, pp. 162-6. Indeed, Zukofsky sent Niedecker a copy of Bunting’s Poems (1950) as a Christmas present in the year of its publication and almost certainly introduced Bunting to Niedecker’s work. Penberthy, Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, pp. 172, 174, n. 4. Although Bunting and Niedecker are best considered as ‘outriders’ of the core group of Objectivist poets (Oppen, Rakosi, Reznikoff, Zukofsky), and neither was wholly comfortable with the label ‘Objectivist’, Zukofsky’s ideas on poetry and poetics had a significant influence on them both. Mark Scroggins, ‘Objectivist Poets,’ in Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, eds., A History of Modernist Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 383; Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us, pp. 199-200; Peters, Lorine Niedecker, p. 65. For instance, his stress on the importance of ‘economy of presentation’ and ‘precision of style’ finds a strong response in Bunting’s compressed lyricism and also in Niedecker’s haiku-like miniatures. Louis Zukofsky, ‘An Objective,’ in Prepositions: The collected critical essays (London: Rapp & Carroll, 1967), pp. 22, 23. Indeed, in his lecture on Zukofsky, Bunting recommends Niedecker’s poetry for its ‘clear voice’ and ‘minimum of words’. Basil Bunting, ‘Zukofsky,’ in Basil Bunting on Poetry ed. Peter Makin (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 161. Bunting and Niedecker also share Zukofsky’s interest in the relationship between poetry and music, and each poet displays a mastery of complex patterns of sound and rhythm. ‘The sound of the words is sometimes 95% of poetic presentation’, writes Zukofsky, a principle that finds its echo both in the ‘sublime / slime- / song’ of Niedecker’s ‘Paean to Place’ and in the bull’s ‘descant on Rawthey’s madrigal’ that opens Bunting’s Briggflatts. Louis Zukofsky, A Test of Poetry (New York: Jargon / Corinth Books, 1964), p. 58; Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 265; Basil Bunting, The Poems of Basil Bunting ed. Don Share (London: Faber and Faber, 2016), p. 41. The post-war phase of late modernist poetic production (1945-1975) to which both Bunting and Niedecker contribute has three defining characteristics. First, there is the prevalence of longer forms – sequences, series, mid-length and long poems; second, is the complexity of the geographical imaginations to which such poems give expression, particularly through a concern with the poetics of place; and third, late modernist poetry tends to foreground local and regional places, by contrast with the strongly metropolitan character of early and ‘high’ modernism. Malcolm Bradbury, ‘The Cities of Modernism,’ Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism1890-1930 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 96; Raymond Williams, ‘Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism,’ in The Politics of Modernism (London: Verson, 2005), pp. 37-48. On the significance of local and regional places for modernist poetry, see Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, eds., Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Neal Alexander and James Moran, eds., Regional Modernisms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1946-58), David Jones’s The Anathémata (1952), W.S. Graham’s The Nightfishing (1955), and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems (1960-75) each exemplify all three of these features in different ways. So, too, do Bunting’s Briggflatts and Niedecker’s North Central. Bunting’s regional modernism is characterised both by the imaginative centrality of Northumbrian landscapes and cultural paradigms in his poetry, and by the refraction of such local attachments through a self-consciously international modernist poetics. His representations of place often turn on themes of dislocation and journeying, foregrounding vagrancy as a characteristically modern mode of being-in-the-world. See Neal Alexander, ‘The Idea of North: Basil Bunting and Regional Modernism,’ in Alexander and Moran, eds., Regional Modernisms, pp. 200-21. By comparison, Niedecker’s poetic figurations of Black Hawk Island and the Rock River seem more emphatically grounded or rooted in a home place, except that that place is itself an amphibious terrain of marshes, lakes, and islands: My life by water— Hear spring’s first frog or board out on the cold ground giving Niedecker, Collected Works, p. 237. As these lines illustrate, Niedecker’s speakers are identified with, and emerge from the places in which they live to the extent that self and place begin to merge with one another, and are co-constituting. Moreover, like Bunting, Niedecker’s poems often give expression to distinctive (Northern, Mid-Western) regional identities that are deeply informed by the human and natural histories associated with particular places. On Niedecker’s ‘critical regionalism’, see Michael Davidson, On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), pp. 75-91. Robert Sheppard argues that Olson’s poetry and theories of projective verse had a major influence on the way in which British poets such as J.H. Prynne, Allen Fisher, and Iain Sinclair conceived of geography, history, and place. Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying, p. 58. I would suggest that Olson’s role has been somewhat exaggerated, and that the examples of Bunting and Niedecker, Williams, Graham, and Jones for such a neo-modernist poetics of place deserves further consideration. Another way in which Bunting’s and Niedecker’s work had an impact upon the British Poetry Revival concerns the fact that their major works – Briggflatts and North Central, respectively – as well as editions of their collected poems were all published in the late 1960s by Fulcrum Press, ‘the biggest of the small presses’ on the British poetry scene of the time. Peter Barry, Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Cambridge: Salt, 2006), p. 15. Fulcrum was founded in 1965 by Stuart and Deirdre Montgomery to publish quality editions of work by modernist-influenced British and American poets, including Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood, and Tom Raworth, Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder. Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying, p. 39. Fulcrum’s first publication was Bunting’s First Book of Odes (1965), swiftly followed by Loquitur (1965) and Briggflatts in 1966. A volume of Bunting’s Collected Poems would follow in 1968. For a poet who had been all-but-invisible for more than three decades, this sudden burst of publications had the effect of significantly boosting Bunting’s profile and attracting serious critical attention to his work for the first time. Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us, pp. 397-403. Bunting probably recommended Niedecker’s work to Stuart Montgomery, who wrote to Niedecker in 1967 and visited her at Black Hawk Island in the following year, not long after Fulcrum had published North Central. Peters, Lorine Niedecker, pp. 216, 234-5. Fulcrum would go on to publish Niedecker’s My Life by Water: Collected Poems in 1969, by which stage over half of the books Niedecker published in her lifetime had appeared through British presses. Peters, Lorine Niedecker, p. 247; Peter Middleton, ‘The British Niedecker,’ in Elizabeth Willis, ed., Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), p. 247. Unfortunately, this flurry of publishing successes did not last long, and the conjuncture to which it gave expression was a fleeting phenomenon. Niedecker died of a cerebral haemorrhage in December 1970; and, although he lived until 1984, Bunting wrote very few new poems after Briggflatts. Fulcrum Press was forced to fold by the mid-1970s as a result of a legal dispute with the poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. Peter Barry, ‘The Fall of Fulcrum,’ (2007), Centre for Contemporary Poetry: http://contempoetry.com/Centre/Seminars_files/Contempo%20(P%20Barry%20-%20paper).pdf [accessed 12 June 2017]. For a few years, though, Fulcrum was the point of convergence not just for the separate – though interrelated – poetic careers of Bunting and Niedecker, but also for the larger currents of British and American poetry, late modernism and neo-modernism to which their work contributed. These various convergences, and the contexts of publication and reception they created in the 1960s, are of significant importance to the literary history of the twentieth century and warrant further attention.