The Reserve of Poetry
This article offers a reading of American Objectivist poet Lorine Niedecker 1934 Next Year/, Or/ I fly my Rounds, Tempestuous. It is an artist’s book which never went into print and remained unpublished until it was included in the Complete Works by Jenny Penberthy in 2002. This heterogeneous body o...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Centre de Recherche "Texte et Critique de Texte"
2016-06-01
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| Series: | Sillages Critiques |
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| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/5161 |
| Summary: | This article offers a reading of American Objectivist poet Lorine Niedecker 1934 Next Year/, Or/ I fly my Rounds, Tempestuous. It is an artist’s book which never went into print and remained unpublished until it was included in the Complete Works by Jenny Penberthy in 2002. This heterogeneous body of poems forces us to face the material, visual and graphic dimensions of poetry. It sets poetry in the context of contemporary aesthetics and expectations as it connects poetry to an intermedial apparatus. Discovering Lorine Niedecker’s challenging poetic series means experiencing a form of combined reading-viewing of her writing on an erased central image. In its calendar form, Next Year /or/ I fly my rounds, Tempestuous addresses theoretical issues upfront: what are the matter and the material of a poem? I hypothesize that aesthetic catagories of art, non-art and anti-art, help account for the way an ordinary commonplace object —an anonymous readymade that is industrially produced in series—is turned into a poetical artefact through a process of de-aestheticization then of re-aestheticization that conspicuously maintains the constraints of poetry. This process emerges in the poet’s hand-writing on the erased cartouche. Writing on an erasure reveals the potentiality of graphy: hand-writing produces rather than re-produces the poetic subject. Hand-writing reveals the potential resistance of graphic matter to the material of the apparatus. I will also use a 1926 Sunlit Road Calendar which is quite close to the one appropriated by Lorine Niedecker. My point is not so much to unearth an Americana collectible that would express American popular culture in the 1920s but to give a measure of insight into the reserved violence of Lorine Niedecker’s aesthetic gesture. |
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| ISSN: | 1272-3819 1969-6302 |