As the impulsive marriage testifies, Niedecker was by no means reclusive like Emily Dickinson, to whom she has often been compared. On the contrary, however bookish and intellectual she may have appeared to her friends and neighbours, she also seems to have inherited some of her father’s gregariousness and erotic energy. A loner in high school and later at Beloit, she especially loved being on the debating team. The early poetry reflects this dialectic between being and doing. Her poem “When Ecstasy is Inconvenient” (1930) begins sardonically with the words, “Feign a great calm; / all gay transport soon ends. / Chant: who knows – / flight’s end or flight’s beginning / for the resting gull”. But in the third stanza, the studied distance collapses: “Know amazedly how / often one takes his madness / into his own hands / and keeps it”.
Marjorie Perloff (on Margot Peters) on Lorine Niedecker.
