Angles (Nov 2015)
Condensation and Displacement in the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker
Abstract
In this essay I explore the manifestations of condensation and displacement, the two major mechanisms identified by Freud in his study on Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, throughout the poetry of Lorine Niedecker. I begin by examining the implications of Niedecker’s definition of her poetics as an art of “condensery,” starting with her idiosyncratic handling of the suffix, a mere distortion of common usage that remains compatible with language being a matter of joint ownership. Phenomena of condensation are also at work in the changes that Niedecker observes in the rock formations of the Lake Superior region and records in North Central, conflating geological and human time, and translating those processes into compound nouns which, though they seemingly erase linear syntactical relations, do not serve essentializing purposes, reducing instead the distance between words and things in the manner of Deleuzian incorporeal events. Following the same logic, punning on the word “compound” allows Niedecker to draw the lineaments of a non-capitalist intertextual economy in which symbolic interest is generated by borrowing, notably from Shakespeare’s own metapoetic puns. Such plays on words are where Niedecker’s art of condensation comes closest to Freud’s analysis of wit. Indeed, some of her poems involve semantic shortcuts or humorous double-entendres analogous to those described by Freud, while consistent with the above mentioned logic of the event. Niedecker’s technique is most reminiscent of metaphysical conceit, however, when she tackles the immediate historical context of the Cold War. Poetic “condensery,” in this particular instance, proves instrumental in displacing human conflict towards the scene of the textual agon. I suggest that the poet’s handling of displacement in her poems on the threat of nuclear “obliteration” also allows her to settle gendered literary disputes between Niedecker and Zukokfsky, and thereby question the agency of the Lacanian symbolic Other who, as it is called upon to authorize or invalidate certain lexical choices, also exposes its own failure to guarantee the subject’s utterances and being.
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