Niedecker’s New Goose: Settler Colonialism on the Cusp of the Great Acceleration, in Locating Lorine Niedecker, edited by Brandon Menke and Sarah Dimick, Post45: Contemporaries, February 29, 2024.
This essay focuses on Lorine Niedecker’s New Goose, a collection of poems that she sent to press in 1944 and that was published in early 1946. Its publication history straddling the ’45 in post-45, New Goose gives us a glimpse of Niedecker thinking at the crucial historical moment of the midcentury, poised just at the start of what we now understand as the Great Acceleration. Niedecker writes from the experience of scraping by in the Depression-era small town of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, but also questions the very premise that land can be bought and sold. I suggest that New Goose, which continually asks “How to keep the earth,” can also see the Great Acceleration coming—the exponential “speed-up,” as Niedecker puts it, across domains such as production, consumption, urbanization, and population growth that resulted in the postwar economic boom and its rising greenhouse gas emissions and environmental devastation.
New Goose returns again and again to homes: to owning or losing houses, to living in inadequate dwellings, and to shelters that shield people from violence and the violence that secures such shelters. In the poems set in Wisconsin, these themes are often intertwined with the possession of land or its loss, sale, or theft. Niedecker details, with nuanced irony, the attempts of more or less poor white settlers to keep homes. My reading reveals Niedecker’s criticism of settler colonial home-making and its bumpy acceleration into the consumerism that would speed up even more after the end of World War II. Niedecker does not romanticize rural life, but documents it—and she does not exempt herself from her critique, interrogating her own participation in both settler colonialism and the “speed-up.”
Michelle Niemann 