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Of all the political poetry written in the 1960s, perhaps no single poem packed more punch per word than Lorine Niedecker's highly compressed "J. F. Kennedy after the Bay ofPigs." First published in 1967, and included the following year in Niedecker's collection North Central, here it is as it first appeared in print:
J. F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs
To stand up-
black-marked tulip
not snapped by the storm
"I've been duped by the experts"
-and walk
the South Lawn
(Niedecker 1967, 53)
How best to decipher the utterance at the center of this poem? Answers may vary, as will interpretations of this famously enigmatic work. This much seems certain: in appropriating a speech act implicitly attributed to Kennedy, Niedecker affiliates herself with his speech act even as she transforms it, inviting readers to claim and reframe her own poem in turn. What are the effects that spring from this mysterious poem? At the very least, Niedecker seems to work in an indeterminate mode whose ambiguities invite attempts at resolution, calling upon readers to exercise interpretative judgments grounded in ethical, historical, and political analysis.
Niedecker's first comment on Kennedy's role in the Bay of Pigs invasion came in a letter of May io, 1961, to Louis Zukofsky, in which she confessed: "I can't get over Cuba invasion and J. F. K. with the Republicans-that it turned out unsuccessful seems beside the point" (quoted in Penberthy 1993, 281). Viewed from the present day, Niedecker's chagrin at Kennedy's bipartisan adventurism strikes a tone likely to resonate with independent critics of the Obama administration. Yet Niedecker was slow to communicate her dismay with Kennedy to a wider reading public and it wasn't until 1967, more than three years after his assassination, that she sent the manuscript of "J. F. Kennedy after the Bay ofPigs" to Cid Corman (Faranda 1986,123), who published it in the October 1967 issue of Origin.1
Straddling the early and late 1960s, "J. F. Kennedy after the Bay ofPigs" also functions as a poem of our own times. Ostensibly a commentary on the Bay of Pigs invasion, it is perforce a commentary on the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath, which we live with even half a century later. As a poem of its...