“Superior, the lake”: Whittier, Longfellow, Niedecker

This article considers a number of texts centred on Lake Superior. It begins with a petition inscribed on birch-bark, and brought to Washington by a delegation of Chippewa chiefs in January 1849, which was later reproduced in Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s Conditions and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States. The petition matters for this article because of this shift from document to artefact, and because of the material on which the lines representing Lake Superior were inscribed. The poems considered in the essay cultivate the thought that place supplies the substance of its own representation. Birch bark, an eagle feather, and a bird-turned-mineral materialise a complex of politics and sentiment centred on Lake Superior which is mobilised in the work of Whittier and Longfellow, and which persists in residual form, I suggest, in a serial poem by Lorine Niedecker. Place, too, has a second-order significance for the article’s argument in that these metonyms of place signify variously according to textual circumstance, that is, depending on their own positions in and movements between archive, newspaper, anthology, and documentary poem.