"The Brontës had their moors, I have my marshes," Lorine Niedecker wrote of flood-prone Black Hawk Island in Wisconsin, where she lived most of her life. Her life by water, as she called it, could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene where she also made a home. Niedecker is one of the most important poets of her generation and an essential member of the Objectivist circle. Her work attracted high praise from her peers--Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Cid Corman, Clayton Eshleman--with whom she exchanged life-sustaining letters. Niedecker was also a major woman poet who interrogated issues of gender, domesticity, work, marriage, and sexual politics long before the modern feminist movement. Her marginal status, both geographically and as a woman, translates into a major poetry. Niedecker's lyric voice is one of the most subtle and sensuous of the twentieth century. Her ear is constantly alive to sounds of nature, oddities of vernacular speech, textures of vowels and consonants. Often compared to Emily Dickinson, Niedecker writes a poetry of wit and emotion, cosmopolitan experimentation and down-home American speech. This much-anticipated volume presents all of Niedecker's surviving poetry, plays, and creative prose in the sequence of their composition. It includes many poems previously unpublished in book form plus all of Niedecker's surviving 1930s surrealist work and her 1936-46 folk poetry, bringing to light the formative experimental phases of her early career. With an introduction that offers an account of the poet's life and notes that provide detailed textual information, this book will be the definitive reader's and scholar's edition of Niedecker's work.

Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works

NIEDECKER, Lorine

Penberthy, Jenny

Biographies & Memoirs

University of California Press

Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931–1970

The forty-year correspondence between Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky is one of the closest and most productive in recent literary history. Beginning in 1931, the correspondence was tutelary but it quickly grew into a collaborative enterprise of emotional and artistic significance for both poets. This volume presents Niedecker's side of the correspondence. It opens with a substantial introduction tracing the life and work of Niedecker and how her relationship with Zukofsky influenced her poetry. At the same time Jenny Penberthy attempts to disengage Niedecker from her own myth of Zukofsky. She examines the emergence of Niedecker's quiet but rigorously experimental poetry: her rejection of hierarchies of genre, structure, and syntax, and her questioning of relationships among author, world, and text. Penberthy also reconstructs the early years of Niedecker's career, looking particularly at her surrealism and its impact on her poems. The book is not only about the impact Zukofsky had on Niedecker's work, it is also about a woman poet's struggle for recognition both within and without.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Cambridge University Press

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. Lorine Niedecker lived most of her life (1903-1970) on Blackhawk Island, Wisconsin. Her poetry was formed by her early encounter with Surrealism and the Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine. In the mid-1960s she recalled for Kenneth Cox that "there was an influence from transition and from surrealistes that has always seemed to want to ride right along with the direct, hard, objective kind of writing. The subconscious and the presence of the folk, always there."LORINE NIEDECKER: WOMAN AND POET addresses the ambition of Niedecker's poetry and poetics. The volume includes letters, memoirs, and essays, covering all four decades of her writing career. Among the letters, those Niedecker wrote to Mary Hoard and Harriet Monroe define her early poetics. Memoirs by Jerry Reisman, Edwin Honig, and Vivien Hone extend our understanding of her life in the 1930s and 1940s. Essays by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Marjorie Perloff, Peter Nicholls, Peter Quartermain, Michael Heller, Kenneth Cox, Douglas Crase, Donald Davie, Lisa Pater Faranda, Gilbert Sorrentino, and others, provide authoritative readings of Niedecker's work.

Lorine Neidecker: Woman & Poet

Arts & Literature

Natl Poetry Foundation

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