simultaneously beloved and overlooked

April 30, 2024 1:26 AM

Even as stars among her contemporaries have faded into relative obscurity, Niedecker's poetry pitched resolutely between — between avant-garde experimentalism and ethnopoetics, between the gnomic and the manifest — has sustained, across the decades, stalwart devotion. Her position within the canon of twentieth-century American modernism may seem to be in flux, shifting between various contexts — Objectivism and ecopoetics, white settler colonialism, geological and geopolitical history, the artistic legacies of the New Deal and the Popular Front, midcentury feminism, Thoreauvian hermeticism transplanted to the Midwest. Her work can feel both elusive and profusive, her poetic evolution traced across fugitive volumes produced by tiny presses and now appearing in Selecteds and Collecteds rife with textual variations. In our attempts to locate Lorine Niedecker, we do not seek to pin her down but rather to let loose the frustrating delights and joyful contradictions of her art. from Locating Lorine Niedecker by Brandon Menke and Sarah Dimick

Poet's Poet: Hoa Nguyen Alongside Lorine Niedecker by Hoa Nguyen
Another Long Stretch of Geologic Time: Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior” by Sasha Steensen
Pumps and Plovers: Lorine Niedecker and the Critique of Cybernetic Ecology by Samia Rahimitoola
Niedecker’s New Goose: Settler Colonialism on the Cusp of the Great Acceleration by Michelle Niemann
Cleaning Women: Occupational Health and Broken Solidarities by Sarah Dimick
Rueful Proximities: Lorine Niedecker, Queer Affection, and Lyric Drag by Brandon Menke
The Marsh by et. al.

Lorine Niedecker, previously

posted by chavenet (2 comments total)

What an interesting woman. I had never heard of her before.
posted by Czjewel at 7:34 AM on April 30 [1 favorite]

Driving through my town, I am reminded of her poetry daily as I pass 3 poetry walls full of Lorine Niedecker's words (2 more completed since farmerd's comment in 2016). The river is high this time of year and I think of her cabin out on Blackhawk Island (pictures of the cabin are on the website of the Friends of Lorine Niedecker) and the regular flooding of that area. Her family moved to town for a while during her teenage years and lived across the street from the Rock River. It's so nice to sit on my front porch (a few blocks away from the Niedeckers' house in town), listen to the birds, and watch the sunset's light on the river. I had not heard of her before I moved to this small town, but I'm so glad I get to experience reminders of her work in my everyday life.
posted by catdapperling at 11:15 AM on April 30 [1 favorite]