Last summer I dropped my phone in the Payette River. There was no saving it, unlike the retrieved paycheck (“I knew a clean man”) sun-dried and flattened in Leaves of…
Contemporaries Essays
Stephanie Burt
There’s material in Niedecker’s body of work from which anybody could learn: concision, close observation, humility before objects of study — people — who change, and surprise us, and let us…
Michelle Niemann
Immersion in Lorine Niedecker’s work — especially her New Goose project of the 1930s and ’40s, but also the (not very) long poems she wrote in the 1960s — gave…
Brandon Menke
It is the silences Niedecker authorizes. Between syllables comes the reprieve of silence — a generative darkness suggestive of the understory and the waters it shades. It is a space…
Hannah Brooks-Motl
I have been immensely influenced. And yet, this way of writing, the floaty suspended action of a phrase or word, took me a long time to arrive at. I’ve been…
Sarah Dowling
I always think that the only poem by Niedecker that I have memorized is “I married.” But, it’s not memorized—every time I get to the part about which body part…
Tiff Dressen
I write to you from fault lines for Lorine Niedecker I write to you from fault lines 2,000 miles away this western edge of the north american plate I grew…
Kelly Hoffer
What do I hope to learn from Lorine Niedecker? Duration, intensity. The making of a portraiture faithful to desire and knowledge’s recesses. An economy that is strict but also generous….
Introducing “The Marsh”
In the course of editing the essays for “Locating Lorine Niedecker,” Sarah and I felt we were presented with a fabulous opportunity. Only rarely does one assemble the collective talents…
In Search of Anti-Work Time: Mapping the Anti-Serial Impulse
In 1976, Carol Lopate wrote a remarkable essay about daytime television and the daily rhythms of housework. “The noise of the game shows’ shrieks and laughter injects the home with…