Contemporaries Essays

Colorado Diamond If geological time is                          time times time,we have mined itnearby:the continent’s fifth largest diamond. Just 45…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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….

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…