From the secret notes I must tilt upon pressure execute and adjust1 One doesn’t possess poetry or a poet. Poet’s poet: does this mean a famous unknown celebrated by other relative unknowns?…
Contemporaries Essays
Another Long Stretch of Geologic Time: Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior”
“Probably all it means is another long stretch of geologic time before anything really gets printed. The only time the lava flows is those moments while the poems are being…
Locating Lorine Niedecker: Found Among Friends
On a brilliant August day in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin — a micropolis of 12,489, as of the last census, referred to succinctly by locals as Fort — we park across…
Sasha Steensen
Colorado Diamond If geological time is time times time,we have mined itnearby:the continent’s fifth largest diamond. Just 45…
Kerri Webster
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…
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…