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…
Contemporaries Essays
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…
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….