“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…
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Contemporaries Essays, Locating Lorine Niedecker
Contemporaries Essays, Locating Lorine Niedecker
Poet’s Poet: Hoa Nguyen Alongside Lorine Niedecker
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, Locating Lorine Niedecker
Pumps and Plovers: Lorine Niedecker and the Critique of Cybernetic Ecology
In 1962, after more than fifteen years of living without running water, Lorine Niedecker finally got plumbing.1 The installation of pipes, toilet, and sink was a major event in the…
Contemporaries Essays, Locating Lorine Niedecker
Niedecker’s New Goose: Settler Colonialism on the Cusp of the Great Acceleration
In the opening poem of her 1946 collection New Goose, Lorine Niedecker pulls her readers into the marsh and situates us in a very specific position — that of the…
Contemporaries Essays, Locating Lorine Niedecker
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…
Contemporaries Essays, The Marsh
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…
Contemporaries Essays, The Marsh
Sasha Steensen
Colorado Diamond If geological time is time times time,we have mined itnearby:the continent’s fifth largest diamond. Just 45…
Contemporaries Essays, The Marsh
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…
Contemporaries Essays, The Marsh
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…
Contemporaries Essays, The Marsh
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…