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….
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Contemporaries Essays, The Marsh
Contemporaries Essays, The Marsh
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…
Contemporaries Essays, The Marsh
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…
Contemporaries Essays, The Marsh
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…
Contemporaries Essays, The Marsh
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…
Anti-Work Aesthetics, Contemporaries Essays
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…
Anti-Work Aesthetics, Contemporaries Essays
Working Hard or Hardly Working? Gig-Work and the Gimmick in The Beautiful Bureaucrat
“Has evolution really managed to culminate in this? This spoon, this cup, this plate; us, here.”1 Helen Phillips’ The Beautiful Bureaucrat documents the brief period during which its protagonist, Josephine…
Anti-Work Aesthetics, Contemporaries Essays
Shadows of the Occupation: Wendy Trevino’s “Sonnets for Brass Knuckles Doodles” and Nonprofit Epistemology
“The same ‘reason’ I thought I could help change the world is the ‘reason’ I thought the sonnet form would lead to a ‘conclusion.'” — Bernadette Mayer, author’s note to…
Anti-Work Aesthetics, Contemporaries Essays
“Unsevered is Not a Word”: Anti-work Beyond the Office in Severance
Severance is one of the most uncompromising anti-work shows to appear on TV, turning office comedy cringe to explicit horror. A nightmare masked as fantasy, Severance asks: what if we…
Anti-Work Aesthetics, Contemporaries Essays
False Premises: Tabitha Lasley’s Sea State
Tabitha Lasley’s Sea State — a memoir so unreliable that it appears dishonest, so thieving it has been clubbed into a series of “backdoor memoirs” — traffics in the oily,…