Lorine Niedecker - Böcker

'The Brontes had their moors, I have my marshes,' Lorine Niedecker wrote of flood-prone Black Hawk Island in Wisconsin, where she lived most of her life. Her life by water, as she called it, could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene where she also made a home. Niedecker is one of the most important poets of her generation and an essential member of the Objectivist circle. Her work attracted high praise from her peers - Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Cid Corman, Clayton Eshleman - with whom she exchanged life-sustaining letters. Niedecker was also a major woman poet who interrogated issues of gender, domesticity, work, marriage, and sexual politics long before the modern feminist movement. Her marginal status, both geographically and as a woman, translates into a major poetry. Niedecker's lyric voice is one of the most subtle and sensuous of the twentieth century. Her ear is constantly alive to sounds of nature, oddities of vernacular speech, textures of vowels and consonants. Often compared to Emily Dickinson, Niedecker writes a poetry of wit and emotion, cosmopolitan experimentation and down-home American speech.This much-anticipated volume presents all of Niedecker's surviving poetry, plays, and creative prose in the sequence of their composition. It includes many poems previously unpublished in book form plus all of Niedecker's surviving 1930s surrealist work and her 1936-46 folk poetry, bringing to light the formative experimental phases of her early career. With an introduction that offers an account of the poet's life and notes that provide detailed textual information, this book will be the definitive reader's and scholar's edition of Niedecker's work.

Lake Superior is a compilation of writings around Lorine Niedecker's poem of the same title--strata that inform the poem's ecological and historical resonance. Lorine Niedecker was a major American poet often connected with the Objectivists. She lived in Wisconsin from 1903 to 1970. From "Lake Superior Country": Every bit of you is a bit of the earth ...So--here we go. Maybe as rocks and I pass each other I could say how-do-you-do to an agate. "Niedecker [is] one of the most important and original poets of this past century."--August Kleinzahler, London Review of Books Table of Contents: "Lake Superior" by Lorine Niedecker Lake Superior Country, a journal by Lorine Niedecker "Niedecker and the Evolutional Sublime" by Douglas Crase Three Letters from Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman Excerpt from Back Roads to Far Towns by Basho and trans. by Cid Corman "Tour 14A" from Wisconsin, A Guide to the Badger State "On a Monument to the Pigeon" by Aldo Leopold Excerpt from the writings of Pierre Esprit Radisson Excerpt from the writings of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft