In this Book
- Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place
- Book
- 2008
- Published by: University of Iowa Press
summary
When Lorine Niedecker died in 1970, the British poet and critic Basil Bunting eulogized her warmly. “In England,” he wrote, “she was, in the estimation of many, the most interesting woman poet America has yet produced.”
Aesthetically linked with the New York Objectivist poets, Niedecker remained committed to her community in rural Wisconsin despite the grinding poverty that dogged her throughout her life. Largely self-taught, Niedecker formed attachments through her voracious reading and correspondence, but she also delighted in the disruptive richness of vernacular usage and in the homegrown, improvisational aesthetics that thrived within her immediate world. Niedecker wrote from a highly attenuated concern with biological, cultural, and political sustainability and, in her stridently modernist poems, anticipated many of the most urgent concerns in twenty-first-century poetics. In Radical Vernacular, Elizabeth Willis collects essays by leading poets and scholars that make a major contribution to the study of an important but long overlooked American poet.
This pathbreaking volume contains essays by seventeen leading scholars: Rae Armantrout, Glenna Breslin, Michael Davidson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ruth Jennison, Peter Middleton, Jenny Penberthy, Mary Pinard, Patrick Pritchett, Peter Quartermain, Lisa Robertson, Elizabeth Robinson, Eleni Sikelianos, Jonathan Skinner, Anne Waldman, Eliot Weinberger, and Elizabeth Willis.
Aesthetically linked with the New York Objectivist poets, Niedecker remained committed to her community in rural Wisconsin despite the grinding poverty that dogged her throughout her life. Largely self-taught, Niedecker formed attachments through her voracious reading and correspondence, but she also delighted in the disruptive richness of vernacular usage and in the homegrown, improvisational aesthetics that thrived within her immediate world. Niedecker wrote from a highly attenuated concern with biological, cultural, and political sustainability and, in her stridently modernist poems, anticipated many of the most urgent concerns in twenty-first-century poetics. In Radical Vernacular, Elizabeth Willis collects essays by leading poets and scholars that make a major contribution to the study of an important but long overlooked American poet.
This pathbreaking volume contains essays by seventeen leading scholars: Rae Armantrout, Glenna Breslin, Michael Davidson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ruth Jennison, Peter Middleton, Jenny Penberthy, Mary Pinard, Patrick Pritchett, Peter Quartermain, Lisa Robertson, Elizabeth Robinson, Eleni Sikelianos, Jonathan Skinner, Anne Waldman, Eliot Weinberger, and Elizabeth Willis.
Table of Contents
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- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-x
- Abbreviations
- p. xi
- Introduction
- pp. xiii-xxiii
- Natural and Political Histories
- Niedecker’s Grammar of Flooding
- pp. 21-30
- Writing Lake Superior
- pp. 61-79
- Sounding Process
- Darkinfested
- pp. 103-112
- Niedecker and Company
- Niedecker/Reznikoff
- pp. 183-187
- Lorine Niedecker: The Poet in Her Homeplace
- pp. 189-206
- The British Niedecker
- pp. 247-270
- Take Oil / and Hum: Niedecker / Bunting
- pp. 271-283
- Selected Bibliography
- pp. 285-294
- Contributors
- pp. 295-297
Additional Information
ISBN
9781587297762
Related ISBN(s)
9781587296987
DOI
MARC Record
OCLC
297117916
Pages
333
Launched on MUSE
2012-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
2008