THE NATIONAL POETRY
FOUNDATION
LORINE NIEDECKER: WOMAN AND POET
Jenny Penberthy, Editor
Lorine Niedecker was the only woman among the Objectivist poets.
Marginalized by her cultural isolation in rural Wisconsin, by
poverty, and by her position as a woman writer, Niedecker dedicated
her life to working out the implications of a rigorous poetics that
she developed in the 1930s, in an ongoing dialogue with Zukofsky.
Since her death in 1970, her work has won increasing critical
recognition. A new edition of her collected poems, now under
preparation, will certainly confirm her position as one of the great
poets of our century.
This volume, the 14th in NPF's Man/Woman and Poet Series, offers
the first comprehensive biographical, critical, and bibliographic
overview of Niedecker's career. The biographical materials include an
important memoir by Jerry Reisman, who knew Niedecker and Louis
Zukofsky during the 1930s, along with other memoirs by friends of
Niedecker; three substantial groups of previously unpublished
letters; and essays by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jane Augustine, and
Marjorie Perloff on the way Niedecker's experiences as a woman writer
affected her work.
Critical essays in the volume include contributions, most written
specifically for this volume, by Peter Nicholls, Peter Quartermain,
Michael Heller, Jeffrey Peterson, Richard Caddel, Gilbert Sorrentino,
Kenneth Cox, Douglas Crase, Joseph M. Conte, Donald Davie, and Lisa
Pater Faranda. The volume concludes with an annotated bibliography of
critical and scholarly works on Niedecker from 1947 to 1995, prepared
by Tandy Sturgeon. The book is illustrated with many previously
unpublished photographs.
1996 439 pages
Cloth $25.00 (0-943373-38-7)
Paper O.P. (0-943373-39-5)