| dc.description.abstract | Lorine Niedecker began writing poems in the late 1920s from her home by the waters of Blackhawk Island, Wisconsin. This study examines her first associations with and empowerment through the Objectivists' new poetic methodologies of the early 1930s, and it critically examines, through a forty-year opus, her progressively more reflective work in tandem to her life-long effort of maintaining crucial ties with urban contemporaries, predominantly Louis Zukofsky. As a rural, female writer, on the edge of a disbanding group of disagreeable poets who were originally associated with the term, 'Objectivist,' which Zukofsky had coined for his 1931 issue of Poetry, Niedecker's work was often overlooked or pigeonholed as 'Regionalist,' despite the fact that her main supporters were from New York, Japan, and England. Niedecker's mostly small poems, with their 'deep trickle,' have undergone a resurgence of critical interest within the last decade or so, and this thesis bears witness, with prolonged critical analysis, to her life-span of lucent and rhythmic poems. They ebb and flow into and out of her daily life as a lowly paid copy-editor or hospital floor scrubber, and they emanate, with unparalleled wit and lyricism, through the sometimes dreadful, 'darkinfested' winter or amidst the ecstasies of spring by the marshes of Lake Koshkonong.--Abstract. | |
