Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931-1970
Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931-1970

Author: Jenny Penberthy

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1993-09-24

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9780521443692

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The forty-year correspondence between Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky is one of the closest and most productive in recent literary history. Beginning in 1931, the correspondence was tutelary but it quickly grew into a collaborative enterprise of emotional and artistic significance for both poets. This volume presents Niedecker's side of the correspondence. It opens with a substantial introduction tracing the life and work of Niedecker and how her relationship with Zukofsky influenced her poetry. At the same time Jenny Penberthy attempts to disengage Niedecker from her own myth of Zukofsky. She examines the emergence of Niedecker's quiet but rigorously experimental poetry: her rejection of hierarchies of genre, structure, and syntax, and her questioning of relationships among author, world, and text. Penberthy also reconstructs the early years of Niedecker's career, looking particularly at her surrealism and its impact on her poems. The book is not only about the impact Zukofsky had on Niedecker's work, it is also about a woman poet's struggle for recognition both within and without.

Lorine Niedecker
Lorine Niedecker

Author: Margot Peters

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2011-10-06

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0299285030

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Lorine Niedecker (1903–70) was a poet of extraordinary talent whose life and work were long enveloped in obscurity. After her death in 1970, poet Basil Bunting wrote that she was “the most interesting woman poet America has yet produced . . . only beginning to be appreciated when she died.” Her poverty and arduous family life, the isolated home in Wisconsin that provided rich imagery for her work, and her unusual acquaintances have all contributed to Niedecker’s enigmatic reputation. Margot Peters brings Lorine Niedecker’s life out of the shadows in this first full biography of the poet. She depicts Niedecker’s watery world on Blackhawk Island (near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin), where she was born and spent most of her life. A brief college career cut short by family obligations and an equally brief marriage were followed in 1931 by the start of a life-changing correspondence and complicated thirty-five-year friendship with modernist poet Louis Zukofsky, who connected Niedecker to a literary lifeline of distant poets and magazines. Supporting herself by turns as a hospital scrubwoman and proofreader for a dairy journal, Niedecker made a late marriage to an industrial painter, which gave her time to write and publish her work in the final decades of her life. During her lifetime, Niedecker’s poetry was praised by a relatively small literary circle, including Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Denise Levetov, and Allen Ginsberg. Since her death much more of her surviving writings have been published, including a comprehensive edition of collected works and two volumes of correspondence. Through Margot Peters’s compelling biography, readers will discover Lorine Niedecker as a poet of spare and brilliant verse and a woman whose talent and grit carried her through periods of desperation and despair. Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Letter Writing Among Poets
Letter Writing Among Poets

Author: Jonathan Ellis

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2015-01-13

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0748681337

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Examines letter writing among poets in the last 200 years. Poets discussed include Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley in the nineteenth century and Eliot, Yeats, Bishop and Larkin in the twentieth century. Divided into three sections--Contexts and Issues, Romantic and Victorian Letter Writing and Twentieth-century Letter Writing--the volume demonstrates that real letters still have an allure.

Lorine Niedecker
Lorine Niedecker

Author: Lorine Niedecker

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2002-05-23

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 052093542X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"The Brontës 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.

Short Form American Poetry
Short Form American Poetry

Author: Montgomery Will Montgomery

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2020-06-18

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1474476406

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A ground-breaking analysis of the short form lineage in twentieth-century American poetry Proposes a new genealogy of 20th century and contemporary American verse Contains in-depth discussion of key American poets and movements Will appeal to graduates and scholars in both the modernist and contemporary fieldsReading a century of American poetry through the prism of short form, this book analyses the centrality of an aesthetic of brevity to American modernist verse. It begins with Imagism and devotes chapters to William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, Robert Grenier and Rae Armantrout. Montgomery combines his larger argument, which takes issue with epic-driven narratives of Modernist poetry, with sensitive and original readings of numerous short and short-lined poems. Suggesting a reappraisal of key movements as objectivism, Black Mountain poetry and Language Writing, he opens new lines of discussion around the major poets of the period

Remainders
Remainders

Author: Margaret Ronda

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2018-03-20

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1503604896

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A literary history of the Great Acceleration, Remainders examines an archive of postwar American poetry that reflects on new dimensions of ecological crisis. These poems portray various forms of remainders—from obsolescent goods and waste products to atmospheric pollution and melting glaciers—that convey the ecological consequences of global economic development. While North American ecocriticism has tended to focus on narrative forms in its investigations of environmental consciousness and ethics, Margaret Ronda highlights the ways that poetry explores other dimensions of ecological relationships. The poems she considers engage in more ambivalent ways with the problem of human agency and the limits of individual perception, and they are attuned to the melancholic and damaging aspects of environmental existence in a time of generalized crisis. Her method, which emphasizes the material histories and uneven effects of capitalist development, models a unique critical approach to understanding the causes and conditions of ongoing biospheric catastrophe.

The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry
The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry

Author: Peter Howarth

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-11-10

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1139502328

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Modernist poems are some of the twentieth-century's major cultural achievements, but they are also hard work to read. This wide-ranging introduction takes readers through modernism's most famous poems and some of its forgotten highlights to show why modernists thought difficulty and disorientation essential for poetry in the modern world. In-depth chapters on Pound, Eliot, Yeats and the American modernists outline how formal experiments take on the new world of mass media, democracies, total war and changing religious belief. Chapters on the avant-gardes and later modernism examine how their styles shift as they try to re-make the community of readers. Howarth explains in a clear and enjoyable way how to approach the forms, politics and cultural strategies of modernist poetry in English.

Dictionary Poetics
Dictionary Poetics

Author: Craig Dworkin

Publisher: Fordham University Press

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 0823287998

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The new ways of writing pioneered by the literary avant-garde invite new ways of reading commensurate with their modes of composition. Dictionary Poetics examines one of those modes: book-length poems, from Louis Zukofsky to Harryette Mullen, all structured by particular editions of specific dictionaries. By reading these poems in tandem with their source texts, Dworkin puts paid to the notion that even the most abstract and fragmentary avant-garde literature is nonsensical, meaningless, or impenetrable. When read from the right perspective, passages that at first appear to be discontinuous, irrational, or hopelessly cryptic suddenly appear logically consistent, rationally structured, and thematically coherent. Following a methodology of “critical description,” Dictionary Poetics maps the material surfaces of poems, tracing the networks of signifiers that undergird the more familiar representational schemes with which conventional readings have been traditionally concerned. In the process, this book demonstrates that new ways of reading can yield significant interpretive payoffs, open otherwise unavailable critical insights into the formal and semantic structures of a composition, and transform our understanding of literary texts at their most fundamental levels.

The Zukofsky Era
The Zukofsky Era

Author: Ruth Jennison

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2012-07-30

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1421405296

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Scholars and students of modernism will find much to discuss in Jennison's theoretical study.--Mark Scroggins, author of The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky "The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory"

A Companion to Modernist Poetry
A Companion to Modernist Poetry

Author: David E. Chinitz

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-03-31

Total Pages: 626

ISBN-13: 111860444X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A COMPANION TO MODERNIST POETRY A Companion to Modernist Poetry A Companion to Modernist Poetry presents contemporary approaches to modernist poetry in a uniquely in-depth and accessible text. The first section of the volume reflects the attention to historical and cultural context that has been especially fruitful in recent scholarship. The second section focuses on various movements and groupings of poets, placing writers in literary history and indicating the currents and countercurrents whose interaction generated the category of modernism as it is now broadly conceived. The third section traces the arcs of twenty-one poets’ careers, illustrated by analyses of key works. The Companion thus offers breadth in its presentation of historical and literary contexts and depth in its attention to individual poets; it brings recent scholarship to bear on the subject of modernist poetry while also providing guidance on poets who are historically important and who are likely to appear on syllabi and to attract critical interest for many years to come. Edited by two highly respected and notable critics in the field, A Companion to Modernist Poetry boasts a varied list of contributors who have produced an intense, focused study of modernist poetry.