
Radical Vernacular
Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place
Elizabeth Willis(Editor)
University of Iowa Press
Published on 1. September 2008
Book
Hardback
328 pages
978-1-58729-698-7 (ISBN)
Description
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.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Iowa
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
Illustrations
Weight
600 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-58729-698-7 (9781587296987)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Elizabeth Willis teaches poetry and poetics at Wesleyan University. Her books of poetry include The Human Abstract, Turneresque, and Meteoric Flowers. She was raised in Wisconsin.