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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.

“Elizabeth Willis and her colleagues have made a significant new contribution to the study of an important American poet.”—Stephen Fredman, University of Notre Dame
"Niedecker studies, while not in their infancy, have much room for development. Radical Vernacular will figure large in this growing field."—Lisa Samuels, University of Auckland

Hardcover

ISBN-13
9781587296987
Retail price
$42.50

eBook, 120 day

ISBN-13
9781587297762
Retail price
$10.00

eBook, Perpetual

ISBN-13
9781587297762
Retail price
$35.00

Publication Details

Publication Details

Publication Date
04/25/2008
Pages, art, trim size
334 pages, 4 photos, 6 x 9 inches
Edition
1st