Lorine Niedecker

Lorine Faith Niedecker (English: pronounced Needecker) (May 12, 1903 – December 31, 1970) was a Wisconsin poet and the only woman associated with the Objectivist poets. She is widely credited for demonstrating how an Objectivist poetic could handle the personal as subject matter.

Niedecker was born on Black Hawk Island near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin to Theresa (Daisy) Kunz and Henry Niedecker and lived most of her life in rural isolation. She grew up surrounded by the sights and sounds of the river until she moved to Fort Atkinson to attend school. The environment of birds, trees, water and marsh would inform her later poetry. On graduating from high school in 1922, she went to Beloit College to study literature but left after two years because her father was no longer able to pay her tuition. She devoted herself to caring for her ailing deaf mother, who was deeply depressed by her husband's flagrant affair with a neighbor. Niedecker married Frank Hartwig in 1928; the relationship lasted two years. Hartwig's fledgling road-construction business foundered during the onset of the Great Depression while Lorine lost her job at the Fort Atkinson Library. The two separated in 1930 but were not legally divorced until 1942.

Niedecker's earliest poetry was marked by her reading of the Imagists and Surrealists. In 1931 she read the Objectivist issue of Poetry. She sent her poems to Louis Zukofsky, who had edited the issue. This was the beginning of what proved to be an important relationship for her development as a poet. Zukofsky suggested sending them to Poetry, where they were accepted for publication. Niedecker then found herself in direct contact with the American poetic avant-garde. Near the end of 1933, Niedecker visited Zukofsky in New York City for the first time and became pregnant with his child. He insisted that she have an abortion, which she did, although they remained friends and continued to carry on a mutually beneficial correspondence following Niedecker's return to Fort Atkinson.

From the mid-1930s, Niedecker moved away from surrealism and started writing poems that engaged more directly with social and political realities and on her own immediate rural surroundings. Her first book, New Goose (1946), collected many of these poems.

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