Lorine Niedecker's Lake Superior Resonates in New Contexts

At Ploughshares, Rachel Edelman extends her obsession with geologic inquiry to write about Lorine Niedecker and the Anthropocene. Niedecker "treats research and perception like a geologist treats a rock, as a concrete observation around which a narrative coheres," writes Edelman. An excerpt from this glorious read:

It’s rare to find a complete, preserved account of the earth from any given period in time. Erosion erases the record. You have to piece together the evidence from whatever artifacts remain. While “Lake Superior” was originally published in 1968 in England, Niedecker’s work captured a new interest from feminist scholars in the early 2000s. In 2013, Wave Books published Lake Superior: Lorine Niedecker’s Poem and Journal Along with Other Sources, Documents, and Readings. This slim, resplendent volume traces the poem’s origins in a form akin to the poem’s own nonsequential chronicle of the lake.

The book begins with a clean, airy printing of “Lake Superior.” Within the texts that follow, Wave intersperses facsimiles of Niedecker’s typescripts, ending the book with her handwritten geology notes. Each facsimile is visually arresting; the dark background of the approximated typing paper is inlaid into Lake Superior’s stark white page, linking this volume’s pages with the physical act of writing and the world which Niedecker so acutely observed.

Niedecker began gathering material for “Lake Superior” when she worked as an editor at the WPA’s Federal Writers Project. She contributed historical, folkloric, and scientific research to the guidebook Wisconsin: A Guide to the Badger State (1941), in which “Trip 14A” was first published. The reprinted selection from the guidebook highlights place names in small caps, emphasizing the artifacts of language Niedecker selected for the poem...

Read on at Ploughshares.