Lorine Niedecker

1903 –
1970
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Lorine Niedecker was born on May 12, 1903, and raised in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Her father, Henry Niedecker, was a commercial fisherman who rented hunting and fishing cabins. She attended Beloit College for two years but returned home to help take care of her deaf and ailing mother, Theresa. 

Niedecker lived most of her life on Blackhawk Island, along the banks of the Rock River near Lake Koshkonong in Wisconsin. She worked as a library assistant from 1928 to 1930, as a writer of the Wisconsin Guide in the Federal Writers’ Project from 1938 to 1942, as a stenographer and proofreader for Hoard’s Dairyman, and as a cleaning woman at Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital from 1957 to 1962. 

Niedecker’s early work was most influenced by Imagist and Objectivist poets, including Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. The latter was an early mentor and a lifelong correspondent. The influence of the Objectivist and Imagist schools gradually became less pronounced in Niedecker’s poems as she developed her own idiosyncratic voice and style. She wrote most often about the world around her on Blackhawk Island—its history, her neighbors and family, and the local flora and fauna. In 1968, she published North Central (Fulcrum Press).

Niedecker’s poems did not receive wide critical attention until late in her life. In part, this was due to her geographic and cultural isolation. She was also naturally reticent; many of her relatives and neighbors did not know that she wrote poetry. Her first collection, New Goose (J. A. Decker, 1946), was published by a very small press, and her second, My Friend Tree (The Wild Hawthrone Press, 1962), was published in England.

Because of her often austere, vivid imagery, and spare language, many critics and readers have pointed to Niedecker's affinities with writers such as William Carlos Williams as well as with early Chinese and Japanese poets. She described her poetry as a “condensery.” Although much of her work was overlooked during her lifetime, three additional volumes of poetry have been published since her death, in addition to her selected and collected poems: The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker (North Point Press, 1985); From This Condensery: The Complete Writings of Lorine Niedecker (Jargon Society, 1985); and Blue Chicory (The Elizabeth Press, 1976).

Niedecker died on December 31, 1970.