SOURCE: Penberthy, Jenny. “‘The Revolutionary Word’: Lorine Niedecker's Early Writings 1928-1946.” West Coast Line 26, no. 1 (spring 1992): 75-98.

In the following essay, Penberthy discusses Niedecker's attempts to publish her poems.

In a letter to Cid Corman in the 1960s, Lorine Niedecker recalled: “When I was 18 … I didn't quite know, yet I think I was vaguely aware that the poetry current [1921] was beginning to change” (12 December 1964; “Between Your House and Mine” 49). Ten years later that intuition would find its most persuasive articulation in Louis Zukofsky's “Objectivist” issue of Poetry, February 1931. This single issue ignited Niedecker's career as poet.

Only four poems survive from the period before her encounter with the Zukofsky-edited issue of Poetry: two highschool yearbook romps “Reminiscence,”¹ which she refers to later as an ode to Lake Koshkonong, and “Wasted Energy” which reveals an early start to her fascination with language and idiom); the Imagist-influenced “Transition” published in...