SOURCE: Middleton, Peter. “Lorine Niedecker's ‘Folk Base’ and Her Challenge to the American Avant-Garde.” In The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, pp. 160-88. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Middleton explores Niedecker's place within American avant-garde poetry and analyzes folk elements within the language of her poems.

What is the effect of placing speech in a poem? What is the effect of placing a poem in a collection of poems by other poets? These ordinary cultural acts of displacement are taken for granted by most writers and readers, but for the Objectivist poet Lorine Niedecker they represented highly conscious acts alien to her everyday world. Although her fellow Objectivists were marginalized by the literary world for much of their careers, they mostly lived and worked within the metropolitan cultures where their avant-garde poetry was read. She spent almost all...