SOURCE: Butterick, George F. “Ain't Those the Berries: The Writings of Lorine Niedecker.” Conjunctions 8 (1985): 225-38.

In the following essay, Butterick discusses Niedecker's use of space and language in From this Condensery and Granite Pail.

Her family's name was pronounced “kneedecker,” as has been preserved for us by Louis Zukofsky. She was shy to the quick. The husband she married when she was fifty-nine referred to her as a “knucklehead” about meeting people. He once got the “devil bawled out of him” when he told somebody in a tavern that his wife was a writer. “The second night I was with her … she whispered to me she was a poet—a poetess. She thought I might be angry about it.” He might just as well have thought she was whispering “pythonness.”

Not that there should be anything startling in her biography. Her favorite drink, when taken out, was a...