SOURCE: DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Lorine Niedecker, The Anonymous: Gender, Class, Genre and Resistances.” Kenyon Review 14, no. 2 (spring 1992): 96-116.

In the following essay, DuPlessis discusses Niedecker's subtle role in the canon of female poets.

A poem is a peculiar instance of language's uses, and goes well beyond the [person] writing—finally to the anonymity of any song.

Robert Creeley¹

Anonymity was a great possession. … We can still become anonymous. …

Virginia Woolf²

Lorine Niedecker is an American woman poet, born in 1903, who lived most of her sixty-seven years in rural Wisconsin on the confluence of a lake and a river, in a small cabin like those which her father, then she, managed for vacationing fishermen. She was married twice, once very briefly in her late twenties, and then in the last seven years of her life, but she was more deeply marked by her bonds to her parents. She died...