“Trim Green Thought”: A Public Discussion of Lorine Niedecker’s fiction and poetics

Jenny Penberthy, Kate Colby, and Flora Coker will engage in a public discussion of Lorine Niedecker’s published fiction and poetics with emphasis on Niedecker’s ‘The evenings automobiles’

Jenny Penberthy’s research and writing have focused on the poetry of Lorine Niedecker. She edited Niedecker’s poems—New Goose (Listening Chamber, 2003), Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works (University of California Press, 2002), and Harpsichord & Salt Fish (Pig Press, 1991) —and her letters—Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931-1970(Cambridge University Press, 1993)—along with a collection of essays and letters, Lorine Niedecker: Woman & Poet (National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine, 1996). In 2016 she edited Kenneth Cox: The Art of Language for Flood Editions in Chicago. Currently, she is working on a collection of previously unpublished Niedecker letters and on a book about Fulcrum Press.

Kate Colby’s nine books of poetry and essays include I Mean, Dream of the Trenches, and, most recently Reverse Engineer. She has received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, the Dodd Research Center at University of Connecticut, and Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room. She grew up in Massachusetts, where she helped found and establish the Gloucester Writers Center, and currently lives in Providence. “I have written at length about Oppen, Creeley, Stein, Olson, William Carlos Williams and other adjacent poets, so writing about Niedecker was overdue. I grew up in New England, which shapes and deeply informs my work, so I have a particular interest in other poets who write less about than from place.”

“Flora Coker was a founding member of Theater X. For 35 years she kept company with the likes of actors John Schneider, Willem Dafoe, Deborah Clifton, Victor DeLorenzo, John Kishline, Marcy Hoffman and Rick Graham. She has played in nearly 200 productions over the course of her acting career, but Coker describes herself as a quiet person.” —Jackie Reid Dettlof