Researching Lorine Niedecker

This page presents resources for anyone who is interested in conducting further research into Lorine Niedecker’s life or poetry.

Niedecker Bibliography

The Friends of Lorine Niedecker maintains a searchable database of articles, PhD dissertations, blog posts and essays published about Lorine Niedecker. Please send additional resources that should be included in this bibliography to contact@lorineniedecker.org.

Click on the + sign to the left of a database entry to access bibliographic information.

wdt_ID Author First Name Author Last Name Title Pub Year Doc Type Publisher Rights Editor Journal Title Article Title Volume Issue Pages URL Notes Keyword
477 Jonathan Williams Jargon society folder Book
479 American Poetry: the Twentieth Centurey 2000 Article The Library of America 2 421-440
480 Gregory S. Kinzer Catalysis: Experimental Poetry and the Sciences 2006 PhD Dissertation State University of New York at Buffalo
481 Jonathan Skinner Ecopoetics: Outsider Poetries of the Twentieth Century 2005 PhD Dissertation State University of New York at Buffalo
482 Ruth Louise Jennison The Zukofsky Era: An Objectivists’ Modernism 2004 PhD Dissertation University of California Berkeley
483 David Giles Scott The Physiology of ‘Song’: Sound, Meaning, and Politics in ‘Objectivist’ Poetics 2003 PhD Dissertation Stanford University
484 Matthew Grant Jenkins Totally Bound: Tracing a Levinasian Ethics from Objectivism to Language Poetry 1999 PhD Dissertation University of Notre Dame
485 David Douglas Charbonneau Finding the Middle Ground: Modern Regionalism and Midwestern Poetry, 1930-2003 2003 PhD Dissertation University of Wisconsin Madison
486 Elizabeth Anne Savage Innovation as Interrogation in American Poetics 1998 PhD Dissertation Duquesne University
487 George Leslie Hart The Poetics of Postmodernist and Neoromantic Nature Poetry 1997 PhD Dissertation Stanford University
488 Carole Mae Beard Lorine Niedecker: The Pulse of Her Poems 1996 PhD Dissertation Bowling Green State University
489 Catherine Jean Tufariello Language Experiments: Whitman, Dickinson, and the Poetics of Allusion 1994 PhD Dissertation Cornell University
490 Michelle Ann Gibson ‘Stuff That Once Was Rock’: Critical Treatments of the Work of Lorine Niedecker 1993 PhD Dissertation Ohio University
491 Jefferson Paul Hansen The Edge of the Local Pragmatist Aesthetics and Objectivist Poetry 1993 PhD Dissertation State University of New York at Buffalo
492 Tandy Jennifer Sturgeon A Critical Edition of the Collected Poems of Lorine Niedecker 1990 PhD Dissertation University of Wisconsin Madison
493 Joseph Mark Conte Serial and a Priori Form in Postmodern Poetry 1988 PhD Dissertation Stanford University
494 Jenny Penberthy Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky: Her Poems and Letters 1985 PhD Dissertation University of British Columbia
495 Lisa Pater Farada “Between Your House and Mine”: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960 to 1970 1983 PhD Dissertation Dissertation, University of Iowa
496 John Timpane 2003 Review The Philadelphia Inquirer In one place, a poet’s every vivid line C7 Review of “Collected Works.”
497 David Preece 2003 Review Oyster Boy Review Dear Lorine 17 Fall 63-64 http://www.oysterboyreview.com/archived/17/reviews/PreeceDNiedecker.html Review of “Collected Works.”
498 Linda Wagner-Martin 2003 Review American Book Review Poet’s Poet August Review of “Collected Works.”
499 Stacy Levine 2003 Review The Stranger The Unknown Objectivist: the Life and Death of Lorine Niedecker 28 Review of “Collected Works.”
500 August Kleinzahler 2003 Review London Review of Books This Condensery 25 11 26-28 Review of Niedecker’s “Collected Works” and “New Goose” and Kenneth Cox’s “Collected Studies in the Use of English.”
501 Geeta Sharma Jensen 2003 Review Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Centenary Sheds Light on Poet 1E-5E Review of “Collected Works.”
502 Elizabeth Arnold 2003 Review Chicago Review On Lorine Niedecker 49 1 98-108 Review of “Collected Works.”
Author First Name Author Last Name Title Pub Year Doc Type Publisher Rights Editor Journal Title Article Title Volume Issue Pages URL Notes Keyword

Lorine Niedecker Archival Material

A variety of archival material from Niedecker’s life and writing is held by research institutions across the United States. The most significant of these collections are described below.

Niedecker collection at the Hoard Historical Museum (Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin)

The largest collection of Lorine Niedecker materials are held by the Hoard Historical Museum in her home town of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. The Hoard Historical Museum also has a permanent exhibit dedicated to Niedecker in an upstairs room.

Some of the material held by the Hoard Museum was digitized by University of Wisconsin-Digital Collections in 2007 with support from a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant and is available on the UWDCC’s website as the “Historic Fort Atkinson” collection. This online collection includes 125 individually catalogued documents, 80 photographs, and roughly 20 audio/video recordings. The Digital Public Library of America has provided a useful interface for working with this archive which allows the collection results to be refined and sorted.

In addition to the manuscript and audiovisual collection, since 2024 the Hoard Historical Museum has housed all the surviving books from Niedecker’s personal library as some booklets and papers previously available at the Dwight Foster Public Library relating to Niedecker’s writings and to her life in the community. In 2013, Margot Peters prepared a printable bibliography of the titles in Niedecker’s library.

Scholars can access a searchable database of the titles included in her library as well as her notes and marginalia (transcribed by Tom Montag) below:

wdt_ID Author First Name Author Last Name Title Pub Year Doc Type Publisher Rights Editor Journal Title Article Title Volume Issue Pages URL Notes
1 John Milton L’Allegro, Il penseroso 1900 Book Ginn and Co., N.Y. Notes on inside front cover and first page of book:

– “No. 7 Oshkosh, Wisconsin”

– “St. Peter’s High School, Oshkosh, Wisconsin”

– “Helena Gerdes”

– “T. Herkel Artist”

– “10 cents”

– “St. Peter’s High School”

– “John McCormick”

– “Rose Wuech”

– “Wally Gerdes”



p. 1: Six words on page are underlined. “Zone, corn, cur” are written near line 11.



p. 2: Lines 25-36 are marked in the margin with the word “Memory” near. Line 41 has “X” and “Morn” in margin.



p. 3: Line 69 has “X” and “Morn” in margin.



p. 4: Three words on page are underlinied. “Noontide” in margin near line 90. “Afternoon” in margin near line 99.



p. 5: “X” and “end” in margin at line 114. “Hymen” checked in line 125 and “god of morning” written in margin.



p. 8: Lines 32-44 are bracketed in margin. Line 31 is check marked. “Choir of Angels Mem.” written in margin. Line 45 has “Companion” written near it. “Peace” in line 45, “Fast” in line 46, and “Contemplation” in line 54 have a “C” near them.



p. 25: In space at middle of page “[illegible] Begin Mon” is handwritten.



p. 28: “X” near the end of line 18.



p. 31: “X” in margin at top of page.



p. 39: Line 730 is marked in margin.



p. 54: Lines 131 & 132 are each marked with an “X.”



p. 55: Line 177 is marked with an “X.”



Notation on inside back cover: “p. 139-158.”
2 William Shakespeare The complete works of ____ 1924 Book Oxford Univ. Press, London
3 John Keats The poetical works of ____ 1925 Book Oxford Univ. Press, London
4 Bertrand Russell Selected poems of ____ 1927 Book The Modern Library, N.Y. This notation on Contents page: “No. 15 of blaze and bronze.”
5 Henry David Thoreau Walden or life in the woods 1927 Book Everyman’s Library, E.P. Dutton, N.Y. On slip of paper tucked between front cover and first page: “Of Thoreau – He chose to be rich by making his wants few. – Emerson”



Tucked between pp. 68-69 us a page from the New York Times Review of Books, May 6, 1962, with a column by J. Donald Adams called “Speaking of Books,” which commemorates the 100th anniversary of Thoreau’s death.
6 Edith Hamilton The Roman way 1932 Book W.W. Norton Co., N.Y.
7 Handbook of Marxism 1935 Book International Publishers Emile, Burns p. 7: Checkmark in table of contents next to XXIV. V.I. Lenin – What is to be done: Dogmatism and ‘Freedom of Criticism’ – Trade Union Politics and Social Democratic Politics.



p. 9: In table of contents page number 855 is boxed with pencil for item V.I. Lenin – ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: an Infantile Disorder.



p. 724: The end of a quote from Engels is marked in the margin “… whose purpose is to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power arising out of society, but placing itself above it, and increasingly separating itself from it, is the State.” Just below this quote, a sentence is marked in the margins with a double line ” The State is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.”



pP. 730-731: Quote by Kautsky is marked in the margin with “US?” – “… there are periods whedn the warring classes so nearly attain equilibrium that the State power, ostensibly appearing as a mediator, assumes for the moment a certain independence in relation to both.” Paragraph beginning “Such, we may add, is now the Kerensky government…” on page 730 is marked in margin. Paragraph beginning “In a democratic republic…” at top of page 731 is marked in margin. Seven lines beginning with “A democratic republic is the best possible…” in last full paragraph on paged 731 are marked in margin and have a question mark along side. This sentence is marked in margin and has two question marks along side: “We must also note that Engels quite definitely regards universal suffrage as a means of bourgeois domination.”



p. 732: Portion of a quote from Engels is marked boldly in margin: “We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity but is becoming a positive hindrance to production.”



p. 734: Four lines of a quote from Engel at top of page are marked in the margin, starting with: “…a State, is no longer necessary..” The following sentence is marked in the margin along with a question mark: “The current popular conception, if one may say so, of the ‘withering away’ of the State undoubtedly means a slurring over, if not a negation, of revolution.”



p. 738: Five lines beginning with “Eclecticism is substituted for dialectics…” are marked in the margin, with a question mark along side.
8 John Reed Ten days that shook the world 1935 Book The Modern Library, N.Y.
9 Horace The complete works of ____ 1936 Book Random House, Inc., N.Y.
10 John Blake Complete poetry of each 1941 Book Random House, N.Y.
Author First Name Author Last Name Title Pub Year Doc Type Publisher Rights Editor Journal Title Article Title Volume Issue Pages URL Notes

In 2016, several color photographs and books from Niedecker’s personal library were returned to the Hoard Historical Museum by a researcher who had borrowed them in the early 1970s. Ann Engelman of the Friends of Lorine Niedecker prepared an inventory of this accession.

While there is not a comprehensive digital finding aid for the Hoard Museum’s Niedecker-related holdings, the collection can be accessed by scholars and interested members of the public upon request. To arrange a visit to the Hoard’s Collection contact them by phone at (920) 397-9914 or by email at info@hoardmuseum.org.

Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin

The letters exchanged between Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky (1933-1970) are included in the Zukofsky collection held at the Harry Ransom Center [HRC] at the University of Texas, Austin. Many of the letters from Niedecker to Zukofsky in this collection were published by Jenny Penberthy in her Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931-1970. The Zukofsky collection also includes a large number of Niedecker manuscripts. The HRC has other Niedecker items too.

Finding Aid: search “Niedecker” in the Harry Ransom Center search box.

Berg Collection at the New York Public Library

The letters from Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman (1960-1970) are held in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. These were edited and annotated by Lisa Pater Faranda and published in “Between Your House and Mine”: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960 to 1970.

Finding Aid: search “Niedecker” in the Cid Corman collection of papers.

Poetry Collection at SUNY-Buffalo

Letters from Lorine Niedecker to Jonathan Williams (1956-1970) are included in the Jargon Society Collection, 1950-2008.

Letters from Lorine Niedecker to the English literary critic Kenneth Cox are included in the Kenneth Cox Collection, 1965-2005.

Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University

Three of Niedecker’s late manuscripts are included in the Niedecker Collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.