It is not entirely clear if Lorine Niedecker should be included with the original Objectivists or recognized as the movement’s first predecessor. In 1931 Zukofsky published an issue of Poetry magazine devoted to the Objectivists and Niedecker was so enthralled by the poetry, she mailed Zukofsky to express her enthusiasm and included a copy of one of her own poems. Zukofsky reciprocated the interest and a lifetime relationship began-- as friends, even lovers for a brief period early on, and fellow cohorts toward the aesthetics and principles of the Objectivist movement.

Though committed to the concept of words as objects, embodied with both literal and non-literal properties, Niedecker strayed from the Objectivists in that she was also influenced by French surrealism. Where a poet like Zukofsky tended to strive for clarity in his language, to coincide with perception, Niedecker preferred abstraction, replicating the convulsive movements of the mind in her poetry rather than the poem being a mode for clarification. Although, she always refrained from the poem being a vehicle for subjective expressionism and instead, to have qualities closer in relation to the dream state prior to being reduced to the personal.

The influence of the surrealists is particularly noticeable in Niedecker’s first poems, working from images that are encased within a loose syntax and illogical transitions. A strong resemblance with John Ashbery. However, in the 1940’s she began writing short poems that displayed Asian poetry as a significant influence and continued to do so until the end of her life. Niedecker also made a commitment of not allowing her poetry to be removed from her folk roots, as she was raised in Wisconsin and chose to remain there for her adult life-- almost entirely removed from the literary establishment. And a poet can never write outside of their personal local, which always becomes material for content. For Niedecker this included the natural world, Wisconsin's marshes, the dramatic changes in seasons known to the regions about the Great Lakes (along with one main street through town where sits a bank, a church, a bar and a neon sign). What resulted was a unique blend of poetry that was entirely modern and urban in its construction while also grounded in the cycles of the earth and with a faint background of back road Americana.

Your erudition
the elegant flower
of which

my blue chicory
at scrub end
of campus ditch

illuminates