During this year’s Decatur Book Festival, second-year Brittain Fellow John Harkey read from a book he recently edited: “Homemade Poems,” Lorine Niedecker’s handmade book of poems from 1964. Lorine Niedecker was an American “objectivist” poet who explored conjunctions between plain, vernacular language and experimental techniques such as disjunction, wordplay, and radical condensation.
Harkey discussed Niedecker’s commitment to living in a small, rural Wisconsin town; the importance of space, sound and “smallness” to her poetry; and the ironies of reading aloud the poems of an artist who refused to give public readings of her own work.
Harkey’s reading was sponsored by Atlanta’s eXperimental Writer’s Asylum (XWA), and took place at The Seen Gallery in Decatur.
Share articles with your friends or follow us on Twitter!
About Christine Hoffmann
Christine Hoffmann (PhD University of Arkansas, MFA Art Institute of Chicago) studies the shifting standards for credibility and utility that develop inside post-Gutenberg and post-digital rhetorical environments. Her scholarly work has been published in College Literature, the CEA Critic, PLL, the CEA Forum and, somewhat randomly, Slayage: the Online Journal of Buffy Studies. A few short stories can be found in Make magazine, Eclectica and Loose Change. She also blogs regularly on TECHStyle, the forum for digital pedagogy and research by the Georgia Tech Brittain Fellows. Christine looks forward to connecting the teaching of multimodal composition to her research into rhetorics of struggle, cultures of collecting, and the advantages of copious expression.
During this year’s Decatur Book Festival, second-year Brittain Fellow John Harkey read from a book he recently edited: “Homemade Poems,” Lorine Niedecker’s handmade book of poems from 1964. Lorine Niedecker was an American “objectivist” poet who explored conjunctions between plain, vernacular language and experimental techniques such as disjunction, wordplay, and radical condensation.
