SOURCE: Faranda, Lisa Pater. “Composing a Place: Two Versions of Lorine Niedecker's ‘Lake Superior’.” North Dakota Quarterly 55, no. 4 (fall 1987): 348-64.

In the following essay, Faranda discusses the changes and base similarities Niedecker makes in her revision of “Lake Superior”.

Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970) is most widely known for the short, highly condensed poems she wrote during the forty-odd years of her writing career. For most of her career she saw herself “on the periphery” of the objectivist movement, sharing with its advocates a regard for the “hard, clear image, the thing you could put your hand on,” and the integrity of the poem as an object with its own irresistible demands.¹ However, four years before her death she began writing the long poems and sequences which are her most prodigious works. The first of her experiments with long forms was “TRAVELERS: Lake Superior region,” and this poem, along with...