Bringing poetry to the public in Wisconsin

– Nicholas Gulig: In daughter light like altar’s song, another year upends its hybridized epiphany.

Every night I dream my mouth around a plastic stone and sing.

These are the roots that clutch, and this is the empty jar of their dominion, wilding my sight.

Awake again, a god I don’t believe in alerts me to the purple shadow cast across the kitchen counter by a spoon.

Love like an even number, I count the days until I’m future.

Found geography, my crooked grammar.

Tell me in another language we are home.

[gentle music] [typewriter clicking] When I saw the “Welcome Poets” sign for the first time above the diner in Niedecker’s hometown, how could I have known the way the state where I was born would hold us?

Living in Fort Atkinson, I started teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, trying in my own way as best I could to give to others what others had given me.

It’s a transcendent experience, and I wanna argue that I think it happens too when we read a poem that really, really works for us, is that we become possessed by it.

I’m just in the moment of the poem, or in the moment of the aftermath of the poem.

Poetry, I tell my students, is what the mind becomes when the music that a language is replaces ordinary speech.

[child laughing] [birds singing] And shows you differently.

And for the first time, the world that ordinary speech obstructs.

– Poet’s Voice: “Fish, fowl, flood.”

[wind blowing] [gulls calling]

– Nicholas: The gift of the poem is the world that happens after.

In more ways than I can name, Lorine Niedecker’s work became a world for me by opening the door to a life and place I never once imagined.

As a young kid in the early ’90s, writing poems and making books at Kinko’s with my friends, how could I have known I’d come to spend my life that way?

That years later, in what is, I hope, the middle of my life, I’d be selected to become the Poet Laureate of the state where I was born.

[static] – Journalist 1: We will meet the new State Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, who hails from Eau Claire.

– Journalist 2: Nicholas Gulig is the Poet Laureate of Wisconsin.

– Journalist 3: Congratulations on being named the state’s tenth Poet Laureate.

– Journalist 4: Without any further ado, Nicholas Gulig, our current poet laureate of Wisconsin.

– Nicholas: Being named to the position felt surreal…

– Journalist 5: Author of North of Order …

– Nicholas: …and brought with it a level of public attention I wasn’t used to.

Because writing is so often solitary, almost secretive.

And because, like Niedecker, I work in relative isolation in a small one-room cabin that I built in my backyard.

Being a poet involves a turning inward and away.

[soft jazz music playing] And yet, on the other, to be the Poet Laureate of a state requires that a writer live and think beyond themselves.

The position is one of service.

Niedecker’s words and legacy do for me today… Of moving in the public sphere from one city to another.

Her work and its legacy handed my state back to me.

[steady music] Since accepting the position, I’ve seen more of Wisconsin than I had in the 40-odd years prior.

Some days, it felt I all but lived in libraries and conference centers, at universities and bookstores.

Which the place where I was born began to feel like home.

Most weekends, I was away.

And in that time spent traveling the state, I came to feel that poetry at its best breathes life into communities, because poetry is, in essence, a deeply communal act.

So I’ve been able to, I’ve been able to write again, which is…

It may be that a person writes alone.

But a writer is always drawing on and is, in almost every way, indebted to their influences.

Poems are something given.

As a poet living and writing in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, and as someone for whom Lorine Niedecker’s work has carved a place for me to call my home, I knew I needed to find a way to thank her.

The first poem of Niedecker’s I ever read was “Lake Superior.”

The extended collage built in large part from the notes and journal excerpts from her 1966 trip around the northern portion of the lake.

And so in the summer of 2023, I set off to follow in her footsteps, collecting material along the way to build an altar for a woman I had never met.

[gentle music] – Announcer: Major funding for Welcome Poets is provided by Fort Atkinson Community Foundation, Peter and Connie Roop, donors to the Focus Fund for the Arts, and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.