Finding home in Lorine Niedecker's Fort Atkinson

– Poet’s Voice: “Nobody.

“Nothing.

“Ever gave me greater thing “Than time.

“Unless light “And silence Which, if intense, makes sound.”

[gentle music] [tires rumbling]

Nicholas Gulig: It’s said you can’t go home again.

That the places we are from cease to be the places we remember.

But in the summer of 2016, after living half my life away, I decided to return to the state where I was born.

[gentle music] [typewriter clicking] For the last five years, I’ve been living in my mother’s country, teaching at a university in Khon Kaen, Thailand and planning for a life abroad with my adopted daughter and the woman who would eventually become my wife.

But when my father died, the distance between Southeast Asia and the American Midwest became untenable.

A space I couldn’t bear.

My father was an avid reader, and our house was filled with books.

As a child, when I couldn’t sleep, my dad would sit and read to me, and almost always, he’d read poems.

In this way, my earliest experiences of home, of feeling like I belonged to a place, happened in the ebb and flow and rhythms of my father’s voice.

A low murmur in the quiet of the evening’s dark that held the words of strangers to my ear.

Maybe this is why, since an early age, I wanted to be a poet, to make a home for others in the way the poems my father read had made a home for me.

To find the words through which the world becomes hospitable.

To learn the language of a people and a place.

In time, the pursuit of poetry took me to Montana and Iowa, to Thailand and Denver, and to Thailand once again.

Then, some 20-odd years later, I landed back in Wisconsin, the very place I started.

I had accepted a position as a poetry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and I was looking for a place to live in the neighboring town of Fort Atkinson.

That summer, amid the angst and bitterness of a national election, the Wisconsin to which I returned was a sea of xenophobic signs and bumper stickers.

As a child of an immigrant, and with my wife and daughter in the process of immigrating themselves, it was difficult not to wonder if the home to which I was asking my family to move very openly and very clearly didn’t want them.

For folks like us, it felt like we weren’t welcome.

And yet, here I was, wandering in a world no longer mine.

What was I doing here?

Why did I return?

It was early evening when I pulled into Fort Atkinson, the thin light falling on the brick facade of fast food restaurants and chain stores.

I remember turning off Highway 12 and starting down Main Street.

There, above a restaurant called Scottie’s Eat-Mor, a sign read “Welcome Poets” in small black letters above the doorway.

On the side of that same building, “Fish, fowl, flood, water lily, mud, my life.”

Fort Atkinson is home to Wisconsin’s most notable writer, the poet Lorine Niedecker.

And the excerpt scrawled on a mural on the side of a building downtown is the opening to her most famous poem.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, Niedecker’s writing will soon become a central facet of my life.

A body of work upon which much of my own work will come to rest.

Who was this solitary woman writing in a humble cabin on the Rock River?

How could I have known then how important she would become for me?

How integral and influential the writing of a stranger, this person I had never met, gone for almost half a century.

[gentle music] That evening, as I drove across Wisconsin, I couldn’t have felt more alien, more displaced.

But suddenly, the sign was there above the diner.

The mural painted on the building side.

In more ways than I can name, Niedecker’s poetry, its legacy and material effect, returned me to Wisconsin.

Or rather, more precisely, Niedecker’s poetry and the myriad ways the community of Fort Atkinson has come to be defined by it, gave me back my state.

And made a home for me at a time when it felt that the door to home was closed.

[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.