Niedecker's inspirations, evolution and later work

[gentle music]

– Poet’s Voice: “My friend tree, I sawed you down, but I must attend an older friend, the sun.”

[typewriter clicking] [gentle music]

– Nicholas Gulig: As the years passed, Lorine Niedecker pursued her calling.

Inspired by her surroundings on Blackhawk Island, she continued turning her attention into art.

She documented the natural landscape through photography.

[camera shutter clicking] In some cases, she used these photographs as reference images for her hobby of watercolor painting.

As always, she channeled her reflections into poetry.

– Poet’s Voice: “O my floating life, do not save love for things. Throw things to the flood, ruined by the flood. Leave the new unbought, all one in the end . . . water.”

– Nicholas: At the age of 60, Niedecker’s life changed in ways that would shape her work throughout the remainder of her life.

– Poet’s Voice: “I married [geese honking] in the world’s black night for warmth, if not repose.”

[bright music]

– Nicholas: Al Millen was an industrial painter who worked the night shift in Milwaukee and came to Blackhawk Island on a fishing trip.

It was there he met Lorine.

In 1963, after a brief courtship, they married at St. John’s Community Church.

Through Al, Lorine gained a family.

And a level of security that a single woman of that time so often sadly lacked.

[gentle music] Frequently, she recorded the joy of their daily conversations, a collage of marital observations and inside jokes and put them into small handmade books.

– Voice of Lorine: You can see how we return to our source.

– Voice of Al: Right, like water.

– Voice of Lorine: And there is never any death.

After death, there are life cycles, even though inanimate.

In nature, there is no blemish but the mind.

– Voice of Al: He didn’t read his science fiction or he’d know everything.

– Voice of Lorine: What are you reading?

– Voice of Al: The Fallen Sparrow.

One of those books that has meaning and all that.

– Voice of Lorine: See, if he were here, I’d shake his hand.

– Voice of Al: Yeah, but he didn’t work third shift.

When you think what nature does sometimes.

Storms, lightning.

To say nothing of the stars.

Man is so puny.

– Voice of Lorine: I don’t know.

I’ve never felt it by looking up at the stars.

After all, man has mind.

– Voice of Al: Well, something else might have mind too.

How do we know that tree out there doesn’t have mind?

– Nicholas: This practice of observation and collage would soon become a central aspect of her work.

[typewriter clicking] After marrying Al, Lorine was able to quit her job as a cleaner at the hospital and devote her time more fully to her vocation as a writer.

– Voice of Lorine: “Grandfather advised me, learn a trade. I learned to sit at desk and condense. No layoff from this condensery.”

– Nicholas: For a short time, they lived in Milwaukee, but when Al retired, they returned to Blackhawk Island and built a cottage beside the one-room cabin where she had lived alone before.

Placed directly on the banks of the Rock River, this new house would provide Lorine the time and space to write her most well-known work.

While her most famous poem, “Paean to Place,” focused on her life on Blackhawk Island, other poems like “Lake Superior” and “Wintergreen Ridge” happened somewhere else, in places well beyond the limits of her home.

With Al, Lorine began to travel.

Because of her poor eyesight, she had never been able to drive.

But with Al at the wheel, the couple started taking road trips, exploring the upper Midwest and encountering new landscapes.

In 1966, Lorine and Al took the Lake Superior Circle Tour, traveling around the northern section of the lake.

For the months leading up to the trip, Lorine carried out intensive research in preparation, compiling pages upon pages of notes, which documented the region’s geology, geography, and the history of its Native inhabitants and colonial settlers.

Lorine also kept an extensive travelogue, and upon returning, she would take these notes and journal entries and distill them into a poetry of bright concision, collaging these fragments into the well-wrought, finely-tuned music that would define her later, longer work.

– Voice of Lorine: “For me, the sentence lies in wait all those prepositions and connectives, like an early spring flood. A good thing my follow-up feeling has always been condense, condense.”

– Nicholas: “Lake Superior,” the first poem I ever read of Niedecker’s, was the product of this process, and would eventually become a critical and guiding influence.

Through her, I learned to write again.

Years later, as Wisconsin’s poet laureate, Niedecker’s “Lake Superior” would return me to its shores.