Retracing Lorine Niedecker’s 'Lake Superior'

[gentle music] – Poet’s Voice: “In every part of every living thing is stuff that once was rock.

In blood, the minerals of the rock.

Iron, the common element of earth.

In rocks and freighters.

Sault Ste. Marie.

Big boats, coal black and iron ore red.

Topped with what white castlework.

The waters working together internationally.

Gulls playing both sides.”

[typewriter clicking] – Nicholas Gulig: “Lake Superior,” the first poem of Niedecker’s I ever read, appears in the book North Central, a collection of poems published in 1968 during a moment of new artistic productivity and burgeoning acclaim.

In November of 1970, Lorine speaks with the poet Cid Corman.

Visiting from Japan, Corman brings a small cassette recorder to Blackhawk Island.

In the only audio recordings that we have of her, her voice is small and delicate, almost childlike.

– Recording of Lorine: [chuckling] “Wild man, you are the man, you are my other country, “and I find it hard going.

You are the prickly pear, you are the…”

– Nicholas: It’s easy to hear how excited Lorine is by the work that she’s been doing.

How deeply she’s looking forward to writing more.

– Recording of Cid: Lorine, I noticed, it seems to me that you are making more poems in these past few years than you had made before.

Now, is it because you have more time now than before, or what?

– Recording of Lorine: Yes, well, I do have, I do have more time, but I think that now more than ever, I think lines of poetry that I may use all day long and even in the night.

– Recording of Cid: Mm-hmm.

– Recording of Lorine: Whereas before, I was taken up with so many things, this, that sort of thing… And the fact that I’m 67 years old, and if I’m going to do this more, I’d better get to it.

[tape recorder clicking] – Nicholas: The tape cuts off and it’s the last we hear of her.

Three weeks later, while making dinner, Lorine will turn to Al and say that she feels strange.

Al will call an ambulance.

Lorine will not come home.

[birds singing] [gentle vocalizing] Lorine Niedecker is buried off a county road in the Union Cemetery north of Blackhawk Island.

While her grave is simple and unassuming, her legacy is not.

In the decades since her passing, the poems of Lorine Niedecker have steadily shaped the work of poets writing after her, opening the door for other women and for rural, working-class people from outside the coastal literary centers.

It’s hard to overstate the effect Lorine has had on me.

Growing up, poetry felt to me a matter first and foremost of internal self-expression.

But when as a graduate student, I first read “Lake Superior,” I found myself instead amidst the mind and music of a person looking past herself, turning to the history, industry, and geology of other places.

Drawing inspiration as much from outer truths as inner.

– Poet’s Voice: “Greek-named Exodus antique

Kicked up in America’s northwest.

You have been in my mind, between my toes, agate.”

– Nicholas: Like every writer, I’m indebted to the men and women who wrote before me.

They are, in almost every way, my literary ancestors.

Lorine Niedecker is one of them.

And so, at the beginning of my tenure as Wisconsin’s Poet Laureate, I set out for Lake Superior to pay tribute to this woman I had never met.

Gone now for over half a century.

To build an altar for the poet whose words first welcomed me back home.

[gentle vocalizing] Lake Superior feels closer to an ocean.

From one shore, it is impossible to see the other.

But what you can see lives inside you until it’s there forever.

The water reaching forward, falling back.

The shadows of distant factories.

A ditch of flowers.

Daylight hanging on a cliff face.

The glow of stone beneath the waves.

The rhythmic, breathing heartbeat of the lake.

To be by Lake Superior is to walk beside the poet and to step into the poem.

This was the world she saw and mentioned in her journals.

The places she had visited and wrote about.

– Poet’s Voice: “The smooth black stone I picked up in true source park.

“The leaf beside it once was stone.

Why should we hurry home?”

– Nicholas: As I followed Lorine’s path around the lake, I collected things along the way I felt she might have stopped to notice, were she there.

The small stones and plants and flowers I imagined would have found their way into her poems, had she been with me.

With these things, I built an altar on the shore.

[gentle music] What is poetry if not an act of altar-making?

Of paying tribute to the people and the places that have held us?

To build an altar is to form a space for others here in the present from the objects that they loved.

To write a poem is to build a home from things.

The poems that floated in my father’s voice to find the home I needed when I was young, in much the same way that Niedecker’s poems and legacy do for me today.

I now know and feel that I belong here.

My family belongs here.

We are a part of Wisconsin, and Wisconsin is a part of us.

[family talking] This is the essence of our language, the gift we give to one another when we speak.

To be a poet is to know that no one…

– Recording of Lorine: “Tell them to take my bare walls down, “my cement abutments

their parties thereof and clause of claws.”

– Nicholas: …is alone.

[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.