Wisconsin's landscapes in Niedecker's life of language

– Poet’s Voice: “Fish, fowl, flood, water lily mud, my life, in the leaves and on water, my mother and I, born, in swale and swamp and sworn to water.”

[gentle music] [typewriter clicking] – Nicholas Gulig: Less than five miles from the sign that first welcomed me to the city of Fort Atkinson, a narrow strip of land runs between the Rock River and a vast marsh, culminating in a point at the eastern edge of Lake Koshkonong.

It was here in the shade along these shores that Wisconsin’s most notable poet, Lorine Niedecker, dedicated a largely solitary life to language.

One that in many ways has come to shape and name the place where she was born.

[birds chirping] [door closing] – Poet’s Voice: “I was the solitary plover “a pencil for a wingbone “From the secret notes I must tilt “upon the pressure execute and adjust “In us sea-air rhythm We live by the urgent wave of the verse.”

[gentle music] – Nicholas: A rural Midwestern woman writing in the middle of the 20th century, throughout her life, Lorine Niedecker produced a profoundly influential body of work whose contributions to American poetry continue to reverberate today.

Born in 1903, Lorine spent most of her youth amid the flora and fauna of Blackhawk Island, where her father was an entrepreneur and a fisherman.

By most accounts, Lorine was musical and artistic.

An avid reader and a model student, who even at a young age aspired to be a writer.

In 1931, Niedecker read an issue of Poetry magazine dedicated to the Objectivists, a new literary movement in contemporary poetry that included William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, and George Oppen.

Inspired by their work, Lorine boarded a bus and traveled alone to New York to meet the journal’s editor, the poet Louis Zukofsky, but introduced her to the vibrant world of America’s literary avant-garde.

The influence of this moment feels present in the work she would go on to write, developing an aesthetic as a rural, working class Midwesterner within the framework of progressive, experimental poetry.

– Poet’s Voice: “I grew in green “Slide and slant “of shore and shade “Child-time -wade “Thru weeds “Maples to swing from “Pee Wee-glissando “Sublime- “Slime Song.”

– Nicholas: Throughout her life in Fort Atkinson, Niedecker would work as a librarian, a copy editor, and a hospital cleaner, all the while carrying out a daily discipline of reading, researching, and writing.

As a working-class woman, her literary life happened largely in the aftermath of normal labor and the quiet of a rural one-room cabin on the banks of the Rock River.

– Poet’s Voice: “New-sawed clean-smelling house “sweet cedar pink “flesh tint I love you.”

– Nicholas: These days, when I go into my own cabin to work, I often think of Niedecker sitting at her desk, staring out the window.

Lorine’s poems are never far from me.

I turn to her to teach me.

To remind me of the overlap between a person’s language and their place.

To read her is to see and hear the world of which she was a part.

– Poet’s Voice: “Colors of October “Wait with easy dignity “For the big change- “Lie gorgeous quill-pens “In old inkwells Almost dry.”

– Nicholas: Hers is a poetry of rapt attention, a language made of things, of native trees and local grasses, of minerals and rocks, in the Latin names of flowers and of birds.

The river and its many seasons, the weather spilling over everything, filling up her home.

– Poet’s Voice: “I sit in my own house secure “Through window glass “Ice cakes glide downstream The wild swans of our day.”

– Nicholas: Lorine would spend decades writing in relative obscurity, publishing only four books in her lifetime on small, independent presses.

Most of her own neighbors didn’t know her as a poet, and almost certainly no one in Fort Atkinson would have imagined that this unassuming woman, living in a one-room cabin by the river, would one day leave a lasting mark on the landscape of American letters.

Living in Fort Atkinson today, it’s possible for me to see and feel with greater clarity the ground from which her writing rose, and which it tried so hard to honor.

Like me, Niedecker left Wisconsin and she returned.

Her language lingers in the air and finds me.

[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.