Watch poet Caryl Pagel on Lorine Niedecker in a lecture from 'University Place'

Caryl Pagel interprets the life of Lorine Niedecker from the Fort Atkinson museum preserving her archive

In August 2024, poet, writer, professor, and small press publisher Caryl Pagel delivered a lecture in Fort Atkinson on the life and work of 20th century poet Lorine Niedecker. Presented from the podium of the Hoard Historical Museum — home to a permanent collection of Niedecker’s papers, notebooks, objects and photographs — the talk was recorded for PBS Wisconsin’s University Place.

We invite you to stream it as a companion to Welcome Poets, to learn even more about Niedecker’s biography and witness the fellowship and community that form around her work. Watching the lecture sharpens our sense of the different ways Pagel and Welcome Poets series writer and narrator Nicholas Gulig interpret Niedecker’s story.

Pagel, an associate professor and Director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, is working on a book length essay about Niedecker. Her lecture shares some of her research tracing Niedecker’s discipline as a poet, the material conditions under which Niedecker worked, her sense of humor, her engagement with regional politics and the agency Niedecker exercised to attend to her life’s calling.

Rather than a single, continuous hour-long narrative, Pagel delivers her talk in 25 short fragments — self-contained, carefully composed sections that each hold images, anecdotes and arguments. These brief, vivid pieces accumulate into a portrait of Niedecker that is careful and intimate, while acknowledging the limitations of what the archive allows for our interpretation.

In the video above, we’ve time-coded Pagel’s lecture into sections so you can explore it how you prefer — whether you want to watch the whole hour straight through, or jump to the sections that most interest you.

In the video player, look for icon showing three vertical dots with dashes (near the bottom right). When you hover over or click that button, a chapter menu will open with a vertical scroll bar. From there, you can select any section to skip directly to Pagel’s discussion of Niedecker’s childhood, her ties to the Objectivist poets, the “Lake Superior” poem and more. You can also click on the points in the video timeline to jump forward and ahead to various sections.

We provide also provide the time-codes and associated sections of the lecture below:

00:00 – 00:54 – Welcome from Marilee Lee, Curator, Hoard Historical Museum
00:54 – 04:09 – Introduction of Caryl Pagel by 2023-2024 Wisconsin Poet Laureate Nicholas Gulig
04:09 – 06:06 – Use of Niedecker archives
06:06 – 10:05 – Lorine’s birth, family and landscapes
10:05 – 10:29 – Lorine as photographer and observer
10:29 – 11:59 – Lorine’s eyesight and “missing” as poetics
11:59 – 15:18 – Childhood, coming of age as a reader, Beloit College, returning home
15:18 – 18:27 – Inspired by the Objectivist poets
18:27 – 20:47 – Correspondence with poet Louis Zukofsky and Lorine in New York
20:47 – 23:31 – Federal Writers’ Project, poems for New Goose
23:31 – 26:06 – Humor as craft
26:06 – 29:00 – Black Hawk, Indigenous history and land
29:00 – 30:24 – “These woods have made me”
30:24 – 31:52 – Reading the “immortal cupboard”
31:52 – 33:14 – Everyday life, food and neighbors
33:14 – 36:03 – Hoards Dairyman years, money and eyesight
36:03 – 36:44 – Feminist agency
36:44 – 40:07 – New Goose (1946); small press publishing
40:07 – 41:00 – Music
41:00 – 42:47 – Cut, curate, mow, tend: yard as laboratory
42:47 – 44:04 – “Outed” as a poet
44:04 – 47:35 – “For Paul” poems
47:35 – 49:10 – 1963 marriage, productivity, new directions
49:10 – 52:02 – “Lake Superior” (1966-67)
52:02 – 53:49 – Collage and layering in Niedecker’s poetry
52:49 – 54:53 – “Wintergreen Ridge”
54:53 – 56:43 – Place, land, “Foreclosure”
56:43 – 58:57 – Death, and finding Niedecker