Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
among the common is arguably the most evocative interpretation of the ethos of a
place in the canon of Wisconsin literature. Overlooked as most poets are, she has
beenincludedbynolessthanthe
Norton Anthology
asoneofthe20thcentury'smost
significant American poets.
Lorine Niedecker was born in 1903 on her beloved Blackhawk Island, a penin-
sular marshy swale with a rustic collection of minor resorts and fishing families in
shotgun shacks. Blackhawk Island's isolation and tough life—the river flooded, her
fatherseinedcarpinscows,andhermotherdevelopeddeafness—causedhertoleave
Beloit College early.
Reading Louis Zukofsky's “Objectivist” issue of
Poetry
magazine in 1931
changed her profoundly. The objectivist doctrine of viewing a poem as a pure form
through which the things of the world are seen without the ambiguity of feeling res-
onateddeeplyinher.LikethoseofotherprominentWisconsinwriters—among them
Zona Gale, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold—Niedecker's works were ecological in
everysense.Herattentiontothe“condensory”(herword)calledforusingonlywords
that contributed to a visual and aural presentation. Resolutely hermitic, Niedecker
cloistered herself in her small hand-built cottage. This sense of isolation is funda-
mental to appreciating her passionately understated writing.
Niedecker never sold many books, but was not interested in teaching, so she sup-
ported herself by scrubbing floors at Fort Atkinson General Hospital, scriptwriting
for WHA radio in Madison, and proofreading for
Hoard's Dairyman.
Her greatest
work may have been as field editor for the classic Wisconsin guidebook—the 1942
WPA guide to the Badger State.
An unhappy first marriage ended in 1930. She remarried happily in 1961 and
traveledwidelythroughouttheMidwestforthefirsttime.Itwasthistravelthatraised
her poetry to another level; for the first time she wrote extended poems. Her output
was prolific as she lived quietly on the island until her death in 1971.
MUST-READS
What many consider her greatest poem, “Lake Superior,” was included in the great
North Central,
published in 1968 in London, followed two years later by the classic
My Life By Water: Collected Poems 1936-68.
