[bright music]
- Announcer: The following program
is a PBS Wisconsin original production.
- Announcer 2: 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.
- Poet's Voice: "Nobody.
"Nothing.
"Ever gave me greater thing
"Than time.
"Unless light
"And silence
Which, if intense, makes sound."
[gentle music]
[tires rumbling]
- Nicholas Gulig: It's said you can't go home again.
That the places we are from
cease to be the places we remember.
But in the summer of 2016, after living half my life away,
I decided to return to the state where I was born.
[gentle music]
[typewriter clicking]
For the last five years,
I'd been living in my mother's country,
teaching at a university in Khon Kaen, Thailand
and planning for a life abroad with my adopted daughter
and the woman who would eventually become my wife.
But when my father died,
the distance between Southeast Asia and the American Midwest
became untenable.
A space I couldn't bear.
My father was an avid reader,
and our house was filled with books.
As a child, when I couldn't sleep,
my dad would sit and read to me, and almost always,
he'd read poems.
In this way, my earliest experiences of home,
of feeling like I belonged to a place,
happened in the ebb and flow and rhythms of my father's voice.
A low murmur in the quiet of the evening's dark
that held the words of strangers to my ear.
Maybe this is why, since an early age,
I wanted to be a poet, to make a home for others
in the way the poems my father read had made a home for me.
To find the words through which the world becomes hospitable.
To learn the language of a people and a place.
In time, the pursuit of poetry took me to Montana and Iowa,
to Thailand and Denver, and to Thailand once again.
Then, some 20-odd years later, I landed back in Wisconsin,
the very place I started.
I had accepted a position as a poetry professor
at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater,
and I was looking for a place to live
in the neighboring town of Fort Atkinson.
That summer, amid the angst and bitterness
of a national election,
the Wisconsin to which I returned
was a sea of xenophobic signs and bumper stickers.
As a child of an immigrant, and with my wife and daughter
in the process of immigrating themselves,
it was difficult not to wonder
if the home to which I was asking my family to move
very openly and very clearly didn't want them.
For folks like us, it felt like we weren't welcome.
And yet, here I was, wandering in a world no longer mine.
What was I doing here?
Why did I return?
It was early evening when I pulled into Fort Atkinson,
the thin light falling on the brick facade
of fast food restaurants and chain stores.
I remember turning off Highway 12
and starting down Main Street.
There, above a restaurant called Scottie's Eat-Mor,
a sign read "Welcome Poets" in small black letters
above the doorway.
On the side of that same building,
"Fish, fowl, flood, water lily, mud, my life."
Fort Atkinson is home to Wisconsin's most notable writer,
the poet Lorine Niedecker.
And the excerpt scrawled on a mural
on the side of a building downtown
is the opening to her most famous poem.
Though I didn't know it at the time,
Niedecker's writing will soon become
a central facet of my life.
A body of work upon which much of my own work
will come to rest.
Who was this solitary woman writing in a humble cabin
on the Rock River?
How could I have known then
how important she would become for me?
How integral and influential the writing of a stranger,
this person I had never met, gone for almost half a century.
[gentle music]
That evening, as I drove across Wisconsin,
I couldn't have felt more alien, more displaced.
But suddenly, the sign was there above the diner.
The mural painted on the building side.
In more ways than I can name, Niedecker's poetry,
its legacy and material effect, returned me to Wisconsin.
Or rather, more precisely,
Niedecker's poetry and the myriad ways
the community of Fort Atkinson has come to be defined by it,
gave me back my state.
And made a home for me at a time when it felt
that the door to home was closed.
[gentle music]
- 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: 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, who 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]
In central west Wisconsin,
a pair of rivers rose as separate streams and met.
The city built a park around the confluence,
the water intertwined and often shining,
the shoreline wooded and kept up, where I was born, raised
among the farmers and the forests and the punks.
I left.
[upbeat rock music]
[typewriter clicking]
Like Lorine Niedecker, the town where I was born
defines itself through water.
For her, an island that is not in fact an island,
a place that bears the name of a people
who no longer live there.
And for me, a place where rivers meet.
Because the city's largest factory,
the Uniroyal tire plant, closed when I was young,
the Eau Claire of the early '90s felt largely solitary
and insignificant.
In my memory, the streets downtown were always empty.
The world felt somewhere else.
My dad moved to Eau Claire first as a student
attending the university.
And then, in 1969,
as a conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam,
the draft board returned my father to his alma mater
for mandatory public service.
It was there he met my mom,
an exchange student from Thailand studying ceramics.
A second-generation immigrant, my relationship to the community
and culture of Wisconsin has always been obscure.
Growing up, I both did and didn't feel connected
to my state.
Home was somewhere else.
[school bell ringing]
My mother recalls a moment I came home from grade school,
distraught by the fact that I wasn't white.
I don't recall this incident myself,
but there are other iterations of the experience
that I do recall,
memories in which the distance between myself
and the broader world of the American Midwest
felt strained by differences, both real and imaginary.
One of the first places I didn't feel estranged
was in the books my father read to me,
in the worlds and words of poets.
On those late nights in my childhood bedroom with my dad,
language was a place that I could live in.
But poetry built a home for me in other ways as well.
The first community with which I felt a palpable affinity
was a group of punks and artists I met in high school.
They, like me, went about their lives
largely disconnected from the culture happening around them.
Because the songs on the radio felt dead to us,
we started our own bands in our parents' garages.
We published our own books and literary zines
on the copiers at Kinko's.
We held readings in our bedrooms or in basements,
or on of the tops of downtown roofs
until the cops descended and scattered us away.
- Young Nicholas Gulig: "There was a Saturday night once
"in early early April,
"and even the sun seemed as systematic as everything else.
"We waited for it to go down and let us be.
We spent some time wishing upon Andy Christopherson to show..."
- Nicholas: There was and is an inherent freedom
in the act of making art.
For me, it was through the acts of making and conjunction
that a new, more vibrant community arose.
[upbeat rock music]
Because the poems and music of my friends became the spaces
in which the place where I was from
began again to feel like home.
In art, I found my tribe.
[typewriter knob cranking]
Ironically, poems were also the reason that I left.
[airplane engine whooshing]
Because I wanted to be a writer,
and because art felt very much like something
that mostly happens somewhere else,
my pursuit of poetry took me across the country
and around the world.
In time, I landed back in Thailand.
Throughout those years, Wisconsin felt imaginary,
a distant apparition.
Home was far away.
[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: 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.
[gentle music]
[car whooshing]
In daughter light like altar's song,
another year upends its hybridized epiphany.
Every night I dream my mouth around a plastic stone and sing.
These are the roots that clutch,
and this is the empty jar of their dominion,
wilding my sight.
Awake again, a god I don't believe in
alerts me to the purple shadow
cast across the kitchen counter by a spoon.
Love like an even number,
I count the days until I'm future.
Found geography, my crooked grammar.
Tell me in another language we are home.
[gentle music]
[typewriter clicking]
When I saw the "Welcome Poets" sign for the first time
above the diner in Niedecker's hometown,
I didn't know how fully the state that I had left
would come to hold us.
Living in Fort Atkinson, I started teaching
at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater,
trying in my own way as best I could to give to others
what others had given me.
It's a transcendent experience,
and I wanna argue that I think it happens too
when we read a poem that really, really works for us,
is that we become possessed by it.
I'm just in the moment of the poem,
or in the moment of the aftermath of the poem.
Poetry, I tell my students, is what the mind becomes
when the music that a language is
replaces ordinary speech.
[child laughing] [birds singing]
And shows you differently.
And for the first time,
the world that ordinary speech obstructs.
- Poet's Voice: "Fish, fowl, flood."
[wind blowing]
[gulls calling]
- Nicholas: The gift of the poem is the world that happens after.
In more ways than I can name, Niedecker's work
opened the door to a place I didn't think that I belonged.
As a young kid in the early '90s, writing poems
and making books at Kinko's with my friends,
I didn't know I'd come to live that way.
That years later, in what is, I hope, the middle of my life,
I'd be selected as Wisconsin's Poet Laureate.
[static]
- Journalist 1: We will meet
the new State Poet Laureate of Wisconsin,
who hails from Eau Claire.
- Journalist 2: Nicholas Gulig
is the Poet Laureate of Wisconsin.
- Journalist 3: Congratulations on being named
the state's tenth Poet Laureate.
- Journalist 4: Without any further ado, Nicholas Gulig,
our current Poet Laureate of Wisconsin.
- Nicholas: Being named to the position felt surreal...
- Journalist 5: Author of North of Order ...
- Nicholas: ...and brought with it a level of public attention
I wasn't used to.
Because writing is so often solitary, almost secretive.
And because, like Niedecker, I work in relative isolation
in a small one-room cabin that I built in my backyard.
Being a poet involves a turning inward and away.
[soft jazz music playing]
And yet, on the other, to be the Poet Laureate of a state
requires that a writer live and think beyond themselves.
The position is one of service.
Niedecker's words and legacy do for me today...
Of moving in the public sphere from one city to another.
Her work and its legacy handed my state back to me.
[steady music]
Since accepting the position, I've seen more of Wisconsin
than I had in the 40-odd years prior.
Some days, it felt I all but lived in libraries
and conference centers, at universities and bookstores.
Which the place where I was born began to feel like home.
Most weekends, I was away.
And in that time spent traveling the state,
I came to feel that poetry at its best
breathes life into communities, because poetry is, in essence,
a deeply communal act.
So I've been able to, I've been able to write again,
which is...
It may be that a person writes alone.
But a writer is always drawing on and is, in almost every way,
indebted to their influences.
Poems are something given.
As a poet living and writing in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin,
and as someone for whom Lorine Niedecker's work
has carved a space for me and for my family,
I knew I needed to find a way to thank her.
"Lake Superior," the poem that introduced me
to Niedecker's work, is an extended collage
comprised in large part of Niedecker's notes
and journal excerpts from a 1966 trip with Al
around the northern portion of the lake.
And so, in the summer of 2023,
I set off to follow in her footsteps,
collecting things along the way
to build an altar on the shore.
[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: "Lake Superior"
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 headed north toward water
to pay tribute to this woman
whose work is now a part of my work.
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
defined 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.