When Libraries, Water, and Art Collide

When Sarah FitzSimons first heard of the Wisconsin Water Library, she was inspired. “It was just so poetic and lovely” says the artist. Sarah, who is a faculty member in the UW-Madison Art Department, began thinking about the ways in which various bodies of water have impacted her life. This led her to the creation of her own personal Water Library.

Sarah’s water biography is comprised of bodies of water that she has lived near that have become important and meaningful to her. She has built individual water books that are filled with a sample of the water from these locations which she holds dearly. Currently, there are 10 water books from the following bodies of water:  Lake Erie, Euclid Creek, Cuyahoga River, Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Tejo River, Douro River, Tuela River, Lake Michigan, and Dugway Brook. Sarah plans to add an additional 5 books to her water biography.

As with any type of biography, there are personal stories attached to these books. Sarah said that her strongest connection is to Lake Erie, as she grew up in Cleveland. Sarah recalls childhood memories of swimming in Lake Erie, having bonfires on the beach, and watching sunsets. She also remembers bringing a water bottle filled with water from the Pacific Ocean back to Wisconsin, to remind her of her time living in Los Angeles and living just moments away from the ocean.

The Wisconsin Water Library is thrilled to have received a volume of the Lake Michigan book as a donation from Sarah to have as a part of our collection. Sarah has also donated the Atlantic Ocean book to the Kohler Art Library. The remaining volumes are available for viewing at the Faculty Exhibition at the Chazen Museum of Art, which runs from February 1st through May 10th. Sarah will also be giving a presentation at the Chazen about this collection on Tuesday, April 21^st at 5:30.

For more information on any of these topics, please visit Sarah FitzSimon’s website, the Chazen Museum of Art, or the Wisconsin Water Library.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For National Poetry Month (April), serendipity introduced the Wisconsin Water Librarians to a new friend in the late Fort Atkinson poet, Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970). And speaking of friends, serendipity had a helping hand from the dedication of the Friends of Lorine Niedecker and Fort Atkinson’s Dwight Foster Public Library, along with the work of a UW scholar, Steele Wagstaff, who researches and writes eloquently on Niedecker’s ecopoetics  and her work among the larger family of Objectivist Poets.

That such a stunning artist whose poems sits alongside Emily Dickinson’s in the Norton Anthology of Poetry lived in obscurity in a most obscure place—on Blackhawk Island, a small  peninsula which juts into Lake Koshkonong on the Rock River—and wrote with such passionate simplicity about water and place, took us aback this month.

We’re so grateful for the introduction – and we invite you to learn why with a few of her poems here.

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from Paean to Place

And the place

was water

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

Get a load

of April’s

fabulous

 

frog rattle-

lowland freight cars

          in the night

 

Smile

to see the lake

   lay

the still sky

And

out for an easy

   make

the dragonfly

Something

like a flower

will devour

 

water

 

flower

Along the river

wild sunflowers

over my head

the dead

who gave me life

give me this

our relative the air

floods

our rich friend

silt

from Paean to Place

 

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

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