Water in the Words of Fort Atkinson Poet Lorine Niedecker

Wisconsin Water Library > Uncategorized > Water in the Words of Fort Atkinson Poet Lorine Niedecker

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.


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

***