Fantasy Niedecker
  by Tom Hibbard

Perhaps the kernel of Lorine Niedecker's work is living within self-determined limits. I find her more an economist than a feminist. She grew up in a small town and speaks for small town values but with the experience of someone who has journeyed outside them. Her clarity is of a perspective of a microscopic individual measuring the vast philosophical and sociological context of the future of Mankind. Niedecker works in the same place where she lives; she does not irresponsibly commute to activity that she finds hopelessly beyond managing and in conflict with her own belief system. Surely, small town values are preferable to urban desensitization, suburban materialism and even bohemian decadence.
 

On the weekend of October 9, 2003, Woodland Pattern bookstore in Milwaukee and the town library, high school and museum of Fort Atkinson, Wis., where she grew up and spent most of her life, celebrated Lorine Niedecker's centennial. Many writers and artists from near and far converged to read her works, to conduct discussions, to view first-hand some of the places that nourished her thoughts, her 'life by water'. Woodland Pattern website lists the participants (including Jenny Penberthy editor of the wonderful 2002 Collected Works) and specific events. The amateur photographs below were taken in an unofficial and detached effort to acknowledge the occasion, perhaps noting that they were taken by someone who also grew up on the Rock River in a town neighboring Fort Atkinson and Blackhawk Island.

1. (river entering Blackhawk Island)

O my floating life
Do not save love
for things
Throw things
to the flood
 

 


2. (early one-room Niedecker residence)

The greatest plumber
in all the town
from Montgomery Ward
rode a Cadillac carriage
by marriage
and visited my pump

A sensitive pump
said he
that has at times a proper
balance
of water, air
and poetry

 

3. (historical marker at property on Blackhawk Island)

The clothesline post is set
yet no totem-carvings distinguish the Niedecker tribe
from the rest; every seventh day they wash:
worship sun; fear rain, their neighbors' eyes;
raise their hands from ground to sky,
and hang or fall by the whiteness of their all.

 

 

4. (Fort Atkinson town library)

Nothing nourishing,
Common dealt out food;
no better reading
than keeps us destitute.
___

Shelley, Shelley, off on the new romance
wrote inconsolable Harriet,
"Are you above the world?
And to what extent?"
....
But that was before the library burned.

 

 

5. (second, newer house on Blackhawk Island)

River rising - flood
Now melt and leave home
Return - broom wet
naturally wet
Under
soak-heavy rug
water bugs hatched -
no snake in the house

 

 

6. (autumn color)

Colors of October
wait with easy dignity
for the big change -

 

 

7. (old house in Fort Atkinson)

Here we last,
lilacs, vacant lots,
taxes, no work
debts, the wind widens
the grass
In the old house
the clocks are dead,
past dead.

 

Approximately during the decade of the 1960s, Niedecker married a second time and lived in a predominantly Polish working class neighborhood on the south side of Milwaukee.

 

 

 

8. (this house near the corner of 6th and Becher is from the best information I could get the house where Niedecker lived in Milwaukee)

Serious wags its tail
- they see us -
from curtain tie-backs
no knick-knacks
between us

 

 

 

 

 

9. (car and house in the neighborhood)

The men leave the car
to bring us green-white lilies
by woods
These men are our woods
...

I'm swamp
as against a large pine-spread -
his clean No marriage
no marriage
friend

 

 

 

10. (back yard garden of a house nearby)

"Isn't it glorious? Let's trim green thought in one place and let it grow wild in another."

 

 

 

 

11. (nearby house with patriotic poster)

"But why do you do it," shrieked Benj. "It's lunacy!--alone, isolated, when everybody else is gearing himself for the fight for survival."
"Are men afraid of their own selves? Give us peace, and we'll survive."
"But nobody to talk with!"
"Talk, these days, is dangerous. My friend the poet says, 'Talk is a form of love'. Maybe I'll find that form in the millennium after the next."

 

 

12. (tennis courts up the hill in Kosciuszko Park)

--they're not bad kids--
you have the world. Remember the little
lovely notes "the little O, the earth."
This thing is old and singing new--you
just more full. Come, we'll sit without birds
between city bricks. See! The sun hits.

 

 

 

13. (St. Josephat basilica two blocks south)

Effort lay in us
before religion
at pond bottom
All things move toward
the light

except those
that freely work down
to oceans' black depths
In us an impulse tests
the unknown

The following three photos taken in Milwaukee on the Thursday the centennial began seemed fitting.

 

 

 

14. (Woodland Pattern bookstore)

I worked the print shop
right down among 'em
the folk from whom all poetry flows

 

 

 

15. (gallery inside Woodland Pattern featuring new artworks by JoAnna Poehlmann)

Audubon

Tried selling my pictures. In jail
Twice for debt. My companion
A sharp, frosty gale.

 

16. (lake beach in Milwaukee)

I'd prick the sand in cunning, lean,
Cummings irony, a little drunk dead sober.
Man, that walk down the beach!

 

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