Lorine Niedecker and Blackhawk Island

I thought I'd kick things off in my hometown, of course.  A few miles outside of the city of Ft. Atkinson, WI, the Rock River meets Lake Koshkonong in a quiet, muddy wash of land known as Blackhawk Island.  No matter that the island is really a peninsula - the residents of this part of town are as aware of their close relationship to the water as any legitimate islander might be.  The modern history of the place is characterized by the slow battles of floods, fungus, and shiftless economic decline.  But before European settlement and the damming of the river (which effectively turned a large swamp into a lake), native tribes claimed the land, marking it in such a way that could only strike a white man living 7 centuries later as heart-rending and poetic.  The Mississippian Mound-Builders, as we knew them in school, flourished in the area between the CE 650 and 1200, leaving in their wake a swath of piles, nooks, and hollows - burial grounds and storage facilities carefully shaped into crescents, birds, turtles, and the like.  Much later, the Sauk, Winnebago and Potawatomi would settle amidst these shapes, similarly hunting and gathering the fens and prairies until (you guessed it) their violent removal in the 1830s.

Growing up near the island, not on it, racked my teenage mind with mystery.  Always willing to drag a carload of my friends out there in the dead middle of the night, we would trade our parents' stories - mostly pertaining to either The Green Dragon or Burns Resort.  The former had been a blues club, and that is really where the story stops as we knew it - although we would all imagine motorcycles and rougher fare, our uncles playing pool with one eye scoping out women in the smoky light.  The latter is arguably still standing, a summer resort now reduced to unnerving scrap hidden in the forest - it was left to rot after 2 (or 3?) children burned to death there in the 70s.  Bob Ramaika told me that story in 2004, sitting, slowly going blind in his front yard one spring day and surrounded by no less than 25 semi-feral cats (it doesn't get much more Midwest Gothic than that, folks).  The one idiosyncrasy about the island that my friends and I didn't care to investigate was perhaps its most entrancing - Blackhawk Island was the birthplace and haunt of Lorine Niedecker, arguably the most prolific female poet in America in her day, and undoubtedly the most beloved creature of disenfranchised marshes everywhere.

Before I continue, let's take in a sample of her work:

 What horror to awake at night
and in the dimness see the light.
     Time is white
     mosquitoes bite
I've spent my life on nothing.

The thought that stings. How are you, Nothing,
sitting around with Something's wife.
     Buzz and burn
     is all I learn
I've spend my life on nothing.

I'm pillowed and padded, pale and puffing
lifting household stuffing--
     carpets, dishes
     benches, fishes
I've spent my life in nothing.

She wasted little time with titling her work, or, more excitingly, with adhering to conventionality of any sort.  The structure of her poems sometimes resembles a list of sounds, and you can see her listening out the window of her tiny house at night, straining to translate the swamp into English.

 Spring
  stood there
        all body

Head
  blown off
       (war)

showed up
  downstream

October
  is the head
        of spring

Birch, sumac
  before
        the blast

--

Foreclosure

Tell em to take my bare walls down
my cement abutments
their parties thereof
and clause of claws
Leave me the land
Scratch out: the land
May prose and property both die out
and leave me peace

Lorine Niedecker spent a good part of her life alone on Blackhawk, a fact that has predictably colored her as hermit, mystic, romantic, and victim.  Her correspondences reveal a troubled relationship or two, a lost child and her retirement to a leaky, sinking shack, and this is what many people in my hometown may remember her for after reading just a few lines of her work.  Of course we know that there was more to the kook on Blackhawk Island, but how much we know really doesn't matter.  For me, Lorine Niedecker captures the woods around a small town in such a near perfect way.  I appreciate her sense of balance like I marvel at the balance of a basic ecosystem - starkness, the cold accounts of each quiet hour, vividness and joy, color and moisture, simplicity.  Simply seen and simply lived, but never simply written.  I am proud to have tramped those same places and struggled to describe their noise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZpbQE8Oamk

http://www.lorineniedecker.org/gfx/muralfinal.jpg