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| This celebration has been made possible by the following contributors: Anonymous (NFR) Wisconsin Humanities Council Wisconsin Arts Board Milwaukee Arts Board Fort Atkinson Community Foundation Kohler Foundation Brico Fund Franke Idea Fund with additional support from: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel W.D. Hoard and Company Midwest Airline Center Mary (Kit) Basquin and special thanks to: Woodland Pattern Board and staff members, whose enthusiasm and support helped make this conference possible. |
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 "Lorine Niedecker is the best living poetess. No one is so subtle
with so few words."- Basil Bunting
Lorine Niedecker: a Centenary Celebration
During the conference we will explore Lorine Niedecker's life and career on the centennial year of her birth. Programs on Thursday and Friday, October 9 & 10, will address Niedecker's art and legacy through tributes, panel discussions, scholarly talks, performances of LN's work, and readings by attending writers. Woodland Pattern Book Center will exhibit photographs from LN's life and surroundings, her poetry, and drawings and prints by Wisconsin artist Joanna Poehlman. Evening events will include talks, readings, theatrical presentations, and film screenings. The conference will culminate Saturday, October 11 in Fort Atkinson with tours of Black Hawk Island, talks and exhibits at the Dwight Foster Public Library and the Hoard Museum, talks and workshops devoted to LN's poetry of place and to the teaching and collecting of her poetry in schools and libraries. On Sunday, Oct. 12, we will offer an optional tour to Door County and the Ridges Sanctuary, site of Niedecker's famous poem, Wintergreen Ridge. "The Brontës had their moors, I have my marshes," Lorine Niedecker wrote of floodprone Black Hawk Island, near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, where she lived most of her life. Her life by water, as she called it, could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene where she also made a home. An essential member of the Objectivist circle, Niedecker is one of the most important poets of her generation. Her work attracted high praise from her peers—William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Cid Corman, Clayton Eshleman—with whom she exchanged life-sustaining letters. Long before the modern feminist movement, Niedecker interrogated issues of gender, domesticity, work, marriage, and sexual politics. Her marginal status, both geographically and as a woman, translates into a major poetry.Lorine Niedecker was born in 1903 and died in 1970. Among her published work is New Goose (1946), My Friend Tree (1961), North Central (1968), T&G: Collected Poems, 1936-1966 (1969), My Life by Water: Collected Poems, 1936-1968 (1970), Blue Chicory (1976), From This Condensery (1985), The Granite Pail (1985), and Collected Works (2002). |