current news
Third Thursday: a poetry event Fran Abbate will be the featured poet on June 20. You can see the rest of the 2013 lineup here.
Music inspired by Lorine - Three of Lorine's poems inspired composer Jerry Hui for a commission by the Isthmus Vocal Ensemble of Madison, WI conducted by Scott MacPherson. Listen here.
The next meeting of the Solitary Plovers Study Group will be on June 8 from 12:30-1:45 pm at the
Dwight Foster Library in the
LN Room on the 2nd floor.
Poems: If I were a Bird and
Three Americans.
Leaders: Nancy Shea and Margaret Schroeder. See more scheduled meetings here.
POETRY FESTIVAL UPDATE: The 2013 Lorine Niedecker Wisconsin Poetry Festival in Fort Atkinson is scheduled for October 11 and 12. View the preliminary schedule here.
Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970) is a twentieth-century, second-wave, Modern American poet often identified with the Objectivists. Living most of her life on the shores of the Rock River near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, she is perhaps best known as a poet of place who wrote about the Blackhawk Island that she loved. Her work, however, ranges from modernist folk poetry (NEW GOOSE, 1946) to haiku-like forms to long poems like "Lake Superior" and "Wintergreen Ridge" (NORTH CENTRAL, 1968). She is admired for the subtlety of her tightly crafted, nuanced and deliciously ironic poems, as well as for her total devotion to her calling.
poetry
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.
archive item
of the month
Lorine's handmade book for Aeneas