Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place

Niedecker’s Grammar of Flooding

Niedecker’s Grammar of Flooding A river is a multi-channeled text that shapes as it is shaped, that preserves as surely as it destroys. In modern history, natural waterways have defined exploration, conquest, and settlement. A river allows for external exploration through estuarial ports, and it creates access to internal waterways through canals, streams, and washes. The inner valleys of some of the greatest alluvial rivers contain the remains of ancestral sites and even ancient cities. A river is thus a shifting repository of memory and identity. A riverine environment is both rich and dangerous. While seasonal and climatic patterns of flooding may be determined, the nature of river flooding is inundation and unpredictability: a wandering defined only by the force of its wash and the transformations it leaves behind. Surprise. Surplus. Resignation. Renewal. For Lorine Niedecker, the riverine world—especially the impact of floods and flooding—is an intrinsic influence, both as a theme and as a shaping force in many of her poems. She spent most of her life living on Black Hawk Island in two small houses, each located on the north bank of Wisconsin’s flood-prone Rock River. Her lifelong landscape was a narrow flood plain. The nearly constant presence in her life of flooding— whether anticipated, occurring, or remembered—created a complex and ever-changing landscape, or perhaps more precisely, a waterscape, which required imagination, time, and physical labor to maintain. She was no Mary Pinard 22 | natural and political histories stranger to the physically taxing work required of a regular resident of a flood plain, from pre-flood precautions such as diking, sandbagging, battening down objects likely to float away, and even tying a boat to the front porch for post-flood transportation, to the sustained tasks of flood aftermath, including baling, hauling, shoveling, mopping, and disinfecting . Many of these activities—and as often, their interpretation through image, narrative, sound, or metaphor—emerge across her poems and suggest her strong preference for order against chaos. At the same time, however, Niedecker’s writing often shows a surrealist’s appreciation for the usurpations of the flood. She took pleasure in the upended, the strange, the mongrel made from accident. To grasp just how deeply Niedecker was influenced by the river and flooding , it’s essential to map the watery place she called home. She was raised near Fort Atkinson on Black Hawk Island, located at the mouth of the Rock River near where it empties into Lake Koshkonong. The total area of Wisconsin is approximately 56,000 square miles, of which 38,500 miles is the Mississippi River basin. The area of inland lakes is more than 1,400 square miles. Fort Atkinson is located in the Rock-Fox River basin in southeastern Wisconsin. It includes the drainage area of the Rock, Fox, and Des Plaines Rivers, from their headwaters to the Wisconsin-Illinois state line (Holmstrom 4). Hydrologists and geologic engineers from the U.S. Geological Survey have created a number of open-file reports about the magnitude and frequency of floods in this region, data gathered from a number of gaging stations located across the state to record high-water levels. In a thirty-mile radius from Niedecker’s home, there are seven gaging stations . According to the U.S. Geological Survey report filed in 1961 by D. W. Ericson, between the years 1935 and 1956 there were twenty-six floods recorded at the nearest gaging station to Niedecker’s home. They usually occurred in March, but sometimes in April, June, and January. The average peak stage for floods during this twenty-one-year period was six feet, with the smallest in 1942 at 4.16 feet and the highest in 1946 at 8.88 feet. Eleven of the twenty-six floods reached above the six-foot average. Mary Pinard | 23 In general, winters are long and cold in Fort Atkinson, and low winter temperatures create heavy ice cover on most streams. The thickness varies, depending on conditions, but it is not uncommon for ice to extend to two feet in depth. The spring breakup in southern Wisconsin generally starts in late February or early March, and as might be expected, this is the flooding season on the Rock River flood plain. The Niedecker family lived for generations on the banks of the Rock River and, except for a four-year period from 1938–1942 when Lorine moved to...