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Lorine Niedecker: The Poet in Her Homeplace
- University of Iowa Press
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Lorine Niedecker The Poet in Her Homeplace When I began studying the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, I, like many other readers, thought of her as painfully isolated in her Wisconsin community, despite the facts that her family had lived there for three generations and that she lived and worked there most of her life. To sustain her creative life, I thought, she depended on her correspondence with writers at a distance, chiefly Louis Zukofsky in New York and Cid Corman in Japan. Niedecker contributed to this impression that her writing life went on in separation from Fort Atkinson and Black Hawk Island, except as “the folk,” the natural environment, and local history gave her subjects for poems. In poems like “In the great snowfall before the bomb,” in letters, and in anecdotes that have been reported by people who met or corresponded with her, she cultivated a persona detached from her community and claimed her anonymity desirable and self-imposed. However, during research trips to Fort Atkinson in the mid-1980s, I met two local men who shared their recollections of Niedecker with me: Ernest Hartwig, younger brother of Niedecker’s first husband, Frank, and A eneas McAllister, a neighbor of Niedecker’s during the 1950s. These interviews changed my ideas about Niedecker’s attachment to her community . Both men’s recollections helped me understand how Niedecker created a life at home that was productive for her writing. In particular, Glenna Breslin 190 | niedecker and company McAllister’s story of the Zukofsky family’s visit to Black Hawk Island in 1954, which I recount in the second half of this essay, showed me how Niedecker adopted different personae for home and for the literary world. By the time of my second visit to Fort Atkinson, in 1987, I knew little about Niedecker’s first marriage to Frank Hartwig other than the courthouse rec ords of their marriage in 1928 and divorce in 1942. At the time of the wedding, Lorine was twenty-five and Frank twenty-nine. On the license, she declared as her occupation “Assistant Librarian,” he “Road Construction .” Most of Lorine’s acquaintances never knew she had been married. A few local people who had known the two recalled being surprised that they married because they were “different types.” One of Lorine’s high school classmates described Frank as “a loner . . . even less outgoing to people than Lorine.” Neighbors of Lorine described Frank in his later years as a morose and bitter man, inclined to drink too much. A eneas recalled Lorine complaining that Frank “drank and was mean to her.” Hearing these stories made me wonder what Lorine saw in this man that led her to marry him. So I was pleased to find Frank’s younger brother Ernest willing to talk with me. Ernest and Frank grew up on their parents ’ farm on Black Hawk Island. Although the boys attended the Lutheran German-language grade school, they went to Fort Atkinson for high school, where Ernest and Lorine graduated together in the class of 1922. Ernest remembered meeting Lorine when he was about eight years old, accompanying his mother when she worked as a cook for members of the hunting clubs at the end of Black Hawk Island. As a teenager, he helped his father mow Henry Niedecker’s hayfields and store the hay in the barn, and both Ernest and Frank worked for Henry in his carpseining operation. Ernest met me at his office—he was the Town Clerk—in Koshkonong Town Hall, two miles outside of Fort Atkinson. The small cream brick building with its two brick outhouses in opposite back corners of the yard was formerly a county school very like the one Lorine attended. Ernest was a soft-spoken, kindly man who recalled Lorine with obvious affection and admiration. Although he willingly answered my questions, he seemed reluctant to say anything less than positive about people. [54.166.234.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:47 GMT) Glenna Breslin | 191 Ernest described his brother as a gentle man who “kept to himself.” Frank hated school and quit in the spring of his junior year, not because his grades were bad, but because he wanted to work outdoors. He felt happiest outdoors, loved animals, and thrived on construction work. Although he lived in a community that offered plenty of opportunity for hunting, Frank “didn’t like killing pretty ducks.” Not until the day before the wedding did Frank tell Ernest that he...