The Banta Award 1986
From This Condensery: The Complete Writing of Lorine Niedecker
by Lorine Niedecker
edited by Robert J. Bertholf
The Jargon Society, 1985

The 1986 Banta Award BOOK
From This Condensery: The Complete Writing of Lorine Niedecker is to be treasured for its precise poems magically shaped into Lorine's miniature worlds.

Niedecker wrote of life on her beloved Blackhawk Island with its ordinary folks, the birds of the marshes and its muskrats at flood time. Water is a recurring theme: ". ..My life in the leaves and on water My mother and I born in swale and swamp and sworn to water"

"She is the best living poetess," said English poet Basil Bunting. "No one is so subtle with so few words." Recognized increasingly by American critics and often compared to Emily Dickinson, Lorine Niedecker's poetry has survived and is now flourishing because of its steadfast cultivation and publication by poets. They include Cid Corman, her literary executor; Louis Zukofsky, her mentor; William Carlos Williams; and Jonathan Williams who published Condensery. Supportive British poets were Bunting, Peter Dent, Richard Caddel, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Kenneth Cox.

Her style was to re-write, to refine and to condense to the fewest and the best words. "I learned to sit at desk and condense/No layoff from this condensery." She once wrote to Corman: "For me the sentence lies in wait — all those prepositions and connectives — like an early spring flood. A good thing my follow-up feeling has always been condense, condense...."

Members of the Literary Awards Committee admired Lorine's personal reflections, refined crystal clean.

"The smooth black stone
I picked up in true source park
the leaf beside it
once was stone
Why should we hurry
home."
They marveled at her perspective and grace, finding her to be in tune with truth.

Reviewing Condensery for The N.Y. Times, Michael Heller says, "....the sudden availability of her work is a distinctive literary event, for her poems, in their powerful yet nearly mathematical compoundings of language and silence, are among the subtlest of our time."

For The Christian Science Monitor, Steven Ratiner writes, "There is a courage, a sense of purpose in her long quiet dedication that stands out among the art-performers as a work of genuine greatness."

Three publications devoted to the Niedecker ouevre have paid homage: Epitaphs for Lorine; Thirty-two Poets Celebrate Lorine Niedecker, Jargon Society, 1973; Lorine Niedecker, Truck Press, 1975 (Truck 16 summer issue); and The Full Note: Lorine Niedecker, Interim Press, 1983.

Editor Robert J. Bertholf has included her multiple versions and her abandoned poems in Condensery, as well as Niedecker's radio plays, reviews and other prose pieces. Duke University Press will soon publish her letters to Corman.

The AUTHOR
Lorine Niedecker

Lorine Niedecker lived nearly all of her 67 years on the Rock River near Fort Atkinson, obscure to her community and to most of America's literati. During her lifetime, however, her poetry was praised and published by the British, as well as by many American poets.

An only child, Lorine was born to Henry E. and Theresa (Kunz)Niedecker on May 12, 1903, at Blackhawk Island where Henry was a carp fisherman. A peninsula along Rock River which juts into Lake Koshkonong, the "island" was home to Lorine until her death on New Year's Eve 1970.

For many years she lived alone in a two-room cabin without plumbing. She never had a car and would walk four miles to work in Fort Atkinson. She had to earn a living, but her role was relentlessly that of poet.

After graduation from high school in 1922, Lorine attended Beloit College for two years. She worked at Fort Atkinson's public library, married unsuccessfully and was in Madison briefly, writing for WHA radio. Her last jobs back home were reading proof for Hoard's Dairyman magazine and cleaning at the hospital until 1962, the year she married Al Millen, a house painter from Milwaukee. Except for some winters spent in Milwaukee before he retired, Lorine and Al lived on her beloved Blackhawk Island. They are buried nearby in Union Cemetery.

Lorine's eight published works are New Goose, Prairie City, IL: Decker Press, 1946; My Friend Tree, Edinburgh, Scotland: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1961; North Central, London: Fulcrum Press, 1968; T & G: The Collected Poems (1936-1968), Penland, NC: Jargon Society, 1968; My Life By Water: Collected Poems 1936-1968, London: Fulcrum Press, 1970; Blue Chicory, New Rochelle, NY: Elizabeth Press, 1976; The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker ed. by Cid Corman, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985; and From This Condensery: The Complete Writing of Lorine Niedecker ed. by Robert J. Bertholf, Highlands, NC: Jargon Society, 1985.

1986 WLA Literary Awards Committee Members

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