My Life by Water: Lorine Niedecker

My Life By Water: Lorine Niedecker is a documentary short film on poet, Lorine Niedecker.

My Life By Water: Lorine Niedecker is a cinematic interpretation of a selection of poetry by world-renowned poet Lorine Niedecker. Named "America's Greatest Unknown Poet", this short film is part of a 55-minute documentary, currently in production, about her life and work. This film explores Lorine Niedecker’s life through her poetry, of a life in literature lived largely where she was raised on Blackhawk Island near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. The film conveys this compelling, at times gritty, but sublime life, through a visual narrative of film and photographs together with music and readings of her literary art.

Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970) was the shy daughter of a carp fisherman, and mother that went deaf. She lived much of her life along the flooding Rock River, in a barren cottage without electricity or running water. Lorine grew up on Blackhawk Island, near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, while writing fierce poetry. She worked as a cleaning woman in a local hospital, and unknown to most of her acquaintances, notable poets worldwide admired her, such as Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Cid Corman, Basil Bunting, Adrienne Rich and Louis Zukofsky. With the sights and sounds of her rustic environs as frequent metaphors, Niedecker’s poetry explored issues of gender, domesticity, and sexual politics long before modern feminism.

Lorine once lived and loved in the Village of New York, then went home to write; for the rest of her life:

“…No layoff / from this / condensery.”