Literature: Lorine Niedecker’s “Black Hawk held:”
Steel Wagstaff
Lorine Niedecker was born on May 12, 1903 and lived most of her life on Black Hawk Island near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. She died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage on December 31, 1970.
This short poem was probably written in 1941, during the time that Niedecker was working for a federal writer’s program in Madison, Wisconsin. Her duties in this job included researching and editing historical biographies of notable persons in Wisconsin history, one of whom was Black Hawk. Niedecker’s reading notes on The Life of Black Hawk are held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at UT-Austin and are dated May 28, 1941.
This poem was included in Niedecker’s first book, New Goose, published in 1946 by the Press of James A. Decker. One of Niedecker’s favorite poems, she also included it her second book, My Friend Tree published in 1961 by The Wild Hawthorn Press[1] in Edinburgh, Scotland as well as both of the collected editions of her work that appeared during her lifetime: T&G: The Collected Poems, 1936-1966, published in 1969 by Jonathan Williams’ The Jargon Society, and My Life By Water: Collected Poems 1936-1968, published by Stuart and Deidre Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press in London in 1970.
Check your understanding
Black Hawk held: In reason
land cannot be sold,
only things to be carried away,
and I am old.Young Lincoln’s general moved,
pawpaw in bloom,
and to this day, Black Hawk,
reason has small room.
Read the poem in its entirety twice, once aloud. Then read through the various annotations to deepen your understanding of the poem’s context and historical references.
Once you’ve done this, complete these two short quizzes to check your understanding. The first quiz is a fill in the blank activity focused on the historical context for the poem.
This second quiz focuses on the characters in the poem, the rhyme pattern, and the poem’s attitude towards the two primary protagonists.
Additional Learning Material: “Foreclosure”
Publication History
The short poem “Foreclosure” was published in June 1970 in the second issue of Tuatara, a small magazine edited by Mike Doyle and published in Toronto by Coach House Press. This poem was part of her unpublished Harpsichord and Salt Fish manuscript and had not appeared in book form at the time of her death. It was first collected in the posthumous 1976 collection Blue Chicory, edited by Cid Cormon and published by the Elizabeth Press.
Niedecker was a property owner, having inherited land and homes on Black Hawk Island from her father after his death in 1954. She deeply disliked being a landlord, especially when she had to deal with tenants who failed to make payments. She writes about her view of property and land rights in the following poem.
“Foreclosure”
Tell em to take my bare walls down
my cement abutments
their parties thereof
and clause of claws
Leave me the land
Scratch out: the land
May prose and property both die out
and leave me peace
Post poem quiz
You can listen to a recording of Niedecker reading this poem made available on the PennSound website. This recording comes from the only known recording of Niedecker reading her own work and was made at her home in November 1970 by Cid Corman.
Several members of the Friends of Lorine Niedecker met at her cabin on Blackhawk Island to discuss this poem in September 2019:
Final reflection Essay:
This essay will automatically have a grade assigned to it and some automatic feedback based on keywords in your reponse. I will be reading your thoughts in detail and will provide comments and feedback separately.
- The Wild Hawthorn Press was operated by the iconoclastic Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. ↵
The Press of James A. Decker was a poetry publishing house once located in the tiny hamlet of Prairie City, Illinois. The Decker Press received national attention in the 1940s, when it published work by authors like Edgar Lee Masters, August Derleth, William Everson (Brother Antoninus), David Ignatow, Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, Lorine Niedecker, and Louis Zukofsky.
The Jargon Society is an independent press founded in 1951 by the American poet Jonathan Williams. It is now a part of the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.
Fulcrum Press (1965-74) was founded in London in the mid-1960s by medical student Stuart Montgomery and his wife Deirdre. A leading small press of the late 1960s, Fulcrum published major American and British poets in the modernist and the avant-garde traditions in carefully designed books on good paper. The Fulcrum Press made a significant contribution to the British Poetry Revival. Poets published by Fulcrum included Niedecker, Basil Bunting, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, Roy Fisher, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Hamburger, David Jones, Christopher Middleton, George Oppen, Tom Pickard, Omar S. Pound, Tom Raworth, Jerome Rothenberg and Gary Snyder.
