Screening: Welcome Poets

In collaboration with former Wisconsin Poet Laureate Nicholas Gulig (2023–24), PBS Wisconsin, and the Friends of Lorine Niedecker, join us for a community viewing and discussion of the new documentary video series Welcome Poets.

This PBS Wisconsin video series provides a unique opportunity to consider the experiences of two important Wisconsin poets, separated by time but joined together by place. Follow Gulig in a reflective homecoming told through the shared landscapes and poetry of his life and that of famed 20th century Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker (1903–70) of Fort Atkinson. Weaving literary biography and memory in an extended contemplation of identity and place, this six-part series demonstrates poetry’s power to give voice to community.

After the screening, join in a conversation with Gulig and producer Colin Cowley.

About Lorine Niedecker: Niedecker lived most of her life on Blackhawk Island, a flood-prone stretch of marshland near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, whose landscapes shaped the clarity and concision of her poetry. Often working a range of jobs to survive—as a library assistant, proofreader, and hospital cleaner—she wrote in spare hours, crafting poems that balanced the immediacy of folk speech with the precision of modernist experiment. Her lifelong correspondence with poet Louis Zukofsky linked her to the Objectivist poets, yet her work remained singular—marked by brevity, musicality, and deep attention to objects and place.

Though she published only a handful of books during her lifetime, including New Goose (1946), My Friend Tree (1961), North Central (1968), and T&G: The Collected Poems, 1936–1966 (1969), Niedecker earned the admiration of William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Basil Bunting, who praised her as “the most interesting woman poet America has yet produced.” Her later long poems, such as “Lake Superior,” “Wintergreen Ridge” and “Paean to Place,” brought together local history, natural observation, and political and social concerns of global weight. Once little known beyond small presses, her reputation has steadily grown, and she is now recognized as one of Wisconsin’s—and the United States’—most vital 20th century poets.

Nicholas Gulig is a Thai-American poet from Wisconsin. He is the author of The Other Altar (Center for Literary Publishing, 2024), winner of both the Colorado Poetry Prize and the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award; Orient (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2018), winner of the CSU Poetry Center Open Book Competition; Book of Lake (CutBank, 2016); and North of Order (YesYes Books, 2015). A recipient of a 2011 Fulbright Fellowship to Bangkok, Thailand, Gulig has also been awarded the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award, the Black Warrior Review Poetry Prize, and the Grist’s ProForma Award. Currently, Gulig works as an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater where he founded and co-edits Either/Or magazine. In 2023, he was appointed poet laureate of Wisconsin and received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.

Colin Crowley is a video producer and photographer with a degree in French from UW–Eau Claire. He lived for over a decade in Nairobi, Kenya, and traveled globally as a communications specialist for an international aid organization before relocating to the Madison area in 2017. He now works as a senior multimedia producer for PBS Wisconsin. In 2022 he was awarded three Chicago/Midwest Emmys for Directing, Photography, and Editing.

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