Poet in Residence Karl Elder has won the 2005 Lorine Niedecker Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. The prize, named after “the state’s pre-eminent poet of the twentieth century . . . [is] given for a group of shorter poems, which, taken singly or together, represent a significant poetic achievement commensurate with the quality and character of Niedecker’s work.” Mr. Elder will be presented the award at a ceremony in the Mitchell Room of the Wisconsin Club in Milwaukee on Saturday, April 30th.
Concerning the selection of his poems for the award by the New York poet and critic Rachel Wetzsteon, Elder said, “I’m humbled by this honor because Niedecker (a protégé of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky) who died in 1970, has recently assumed the position in literary circles as the most prominent poet ever to surface from Wisconsin. I admire her work very much. She lived near Ft. Atkinson for nearly all her life and endured with great nobility what anyone in our culture would call hardships—both personal and physical. But she was deeply immersed in the life of the mind and utterly devoted to her aesthetic principles, the most dominant being severe economy of language. By way of the quality of her art and her temperament she is often perceived to be in the line of Emily Dickinson.”