This popular festival, the 4th annual takes place here in Fort the entire weekend. See schedule It kicks off here at the Carpe with a poetry open mic, and includes 2 featured poets, Mary Linton and Tom Montag.

Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970) is a twentieth-century, second-wave, Modern American poet often identified with the Objectivists. Living most of her life on the shores of the Rock River near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, she is perhaps best known as a poet of place who wrote about the Blackhawk Island that she loved. Her work, however, ranges from modernist folk poetry (NEW GOOSE, 1946) to haiku-like forms to long poems like “Lake Superior” and “Wintergreen Ridge” (NORTH CENTRAL, 1968). She is admired for the subtlety of her tightly crafted, nuanced and deliciously ironic poems, as well as for her total devotion to her calling.

“Not all harsh sounds displease—
Yellowhead blackbirds cough
through reeds and fronds
as through pronged bronze”