Letter from Blackhawk Island (2024)
Derek Jenkins
Letter from Blackhawk Island, Derek Jenkins, Canada/USA, 16mm > digital, 2 min, 2024
From her home in Blackhawk Island, Wisconsin, the poet Lorine Niedecker traded lively and impactful letters with numerous peers, most notably Louis Zukofsky and, later, Cid Corman. After a brief sojourn in New York, she lived alone in a one-room cabin for much of her adult life, often walking several miles into nearby Fort Atkinson to work as a copy editor at a dairy industry trade journal until failing eyesight reduced her to menial labour. Niedecker connected to the outside world by post, and among the small shelf of books she kept for herself in later years were several collections of letters, including those of the composer Franz Liszt and his lover, the scholar Marie Catherine Sophie, Comtesse d’Agoult.
Letter from Blackhawk Island assembles images and sound gathered on the small plot of land by the Rock River where Niedecker lived, along with ambient audio from the only existing recording of the poet’s voice, into the filmmaker’s own condensed record of prismatic correspondences.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with College for Creative Studies and Arts Council Windsor and Region.
Image credits: all artworks and stills courtesy of the artist © Derek Jenkins. Portrait courtesy © Amy MacIntosh.
About the artist
Derek Jenkins (Canada/USA) is a motion picture photographer born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1980. His practice is handmade, personal, and documentary, with an interest in labour, ecology, and technology—specifically the reciprocal relationships between tools, materials, and ways of knowing. He received a BA (2003) and an MA (2008) in English from the University of Arkansas, and an MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University (2021). His films, including Contents (2018), The Shouting Flower (2019), Livestock (2019), and Grounders (2020), have been exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries worldwide including DocLisboa, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, McMaster Museum of Art, ARKIPEL Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival, the8fest, FRACTO Experimental Film Encounter, Factory Media Centre, and Experiments in Cinema, among many others. His film As Close as Your Voice Can Call (2023) won the Best Regional prize at the 26th Media City Film Festival. He is Executive Director of Hamilton Artists Inc. and is a board member at Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Jenkins has also worked as a technician at Niagara Custom Lab. He lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario.