LORINE NIEDECKER'S MARSHES

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Writing from her “little kitchen/table overlooking 600/acres of marsh,” the poet Lorine Niedecker declared in a snatch of verse in a 1947 Christmas letter to Louis Zukofsky that “The Brontes/had their moors, I have/my marshes!” The Wisconsin waterworld in which this poet spent most of her days comes marvelously to life in an exquisite short film, My Life by Water: Lorine Niedecker, completed by director Brent Notbohm in 2004 as part of a longer feature project. You could do a great deal worse for your mental health than spending your next seven minutes watching the green marshes roll by, learning about the life of the poet, and hearing dazzling excerpts from her poetry.

You could do even better than that by spending time with Neidecker’s sublime memoir poem, “Paean to Place,” brilliant passages of which can be heard on the film’s soundtrack. You can absorb, for instance, Niedecker’s acute linguistic precision in lines that gauge the surface tension of marshwater as experienced by a water bug—the sense of place conveyed in the observation of its minutest particulars. And best of all is to hear the intense musicality she derives out of the flora and fauna from which the story of her life emerges. The song of praise to her native place begins:

And the place

                                        was water            

Fish

      fowl

            flood

      Water lily mud

The rhyme of “flood” and “mud” is both delicate and basic. And just listen to Neidecker as she mourns her mother’s deafness in an intensely intricate evocation of birdsong:

I mourn her not hearing canvasbacks

their blast-off rise

      from the water

            Not hearing sora

rails’s sweet

spoon-tapped waterglass-

descending scale-

      tear-drop-tittle

            Did she giggle

as a girl?

In describing the silence of her mother’s experience, Niedecker summons an equivalent of the dense music of a Bach harpsichord piece in just two amazing lines describing the structure of the call of the sora rail : “spoon-tapped waterglass/descending scale.” There is the ever-present image of water, but it is in a glass, to be played as a musical instrument. And there is so much assonance and internal rhyming in “spoon-tapped waterglass” as to defy quantification. This is high poetry.