ABSTRACT
O f the earth, the mud of flooded land and the marshes of hernative Black Hawk Island, Wisconsin, Lorine Niedecker's poems are as powerfully elemental as they show us humans to be-as mineral, copper flowing in our veins, and iron. Butterflies-fragile as spirit-are shown to be actually akin to rock:
Nothing supra-rock about it
simply Butterflies
are quicker than rock. ("Lake Superior")
Niedecker's vision effects a kind of democratization of the hierarchy of things. In this sense, she is a descendent of Whitman, although in almost every other way-her succinctness, for example, reflecting a lifelong commitment to condensing, her work being her "condensery," as she called it-she is light-years away from Whitman's project of inclusion. Even her cataloging is brutally selective. "I arose from marsh mud," she tells us, from
algae, equisetum, willows, sweet green, noisy birds and frogs (untitled fragment)
an earthy, earth-bound beginning reinforced by her decision to remain in her native rural Wisconsin, a world that, in Niedecker's hands, does grant access to more ethereal earth-bound beings, such as those butterflies, beings whose ties to the mineral realm extend everyone's, everything's, connection to the farthest reaches of the universe. She strives for as accurate a description of each object as Gerard Manley Hopkins did, coupling this effort with an unerring ear for sympathetic sounds, far too numerous to do justice to here:
Not all harsh sounds displeaseYellowhead blackbirds cough through reeds and fronds as through pronged bronze.
