Austin S. Lin & the Quill without a Well.

The poetry of Lorine Niedecker is not so much exhumed as repositioned, much in the same way museums rotate traveling shows into their special exhibition wings, in 2005 Iowa Review Poetry Award winner Kayoko Wakamatsu’s poem, "Floodland."

In this poem, Wakamatsu uses the form of Niedecker’s poetry as a biographical instrument to bring both Niedecker and her work to the public eye, something that Niedecker herself had immense difficulty in achieving during her lifetime. Wakamatsu’s work is very much Shakespeare’s mirror held to nature in her biographical poem about 20th century poet Lorine Niedecker. What makes the work especially intricate is that it is syntactically and stylistically written like a Niedecker poem while Niedecker’s own verses are interwoven throughout it, creating a critical tapestry of the past, present, and future glimpses of Niedecker’s work.

Wakamatsu introduces Niedecker as a woman

who

lived hard

by water

only daughter

of a carp man (1-5)

which is a highly concentrated distillation of Niedecker’s life. Niedecker who indeed "lived hard" did so via a life of physiological struggles, professional struggles (if they could even at all be called "professional" for a woman in the 1930s), and creative struggles as a poet who had difficulty finding publishers who would consider her work. After expressing that Niedecker was

stone

deaf

till death

to all but dirt           (7 - 10)

referring not to Niedecker herself, but Niedecker’s spending Depression years caring for a deaf mother, Wakamatsu then allows Niedecker to speak for herself:

‘Anchored here

in the rise and sink

of life’ duckweed

long stem speed-

well sora rail plover               (16 - 20)

Niedecker described, in one of her poems, the plover, a bird that feigns a broken wing in order to lure predators only to distract them away from its young. This pairing with Wakamatsu’s own reference to the "well sora rail plover" shows her personifying Niedecker’s dilemma: to feign one’s tactics as a specific form or stylist of poetry in order to attract readership, or perhaps even to repel readership instead. In this fashion, Wakamatsu has also distracted the modern day reader of poetry–to read something whose text and form is very contemporary, yet when the reader delves deeper, realizes that Wakamatsu is simply using the modernist craving to rediscover works written over five decades ago. Wakamatsu focuses her attention on Niedecker’s isolation—as a poet whose Dickensonian obscurity during Niedecker’s lifetime was one of the greatest hurdles for her creativity. She depicts Niedecker trapped in cultiavting her state of remaining unknown by again creating a hybrid originating from her own verse and Niedecker’s:

Rock gardens grew in her blood

her old tools sieve

and seine

and pen

‘planting poems in deep silence’                 (40 - 45)

Yet Wakamatsu again strives to elevate Neidecker despite this literary limbo by summoning Niedecker’s verse again, this time amidst the syncopated musings of a Basho poem

like frogs in Basho

She divorced young

no ‘diamond fronds’

then named Lost and Found

twins unborne by ‘A’ poet (Z)          (46 - 50)

In effect, Wakamatsu is creating that same state of "Lost and Found" with her poem—using Niedecker’s lack of public outlet for her work–striving to be something precious on paper, precious to the eyes of a reading public, by the pairing of Niedecker’s words with Basho’s frog—here in the arena of the 21st century reader’s eyes. Wakamatsu continues by describing Niedecker’s physical barriers that came upon her later in her life, which added additional difficulty to her creative aspirations as a poet:

…the desire

of possessing

things’

She read proof-

read till her eyes

dimmed Seven years

with callused knees

wrists steeped s

he scrubbed floors

in the hospital ‘consensery’

where she stripped down

her poems–            (61 - 73)

Finding a means to support her life financially in the post-Depression American landscape accompanied by deteriorating physical conditions constricted the opportunities for Niedecker’s creative expression even more. This would complicate the already tumultuous personal life Niedecker was also balancing in the fray at the time. Ultimately, it is Niedecker’s own words again that burrow through the landscape in defiance and the perseverance of ones words surfacing from obscurity:

‘All my surfaces are

hard’ She

knew her place

knew agates

and blood

and wrote of them

speaking words on water

‘All my surfaces shine

a hard varnish shine

but looks good to me

renewed table feet

doors etc

after a flood’            (115 - 123)

In closing her own poem with Niedecker’s own hopefulness, Wakamatsu is, as a contemporary poet, clearing off her own poetic pedestal to make room for Niedecker. The final images suggest furniture and heirloom antiquities, once grand in their purpose, now weatherbeaten and weary by the floods and the elements. Yet even despite those blemishes, Niedecker herselve is steeped in resolve, knowing that if she could just continue onward with a "hard varnish shine" on the work, that her poems could still stand on their own, not only "look[ing] good to me" but to Wakamatsu and certainly, to the reading audience. "Floodlands" itself connotes the imagery of Niedecker’s poems after a literary Katrina equivalent—pieces and fragments of her words mixed and drying among Wakamatsu’s own. Yet Wakamatsu is the salvager here—rescuing, restoring, revitalizing, so that Niedecker’s work not only see a new day, but a new readership altogether.

Austin S. Lin

SOURCES

Brady, Andrea, "The Middle Distance" A book review of a collection of Lorine Niedecker poems edited by Jenny Penberthy, University of California Press, 2002

Wakamatsu, Kayoko, "Floodland" The Iowa Review Volume 35, Number 3 (Winter 2005/2006) pp.2-5