The Marsh
Immersion in Lorine Niedecker's work — especially her New Goose project of the 1930s and '40s, but also the (not very) long poems she wrote in the 1960s — gave me permission to embrace spareness and lyrical sonic play in poems of specific places and times that chart my own psychogeographies. The following poems are part of a sequence I'm tentatively calling "Nother Goose."
* * *
To an Indiana editor, 2023:
these are more
woodsy
than marshy
but—living now among
fields tiled and tilled,
ghost forest
long felled, over-plowed,
southeast of
Kankakee,
the deep ditches, straightened
rivers and rich
level soil of the
Great Drained
Swamp
(only Jasper Pulaski remains, where the cranes come
in a raucous crowd each fall, their rattling calls
knocking on our skulls)—
I'll have to go dig
marsh poems
out of the bog
of my Old
Northwest
notebooks.
* * *
in a Northwoods bog, 2011
sundew
sundew
kayak made for one
or two, a floating
island
we bumped into—
a few small trees
a clump of grasses
that slid askew
across the barely
riffled surface
of what I meant to
ask you
a cabin called king,
snapper squatting
under the dock
to bite off all reflection
edgeless
the edge also grasses
suspended over deep
water
eggs and chard,
grilled escarole,
brats and beer from
Stevens Point
thought we saw
the plain-looking bird with the
ethereal song on the
leaf-strewn floor by the
picnic table
on the mirror of early morning
while you slept
I went alone
in the canoe
and saw the otters
playing
a shiver of delights
scarves twisting across the
shimmering light—
a glimpse I couldn't
bring to you
hermit us
listening to that
electric
thrush
young moonlight
hush
hush
hush
Four Trees, a Confluence, and an Owl
Garfield Park, Indianapolis, Fall 2022
hairy hatted
acorn
mast
ten thousand
thousand
make it last
*
Ginkgo stink
sidewalk's crushed
berries
memory's thin
sticky
reparatives
*
persimmon
summons
pudding
persists
rot's
required
for the sweet
I list
*
marcescent
effervescence
hold on
too long
*
where bean creek
flows into
pleasant run
"who cooks for you?"
"who cooks for you
all?"
at leech of
sun
Michelle Niemann (Twitter: @mlniemann4; Instagram and Facebook: @michelle.re.writing) is a poet, scholar, and academic writing coach who earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Her article on Lorine Niedecker's food and farming poems of the 1930s and 1940s appeared in Modernism/modernity and received an honorable mention from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature in 2019. Michelle's scholarly work on ecopoetics, organic form in poetry, and the organic farming movement has been published in the Journal of Modern Literature, Victorian Poetry, Edge Effects, and edited collections. Her poems have appeared in RHINO, after hours, and CANNOT EXIST.
