LORINE'S TOOLBOX - CONTINUED

MEASURE
When we get to the level of line and stanza in Niedecker's poetry, how do these get measured?

Sometimes she clearly has an oriental, haiku-like line. There is not denying that "Hospital Kitchen" (Exhibit 10) feels like a haiku:

Return
the night women's
gravy

to the cleaned
stove

Sometimes Niedecker uses a line and stanza very much like Williams' "triadic line," which Williams developed late in his late, and which Niedecker adapted for some of her later poems. Look at the beginning of "Wintergreen Ridge" (Exhibit 2) for an example of this.

Sometimes Niedecker's lines seem very much like what Williams calls for when he talks about an "American measure." That is, the line is much like a "measure" in music, where each measure contains beats and rests of equal total value. And as Williams points out, it is stupid to say "that every musical measure in two-four time must contain only two notes" (22). Further, Niedecker sometimes puts two measures in a single line.

For instance, in the poem beginning "The smooth black stone..." (Exhibit 7) each line might be read as being of equal value, with two beats to the measure. The result is that the information in the second line, being less important, is more rushed; and the final line has a single word that expands to fill two beats:

The smooth black stone
I picked up in true source park
       the leaf beside it
once was stone

Rest   Rest

Why should we hurry
      Home   Rest

At the opening to "Paean to Place" (Exhibit 4), we see the fourth line of each stanza has doubled measures, four beats instead of two:

Fish   Rest
        fowl   Rest
              flood   Rest
       water lily mud   Rest
My life   Rest

Rest    Rest

in the leaves and on the water
My mother and I
                          born   Rest
in swale and swamp and sworn   Rest
to water   Rest

We might call these poems free-verse, but they are clearly not "free." They are measured in a consistent way. While I have not applied my notion of measure to every line of Niedecker's poetry to see how well it fits – that would be a task for another time and place – in many of the cases I've tried, line and measure coincide.

Continued here.