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Friday, November 9, 2018

Niedecker

"You are my friend-- / you bring me peaches / and the high bush cranberry / you carry / my fishpole // you water my worms / you patch my boot / with your mending kit / nothing in it / but my hand."

Here's a nice poem. I want to set it to music so first I must think it through a bit. It starts off with a kind of ordinary line. Everything else in the poem explains that friendship.  Gifts of fruit first. I didn't know before 10 seconds ago that cranberry bushes were tall, but I've just found out they grow to be 10-15'.  We don't expect that line to be so long, but the details get more specific as we go along. The alliteration of water and worms is a nice touch of humor there. I don't fish but I guess you keep the bait wet so they are still alive when you put them on the hook.  

There is a shift to a faster rhythm.  Now the gifts are of service, not edible objects. A narrative emerges of the images: the speaker, if she is a woman, is going fishing with another person (possibly male?).  He is carrying to gear, including hers, then doing more specific things. There is a slight hiccup syntactically in the last two lines: "nothing in it" would refer to the kit, but that doesn't make sense, so it must be the boot. Now the hand, not the foot is in there: we get the image of her holding the boot steady by putting her hand in it while he is putting a patch onto it.  "Nothing in it but my foot" wouldn't be a satisfying conclusion.

That specificity has an emotional charge to it. It is a love poem, but expresses love as gratitude for friendship, small acts of comradeship by which he shows his affection for her. The music has to express the tone of that old song "P.S. I love you" or something like that. It has got to expand and contract in the length of phrases and be somewhat understated, not too Norman Rockwell.

PS:  I just saw an online lecture / discussion of the poem where the professor and the class do not consider the possibility that the "it" can be the boot itself. They go into this long discussion of meta poetry and masturbation.  How can the "it' be the mending kit? Did all its contents (thread, needles, patches, glue...) spill out of it? Why would her hand be in it if he is the mender?    

2 comments:

Vance Maverick said...

That was certainly always my reading. And to put your hand in a boot while someone else mends it is pretty trusting -- she's making herself vulnerable to this person.

el curioso impertinente said...

Setting it to music obviously involves a series of choices that together constitute a kind of interpretation. At the very least the music will play up some aspects and downplay others. Stylistically, you could try to go rustic, sentimental, Wisconsin-y (whatever that is), minimalist (to throw the emphasis on the words), or a bunch of others. Is one style more correct or justified than another? A big difference to setting a sad poem to cheerful music.