Editor’s Introduction:
Poet Anna Drzewiecki reached out at the start of the series to tell me that they are always (always) thinking and writing about wetness and wet spaces. Throughout the Wetland Wednesday series, an abundance of poets, writers, and artists’ work on wetlands has been quoted, analysed, and otherwise displayed. Anna’s work contributes a thoughtful contemporary artistic perspective on wetlands.
Wetland Wednesday has also been a series about the loss of wetlands around the world–destroyed by climate change, land reclamation, bad policy, and the structural violence of settler colonialism and other capitalist endeavours. Anna’s work honours, and converses with, the wetlands in England where they write from now: celebrating the liminality, subversiveness, and intricacy of wetlands that has so often motivated their destruction.

I live now near a meadow that floods. It floods in October, and stays like this, wetted, until late spring or summer.

The dog and I go to the wetlands almost daily and at least three times per week. We go in the morning or late afternoon. A few times, at dusk.

In the wetlands is being in a wet – land, being in the wet. These are not the first wetlands I have known, nor the last. Here.

The wetland and I have been thinking a lot lately. Together, we do our exercises.

Neither/nor + both/and

This is an exercise in un/becoming.

Wetland [this body!] to wetland [the meadow saturate and its rivulets]. The shadow is us simultaneous, a wet-landing in language.

I imitate the wetland / We sound each other out

We slip against form, we slip out of it.

What is it? What are you? And what are we doing here?

Nobody swallows nobody. We all flood back. In the wetlands forms repeat, burst and dissipate. Anticipations. A hush.

I have been thinking with this wetland. Here, some notes:

—> hydraculture

—> hybrids

—> the jesterly

—> fluidity

—> saturation

—> the nonbinary

—> waterotics

—> coalition

Here the wetland is me, too; my body, too.

There could be no photographs of the wetland as I knew it, only sketches, pulses, glimpse. I felt kaleidoscopic in the/se aquatic bodies. In the shoreline which is everywhere and nowhere, we jested.

The dog and I visit the wetland: not everyday, but almost.

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This is the shadow of an essay.

On wetlands / In wetlands

What is it? ‘What are you?’

The wetland subverts the question, inverts and reverses.

The wetland as exhausted,

and inexhaustible.

The shadow occurs not only on the surface but beneath it, too. The subdermal, the submerged —> I saw a shadow of creatures in the wet molecules, and the shadow of the molecules, too.

It all started to feel too abstract or abstracted. It made no sense. The wetland is not a vessel metaphor host to theory. The wetland is the theory — and the wetland is the wetland.

I watched the grasses bend back and stay like that, although there was no current, only the surface which they would not breach.

Bend back, bends back. In the indecipherable shore, I bend back, I imagine bending back. Aquatic, acrobatic.

I never wanted to write about the wetlands only within them, and within this one in particular.

How to voice it: at once prismatic, and fluid. I felt adrift and magnetized. I knew the names only of the plants finding root in soil and the hard-packed muds. I recognized the superorganismic bramble and noted where the berries were, and where the thorns. But as for the submerged I had no names. Oh, but the shapes and shadows! Everything was at once shallow and deep.

The wetland is not a place but between places, and this, to me, makes it the place of interest. Of course it is a place.

How to voice it: at once prismatic, and fluid. I felt adrift and magnetized. I knew the names only of the plants finding root in soil and the hard-packed muds. I recognized the superorganismic bramble and noted where the berries were, and where the thorns. But as for the submerged I had no names. Oh, but the shapes and shadows! Everything was at once shallow and deep.

The wetland is not a place but between places, and this, to me, makes it the place of interest. Of course it is a place.

On my walks with S.

I do not want to confuse the wetland as a site of reception: although, for many, this is what the wetland can/might/has become.

The wetland wets my phone, in photographs. Wets my Cloud.

The day I finally brought a camera. On that day, the wetland refused to be made image. The wind made contours in my coat and geese, swans, and unlikely gulls scattered or were caught suspended in the pressure. Everything was blue and browns. On that day, I had a camera, and the wetland had a fit. Under pressure / such pressures. In the weather, which is always, I cried a lot and could not see through the lens.

Three trees, silhouetted

Resuscitates, swallows, molts, unfurls, repeats

Trans/forms

It’s weather, and a perpetual emergence.

Blur, translucence, turbidity, saturation. Seasons, seasoning. Poesis and perpetual emergence. Loss. It floods: the flooding and the draining, the drainage.

Neither/nor + both/and

How could asking what the wetland does to socially-constructed dominant forms—to binaries, to taxonomies, to borders, — …

I never said ‘look what the wetland can teach us.’

Today we are in the shadow of that question. It’s serious and it’s playful, we’re playing. We just have to. It hurts so much. And the scum.

[Scum]

The wetlands are no passive place into which we imagine. They are not a vacant form, an intellectual infrastructure, or a metaphor (I.e. of fluidities, hybridity, the unseen, etc.)

I take photos in the wetlands on my phone. I take so many photos. Sometimes, it is too windy and my hands too patchy (circulation/s) to photograph. Mostly, here, I tend to the dog. Photographs in morning, crystalline hazy crisp frosted ground. Swans. Sometimes, it is so cold I cry and cry. Sometimes, when we are running, I sweat. Nettles. The meadow saturates in its center, and the wetness reaches towards/against the river, higher land, a town, to the northwest trees of which three stand out silhouetted, and through/within pasture.

Three trees, silhouetted.

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Again: I wanted to photograph reflections, wherein the wetland, a kind of dimensional mirror; I only managed the shadows.

The wetland is a jester of form. Jesterly, the wetland…

In another essay, I write with the wetland on being a jester: form, space, time, boundary.

There: a jesterly unfurling, the limb sprawl, performs their inversions, resuscitates, dissipates…

Do we say it? Do we have too? Here: a wetland / the wetlands.

Peer into it! The wetland, temporary and forever.

In another essay, I write with the wetland on hybridity. In another, on fluidity. In another, on fear. In another, on refuge. In another, on the slippery. In another, on doubling. In another, on haunting. In another, on infrastructure. In another, on toxicity.

Today, we are the shadow, and within that shadow.

First: Aglow. A soft murk. We rolled around together. Evaporations. [Gasp]. I saw the wetland in the morning, and again, the same day, at night.

But isn’t it flooded? Isn’t it flooded?

The meadow morphs [molts, slips] into wetland, an affirmation.

In another essay, I write with the wetland on non-binary existence/s.

On the weekends, here, there are horses and cows. Otherwise, birds like mallards, swans, and gulls. Their young.

What floods? What saturates? What pools, purges, percolates?

I feel propelled towards the murk, the hydras lurking. The mud.

In the wetland, thinking in coalition, not comparison. Incomparable, incompatibilities. Companionships.

The sacred mutant molecular: wet.

The myth of vacancy —> potent, dangerous

In another essay, I write with the wetland on vacancy and hospitalities, thinking about what it means to be hospitable or inhospitable, and inevitably also thinking service, hierarchy, desires, unease.

Is this too personal? Not enough?

Too much/not enough

Impression vs. depression. The ecology of a wallow.

The wetland: neither/nor + both/and

Meet me as a prism and in this light

[in this light]

The prism, the doubling.

The wetland: the prism, and the doubling.

Unsteady with me.

In another essay, I write with wetlands on wetness, wet dreams, thirst, and what we might call ‘waterotics’ or ‘waterotica.’

So what? How might we activate these forms? What ‘counter-imaginaries’…

Face it/facing it

[What face?]

The wetland lives forever. It has to.

Its incompatibility with binaries, not incoherence. I started to think of the wetland as a twist, or even: a hinge. To twist, to hinge, at our articulations. I stood in the shoreline with my little camera, pulse.

Each wetland haunts another, the others. I started to imagine wetlands as a saturation, a saturating activity, sometimes an ooze, a flood, a bleed, a rush.

And I would rather not obsess over fecundity.

The mystery, not mystique.

A woman I see on Mondays and Tuesdays: I tell her about the wetlands, my walks and that I am taking notes towards a project. She says ‘The eels!’

Molecular gatherings // amoebic motherhoods

Barren vs. fecund

Wet vs. dry

What is desirable? Am I? Am I desirable? What are you good for? Can I farm you? Can I build you? Can I park on you? What do you want? What do you want?

Can I put this here? Can I put this here.

So a mall is erected on a salt marsh. So the runoff enters the estuary. So an organism.  [And then what?]

Here the dog drinks, she laps at the scum and the bright.

This is an exercise in between. We are jesting: wetland to wetland, to wetland. The jesterly hydra emerging, lurking, slipping into/out of depth/shallows.

The photographs are nothing like what I imagined.

A shadow, or shadows.

Wetlands as shadow zones, and as the shadow itself.

Splashing in/out of presence

Lapping, my lap

My notes from / form

‘Hey Siri,’ error, err. That iris.

How does language happen here? How can it? How could it?

[Sigh]

Is there any relief? Can we sink into it without a loss: a swallow.

Wetland as a season, a para-verse, an activ/ated saturation.

How does it absorb? What does it release?

[Held here]

[Sigh!]