poetics of affinity

8/3/2019 Poetics of Affinity

1/26

The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

University of Wisconsin Presshttp://www.jstor.org/stable/4489137 .

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

University of Wisconsin Press and The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are

collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Contemporary Literature.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uwischttp://www.jstor.org/stable/4489137?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/4489137?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uwisc


2/26

ELIZABETH WILLISThe Poetics of Affinity:LorineNiedecker,

WilliamMorris,and the Art of Work

Lorine Niedeckers one of those rarepoetswhosepolitics,whose full intelligence, can be found in every poem. It's notsimply that there are paychecks, unions, bosses, and evenslave girls in her poems, or that two of her most frequently

recurring nouns are "war" and "work." It's what lies behind herwry, undercutting perspective; her fluid sense of material and intel-lectual property; her awareness of the world as a site of physicaland social evolution; her understanding that things could always beworse; her sense of language's transformative power; and her drivefor self-determination: "I must possess myself" ("Progression,"CollectedWorks28). Niedecker's work is saturated with a politicsconceived at the intersection of public and private lives, where indi-viduals perform their identities, their ideological affinities, theirlabors. ForNiedecker, poetic labor is inextricable from what is ordi-narily thought of as the life outside the work. Her poems insist onthe work of artas part of the largerconstruction of a fully deployed,lived aesthetics. While this tendency runs throughout her verse, it

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Lorine Niedecker Centenary con-ference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in October 2003. My thanks to the conference organiz-ers and sponsors at Woodland Pattern Book Center and the Milwaukee PublicLibrary-particularly to Karl Gartung and Anne Kingsbury, but also to many others-forproviding this forum. And continuing thanks to Jenny Penberthy, without whom somuch of Niedecker scholarship would be impossible. "Who was Mary Shelley?," "Themuseum man," "I knew a clean man," and "Tomy small / electric pump" are quoted intheir entirety from Penberthy's edition of Niedecker's Collected Works, @ 2002/TheRegents of the University of California Press.

Contemporary iteratureXLVI,4 0010-7484;E-ISSN1548-9949/05/0004-0579@2005 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System


3/26

580 o CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREgains priority in her late poems, particularly the poem for WilliamMorris,"His Carpets Flowered," on which this essay will ultimatelyfocus.

Art and labor are inseparably bound in Niedecker's poems. Heroften quoted metaphor for poetic production was the condensery(a dairy where condensed milk is prepared), a crossing point ofagriculture, manufacturing, and distribution. The choice of termaptly describes Niedecker's practice of producing highly concen-trated poems intended for long-term consumption; it also assertsher intellectual activity as labor within the context and vocabularyof her local economy. Throughout her lifetime, Jefferson County,Wisconsin, was headquarters for the theory and practice of theAmerican dairy industry. At its height of production, it was hometo eighty-four creameries, many containing condenseries, and itcontinues to be the home of Hoard'sDairyman,the industry's pub-lication of record, for which Niedecker at one time worked as aproofreader. In her lifetime, the condensery was a site of concen-trated collective activity where-whether due to its communalstructure, its marginality, its constant work flow, or its crucial rela-tion to everyday life-there was no chance of "layoff" ("Poet'sWork,"CollectedWorks194).1Niedecker repeatedly reminds us of poetry's status as both a laborand a luxury, a work limited not only to those who have the ear forit but to those who can manage its unrelenting demands, and onecan't help but recognize it as a luxury for which she-and others-sacrificed a good deal else. She acknowledged her father's workseining carp in terms of the education it afforded her, that she"might go high / on land / to learn" ("Paean to Place," CollectedWorks261). Rather than claiming an economic and intellectualhigher ground that would separate her from her biological and bio-graphicalorigins-and ratherthan pursuing the New Criticalfantasyof the well-wrought poem that transcends its site of production-Niedecker's poetic labor is invested in the reintegration of "high"

1. I am especially grateful to Sue Hartwick of the Hoard Museum and to Mary Gatesand Marilla Fuge of Fort Atkinson for their generous and generative discussions ofNiedecker, the dairy industry, and Jefferson County history. Currently there are no oper-ating condenseries in Jefferson County.


4/26

W I L L I S 581acculturation and "low," flood-level living, in bringing modernistambition to the materials of an essentially working-class life.2 Hertranshistoricalpoetic researchfocused on the location and processesof art, integrating the lives of its local and international producers.

Beyond her use of geographically local content, Niedecker wasdrawn to exploring the genealogy of thought, tracing the sourcesand lines of influence that locate an artist's intellectual commerce.Because of my ongoing interest in tracing Victorian and aestheticistroots in twentieth-century modernism, this essay primarilyexplores Niedecker's reading and reworking of nineteenth-centurymaterials-particularly the biography, letters, and essays of WilliamMorris-with respect to her increasing attention to scenes of pro-duction and ownership. Her poems "Who was Mary Shelley?,""Darwin,"and "His Carpets Flowered" all address writers of greatpolitical imagination who composed within and against variousmanifestations of empire and industrialization. Niedecker capturesthese writers precisely at the crux of their own lives and art, as if inthe process of writing these poems she could expose the turmoiland dynamism of a life in art. In terms of composition, CharlesDarwin exemplified the poet's role as observer of the evolutionaryprocess by which the world makes itself and as condenser of thelarger transhistorical record thereby revealed. William Morris andMary Shelley suggested two distinct forms of collective composi-tion with which Niedecker identified her own work: Shelley thehousehold industry (in other words, the kind of collaborationNiedecker shared with Louis Zukofsky) and Morris the guild (astructure akin to a cooperative condensery).In Niedecker's poetic practice, poems-and other literarylabors-often find their afterlives in other poems. Thus a poem like"Who was Mary Shelley?" (CollectedWorks212-13) appears as an

2. Niedecker studied for two years at Beloit College before returning home to care forher mother. Though she was the daughter of modest landowners, the family's circum-stances steadily declined during her life. As an adult she worked on the Federal Writers'Project, then as a proofreader, library worker, and cleaning person while continuing tomanage the family's few cabins on the Rock River as they slid from minor assets to finan-cial liabilities. For more on Niedecker's family background and economic status, seeLorineNiedecker:Womanand Poet, edited by Jenny Penberthy, and Penberthy's introduc-tion to Niedecker's Collected Works.


5/26

582 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREanswer of sorts to the Romantic obsession with immortality, butalso as a direct test of Mary Shelley's own compositional methods.Like Shelley patching together her monstrous Frankenstein,Niedecker composed poems out of "buried" and "unburied" mat-ter, folding in lines from the letters she wrote, received, or read inprinted volumes and from the conversations she had, overheard, orimagined. The writers with whom her poems converse are con-nected to Niedecker through the elective affinity of devoted reader-ship and through their common human interests, what amounts toa sympathy of both content and form. Referencing an earlier sceneof reading, "Who was Mary Shelley?" presents a doubly laboredtext by placing before us the difficult, metaphorically freighted cir-cumstances of Shelley's intellectual production in the context of thefailed production of a nuclear household:3

Who was Mary Shelley?What was her namebeforeshe married?Sheeloped with this Shelleyshe rode a donkeytill the donkey had to be carried.Marywas Frankenstein's reatorhis yellow eyebeforeherhusbandwas to drownCreatedthe monsternightsafterByron,Shelleytalkedthe candle down.Who was Mary Shelley?She readGreek,ItalianShe borea childWho diedand yet anotherchildwho died.

3. I might add thatFrankensteins a text whose centralproblemis that of balancinglife and thought, a problem that surrounds the novel's many scenes of reading andinforms its discussionof literary orm.The novel also repeatedlyexaminesthe relationbetweenreaderand text and the ways they inevitablymirroreachother.


6/26

W I L L I S 583Inspired at least in part by Eileen Bigland's biography of MaryShelley, the poem mimics the concerns of Shelley's Frankenstein s itrecounts-in radically condensed form-the traumas of textualproduction in the context of both personal loss and the author's fail-ure to produce a culturally accepted model of the maternal, an issuethat haunted Niedecker's relationship with Zukofsky and thepoems (ratherthan children) their relationship produced.4In the process of reading the condensed facts of Shelley's life, atleast two things happen. First,we see the individual life in terms ofrepeated pattern:in the poem's first stanza, the young, exiled MaryShelley, mother of an illegitimate child, blurs with the VirginMary. And second, we see the pared-down narrative as a place-holder for untold complications and losses: the richness of readingGreekand Italian is counterpoised with the loss of her children, andin that juxtaposition we see the possibility of the deaths being readcritically as the result of an overly intellectual, insufficiently nur-turing mother. The practice of borrowing biographical materialfrom other writers was for Niedecker not a simple turning awayfrom her own materials but a broadening of their field of reference,foregrounding the interconnectedness rather than the individualgenius of literary enterprise and, beyond that, the common groundof the human record with its complex narrative variations andongoing struggles for expression.Niedecker's poetics were influenced early on by the ambitionwithin the Romantic world view, its pantheistic vision of nature andits proposition that the poem could be a vehicle for everyday speechrather than heightened literary language. Yet more so than thepoetry of any of the Romantics, whose work was of course familiarto her, Niedecker's work is filled with people and things that cometo us in unabashedly real forms, like the "Two old men" whosesocial impasse amounts to "you spit / I don't spit" (CollectedWorks132). Niedecker's acts of recollection occur less in the context ofWordsworthian tranquillity than of labor-and the exhaustedpleasure of the day's end. Reverie is part of the poet's guilty pleas-ure, a form of unregulated and largely uncompensated labor by

4. See especially Shelley's introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein,in whichshe refers to the novel as her "hideous progeny."


7/26

584 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREwhich she gleans the excess, value-added services of others, know-ing all too well how the excesses of her own work would be read byher immediate company: "What would they say if they knew / I sitfor two months on six lines / of poetry?" (143). And yet what hap-pens within these three lines of poetry conveys some idea of thelevel of condensing their making requires. Here, as elsewhere, wesee Niedecker's poems performing socially constructed acts of see-ing-the poet assessing her surroundings, looking at herself, andcontextualizing her labor among that of others, then imagining thereturnedgaze of the subjectswithin her poems, thinking all the waythrough to what they would say about it, how it would reenter therealm of public commentary and hearsay.In assessing Niedecker's work, it is tempting to emphasize herrelation to the first term of Percy Shelley's familiar assertion thatpoets are "unacknowledged legislators," as, in her lifetime,Niedecker was a classically underacknowledged poet. But it seemslikely that she, like George Oppen, would emphasize the secondterm: "legislators" are elected and thus crucially and inescapablylinked to the local; they represent a constituency; they effect changeslowly, even tediously; their livelihood depends on their ability tolisten to the voices of their region, to fit in, and yet to understandthe outer reaches of the world enough to let those voices be heard."I must have been washed in listenably across the landscape,"Niedecker writes in "Progression" (CollectedWorks31). And thatlandscape goes beyond her geographical locale-to the listenableintellectual constituency of her letters and reading.The texts Niedecker reworks in her poems are primarily com-mon materials-mostly biographies and letters, where personaland public content often merge-texts that bear the "traces of livingthings," of other artists' lives and labor, including private commen-taries on the public matters of governance, art, war, and laborpolitics. Apart from their often extraordinary mechanics, thesepoems carry the sense of a natural process at work. They have anunderground, evolutionary movement, an honest fluidity fromline to line, sometimes taking us across centuries or continents ascasually as if leaping across a stream. Her lines are flooded not justwith Lake Koshkonong, Lake Michigan, and Lake Superior,butwith CharlesDarwin'sand Cid Corman'sPacific,William Morris's


8/26

W I L L I S 585North Sea and Thames, Mary Shelley's Alpine lakes, and PercyShelley's Mediterranean. Niedecker's reading moves beneath theriverine surface of her poems, sometimes overflowing into a directarticulation that can be as crushingly immediate as, say, the pres-ence of her ailing and bitter mother. Eileen Bigland's biography ofMary Shelley, Philip Henderson's WilliamMorris and edition ofMorris's letters, Black Hawk's Autobiography, Gerard ManleyHopkins's Letters,and Yeats's Autobiographiesall function withinNiedecker's poems much the way Jenny Penberthy has shown usthat Zukofsky's letters do, with their anecdotes of Paul, their newsof experiences she could have only vicariously but that, vicariously,she did in fact have.5As poems make possible any number of vicar-ious understandings-and as they translate and evolve out of oneworld and into another-felt things, like seen things, begin movingonto dry land.

Depending on one's perspective and sense of intellectual property,Niedecker's use of personal material from outside her own life mayseem at times disconcertingly appropriative-as the "Poems forPaul"evidently seemed to Celia and Louis Zukofsky.But they're alsocelebratory and communal, based in elective affinity and aesthetickinship-the family one forms as an adult--driven by intellectualeros, shared ironies and understandings. Niedecker clearly saw theabjection of the poet within American culture, but she also saw itsomehow counterweighted by the dizzying freedom of working withothers almost entirely beyond the bounds of the market economy, inthe realm of barterand free exchange, where poems could be made"InExchange for Haiku," freely given "ToPaul," or turned into anoccasion for private bookmaking as "Homemade" or "HandmadePoems."6

In her sense of labor and craft, Niedecker was in fact less akin tothe Romantics than to their late Victorian successors. She was amaker of "art-work," a term John Ruskin introduced in his 1877

5. See Penberthy's groundbreaking research on the relations between Niedecker'sand Zukofsky's lives, letters, and poems in her edition of the Niedecker-Zukofsky corre-spondence.6. In 1964, Niedecker sent a small, handmade volume entitled "Homemade Poems"to Cid Corman and a similar volume, entitled "Handmade Poems," to Louis Zukofskyand Jonathan Williams (CollectedWorks426).


9/26

586 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREtreatise St. Mark'sRest:TheHistoryof VeniceWrittenfor theHelp of theFew Travelers Who Still Care for her Monuments, a piece thatannounced the double edge of its own specialness and cultural iso-lation and that prompted much of William Morris's architecturalactivism. As one might expect, "art-work"signified a direct conflu-ence of art and labor-the kind of collective enterprise required inbuilding cathedrals-whereby designers, masons, laborers, andcraftspeople could collectively make something more significantthan any one of them would have been capable of individually.The Arts and Crafts movement that developed out of Ruskinianand Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics defined itself increasingly by thisshifting of the frame through which works of art were viewed anddefined as such. In fact, it shifted the paradigm of art productionin several important ways. First, it located aestheticism not witharistocraticdecadence but with a vision of social progress. (Ruskinwas instrumental in sustaining the Working-Men's College, wherehe lectured on art for day laborers and promoted the belief thatworkers' lives were improved by working on and understandingthe making of the beautiful, a vision carried out with a strongersense of the workers' material needs by Morris.) Second, the Artsand Crafts aesthetic did not distinguish between what had previ-ously been considered high art, especially painting and sculpture,and what had been considered decorative and domestic crafts-embroidery, weaving, interior design. Nor did it always distinguishthese arts from various forms of industry-the making of furniture,dishes, tiles, windows-and thus it bridged a fundamental gapbetween art and labor,wage work and parlor craft, women's workand manufacturing. Third, it often turned to folk sources for direc-tion in making art that syncretized traditional and contemporarydesigns, with an emphasis that was more regional than nationaland more legendary than historical. And fourth, it was anachronis-tic to Victorianpolitics and economics in significant ways; while itsmethods and scope were derived from the social model of themedieval guild, it was progressive in its protection of workers'rights and profits and was thus in the avant-garde of Britain's evo-lution toward socialism.

While Niedecker never joined the Communist party,her politicalviews were largely in sympathy with Morris's longing for the death


10/26

W I L L I S o 587of capitalism, though with quite differentpoetic results.7Her view ofpoetry as a product of collective labor informed her use of anecdotal,incidental, and domestic materials and her setting of poems at theedges of anthropology, cultural criticism, natural science, philoso-phy, and gossip. One of the primary lines of tension runningthrough her work stems from an awareness of the shifting status ofthings-from Pa's spit-box to the granite pail, Mr.VanEss's fourteenwashcloths, the electricpump, Thomas Jefferson'schestnuts, AbigailAdams's chintz, Morris's carpets. Depending on their context, eachof these items shifts in status between product, artifact,and work ofart-just as the poem that frames it is likewise both process andproduct, art and work.As the act of spitting defines the social world of "Two old men,"the presence or absence of spit-boxes becomes a cultural and aes-thetic dividing line in "Themuseum man," a poem grounded in therich power dynamic between folk production and institutionalauthority:

Themuseum man!I wish he'd taken Pa's spitbox!I'mgoing to takethat spitboxoutand bury it in the groundand put a stone on top.Because without that stone on topit would come back.(CollectedWorks101)

Announced in the wryly inflected shorthand of cultural difference,this "museum man" blurts onto the scene with exclamatory sud-denness. Operating in a temporal register counter to the pace of the

7. In 1964 Niedecker wrote to Zukofsky about reading Ruskin, "his letters home fromVenice to his Pa" and his diaries: "I'll take his derangement to a lot of peoples' stupidorderliness. But I think if he'd had electric lights he might never have got melancholy-whose mind wouldn't give if much of the time the days were so dark in his room he lit-erally couldn't see to read-and therefore, I suppose, to draw or even to write" (Niedecker345-46). In 1969 she wrote to Cid Corman: "I'm absorbed in writing poems-sequence-on William Morris. I know how to evaluate-Ruskin etc., their kind of socialism-paternalism-but the letters of Morris have thrown me .... I'd probably weary of allthose flowery designs in carpets, wall papers, chintzes ... but as a man, as a poet speak-ing to his daughters and his wife-o lovely" ("BetweenYourHouse and Mine" 188).


11/26

588 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREpoem, he's there and gone, having trolled for folk treasure andmoved on. Since, amazingly, the museum man had the sense not totake Pa's spit-box, the canny speaker recasts the occasion and pre-sents a parallel alternative for the spit-box: burial, complete withgravestone, an equivalent of sorts to the museum, with its collec-tions of materials removed from use and recontextualized withexplanatory markers. Though the spit-box as an object remains"alive,"in use, the museum man's visit has turned it into somethingof a cultural zombie, unburied, still walking the earth with "Pa"asits host. But the crux of the poem is in the pleasure of producing artin the museum man's aftermath; where he sought to take objectsfrom use and "bury"them in museums, the visit itself is divertedfrom his purposes into a retelling that produces the speaker's ownkind of living art, an art that, like the spitbox, refuses to be buriedbut, unlike the spitbox, can't (or, in any case, won't) be purchasedor taken away. Poems thus report on interconnecting systems ofthought, often centering on aesthetic judgments and acts of culturalproduction: what one comes with, what can be taken away, andwhat can be gotten away with.In "Toa Maryland editor, 1943,"a similar transformation occurs,beginning with the poem's announcement of itself as an exercise infree speech, a letter to the editor, a complaint. The poem may serveas an annotation to Niedecker's "New Goose" poems and their realor imagined rejection-"We couldn't get away / with these downhere / in the south on the brow / of Washington"-but it uses theoccasion to fuel further art production, transferring our attentionfrom the authority of a distant editorial "we" to the autonomy ofthe poem's maker (CollectedWorks110). Instead of reshaping itselfin accordance with the judgments coming from the nation's capi-tal, a process that would be transparently absorbed into the pro-duction of the revised poem, this poem makes visible its resistanceto the conventions of any (high-, middle-, or low-) "brow" consid-erations, suggesting that perhaps one has to live in a wilderness to"get away" with poetic self-determination. The location of thepoem-the "brow" of the capital in wartime-foregrounds theinterconnectedness of political and aesthetic choices and the aware-ness that such choices are inextricable from their geographical, his-torical, and social context.


12/26

W IL L I S 589This kind of critical attention to acts of self-determination and art

production is evident throughout Niedecker's work. In "I knew aclean man," the creative necessities of blue-collar life imbue ordi-nary objects with an erotic and utilitarian power. The poem'sspeaker eschews access to the "clean" white-collar world in favor ofa world of manual activity, of recycled objects, the muddy water ofwork and well-earned leisure, the usefulness of books:

I knew a clean manbut he was not for me.Now I sew green apronsover coveredseats. Hewades the muddy water fishing,falls in, dries his last pay-checkin the sun, smooths it outin LeavesofGrass.He'sthe one for me.

(CollectedWorks 08)Like the "museum man," the "clean man" is quickly dispensedwith, placed in past tense in favor of a present world of heightenederos and invention. Here nothing is stuck in a prescribed role;words and objectsperform multiple uses. Green aprons, somethinglike the cast-off fig leaves of Eden, can be recycled to serve as seatcovers. If the postlapsarian, unclean world is explicitly one of toil, itis at least a toil inextricably bound with knowledge and pleasure.Just as Niedecker's words offer the pleasures of multiple"senses"-Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass can be read in theWisconsin grass and used to smooth out a paycheck that got wet ona fishing trip-labor is mixed with leisure and accident turned intoresonant, meaningful design. As in so many of Niedecker's poems,pleasure is occasioned by the ingenuity that lies at the conjunctionof art and use. Setting aside the dilemma of textual production andgendered identity in "Whowas MaryShelley?"as simply as choosinganother book for the occasion, the poem reframes the celebratorystance and sexual electricity one finds in Leavesof Grass.Like the shifting incarnations of elements in Niedecker's natural-ist poems, the products of virtually all forms of human labor-including "art-work"-are judged largely by their flexibility and


13/26

590 - CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREthe extent to which they fit in to a natural order, as Leavesof Grassfits into the scene described and performs multiple functions withinit. Just as Zukofsky's "test of poetry" was essentially a question ofdurability, Niedecker insists on poetry's usefulness in ways thatparallel Morris's views in "Hopes and Fears for Art," in which hediscusses the "hand of the craftsman"as not necessarily aspiring toimitate nature but being "guided to work in the way that she does,till the web, the cup, or the knife, look as natural, nay as lovely, asthe green field, the river bank, or the mountain flint."8Further,thisattitude toward the useful arts parallels that of political change inits evolutionary and revolutionary progress, which, Morris persis-tently hopes, will be a change for the better on both counts. InNiedecker's view, poetry is an evolutionary end of the line, an ulti-mate container for laborbeyond its market value and a useful prod-uct in its own right. Books can, of course, serve multiple readers,can delight and instruct, and can even dry paychecks.The convergence of poetic and practical function also drives thedelicately weighted conversation between human and machine inthe poem "Tomysmall electricpump."With shadings of admirationand betrayal, the poem captures a reverence toward the machineworld while offering the kind of advice one would expect more for,say, a reader of poetry:

To senseand soundthis worldlook toyour sniftervalve

8. Addressing specifically the "decorative arts" in which he was employed, Morrisgoes on to argue that "as these arts call people's attention and interest to the matters ofevery-day life in the present, so also, and that I think is no little matter, they call our atten-tion at every step to that history, of which, I said before, they are so great a part. . . . Sostrong is the bond between history and decoration, that in the practice of the latter we can-not, if we would, wholly shake off the influence of past times over what we do at present.... [T]hey [the decorative arts] are connected with all history, and are clear teachers of it;and, best of all, they are the sweeteners of human labour, both to the handicraftsman,whose life is spent in working in them, and to people in general who are influenced bythe sight of them at every turn of the day's work.. ." (CollectedWorks22: 7, 8).


14/26

W I L L I S 591take oiland hum

(CollectedWorks197)With its "snifter" at hand in the center of the middle stanza, theelectric pump is both the perceiving, pumping, valved heart of thepoem and the cordial-sipping lord of the manor whom the speakerserves and advises. The poem's imperatives--"look," "take," and"hum"-are equally suggestive of an offstage cast working at oppo-site ends of the food chain: the rapacious cool of the sequesteredindustrialist and the hungry, undercompensated work of the poet.The poem is funny in a familiar,folksy way, but it is also an auda-cious rethinking of the intersection of art and manufacturing.Composed at the time of pop art's national emergence, the poem'sperceived content is largely a matter of its framing. In creating ahandmade portrait of the mass-produced pump within the hum-ming sonic field of the poem, Niedecker not only reframes thepump as art but foregrounds the homespun artifice of the poem byplacing these two made objects in tension with each other. Thepoint of both objects is the transparency of their function, their well-oiled mechanics, their pleasing "hum." Far from making machine-made and handmade items interchangeable, the poem serves, asMorris put it, to "call people's attention and interest to the mattersof every-day life in the present," to make the presence of everydaydesign legible. In fact, the polemic implied by Andy Warhol'spop-art Factory-that the age of single-artist craftsmanship had passedand that art undercapitalism was inseparablefrom capitalism-wasin some respects a culmination of the late Pre-Raphaeliterethinkingof the problematic relation between art and manufacture, a furtherevolution of the concept of "art-work" as defined by Ruskin andenacted by Morris.9Of Ruskin's followers, none were so ardent, committed, or will-ing to work among the laborers whose cause they championed as

9. Think, for instance, of Warhol's reproductions of money, Coke bottles, and soupcans, or Jasper Johns's flags, in which the manual reproduction of limited copies ofimages that have already been mechanically reproduced and extensively circulateddraws new attention to the work of the hand and makes the familiar not only newly vis-ible but imbued with expressionist presence.


15/26

592 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREMorris, and none were more convinced of the crisis to whichboth art and labor had been brought by the free rein given to capi-talism. Fueled by Ruskin's rhetoric, Morris put progressive princi-ples into action on various fronts. He organized the Society for theProtection of Ancient Buildings (called "Anti-Scrape") and estab-lished a guild through which all workers benefited from the generalprofits of Morris & Company, beyond their salaries. A deeply com-mitted socialist and pacifist, Morris rallied antiwar sentimentthroughout Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's hawkish years. Hisessay "How I Became a Socialist" reveals something of the impas-sioned negativity that drove the activism within both his politicsand his art:

Apartfromthe desireto producebeautiful things, the leading passion ofmy life has been and is hatred of modern civilization....Whatshall I say concerning ts masteryof and its waste of mechanicalpower, its commonwealthso poor, its enemies of the commonwealth sorich,its stupendous organization-for the misery of life! Its contempt ofsimplepleasureswhich everyone could enjoybut for its folly?Itseyelessvulgaritywhich has destroyed art, the one certain solace of labour?...Think of it! Was it all to end in a counting-house on the top of a cinder-heap... ?

(CollectedWorks 3:279-80)Morris's monumental distrust of capitalism was, of course, pre-cisely what drove his vision of utopian alternatives. For Morris, thequality of a nation's art might serve as an index for its overall well-being. For a nation to depend on the pointless toil of its workingclass amounted to slavery; to build an empire while depriving itsworker of the art that was the right result of his labors was "folly"of the worst sort.10Within each of his public lectures on art, Morrisdiscussed the need for social change. He wrote in 1883, "Ihave onlyone subject ... the relation of art to labour" (Letters189).

Beyond his politics, there are so many qualities Niedecker wouldhave loved in Morris. His quiet, good-natured way in the face ofadversity; his love of fishing; his insistence on living on the banks

10. See especially"UsefulWorkversus Useless Toil" 22:98-120) and "How WeLiveand How WeMightLive (23:3-26).


16/26

W I L L IS 593of a flooding river. The way he worked, manually, most of his lifebut continued to lose money; his direct engagement with print andproofreading; his overwhelming desire to be useful (even as a stu-dent at Oxford he insisted on knitting or tying fishing nets duringhis tutorials). His love of birds and attention to weather; his desireto fix things; his troubled love life. The passion he felt for his drafty,impractical house. His wry humor. Even his use of others' materi-als: his favorite epistolary closing was "wot larx," borrowed fromCharles Dickens's characterJoe Gargery;and his motto "Sije puis"("IfI can")was a direct translation of Janvan Eyck's "Als ich kann."Not least of all, Niedecker would have recognized the informed andinsistent optimism of Morris's socialist vision, despite party politicsand personal distress. He wrote his utopian novel News fromNowherealmost immediately after the disastrous "Bloody Sunday"in 1887 when he marched toward TrafalgarSquare among thou-sands of protesters, over two hundred of whom were wounded andthree killed by police.

Morris, in fact,worked so hard that he seemed almost to work inhis sleep, and in "His Carpets Flowered" Niedecker captures hisaccount of the monstrous and even humorous genesis of beautifulideas. In a letterto his long-term friend and customerAglaia Coronio,Morriswrites, "Ihope you arebetter to-day: as to what I am doing, Iam drawing patterns so fast that last night I dreamed I had to drawa sausage; somehow I had to eat it first, which made me anxiousabout my digestion: however I have just done quite a pretty patternforprinted work" (Letters 8).And Niedecker condenses: "I'mdraw-ing patterns so fast / Last night / / in sleep I drew a sausage- /somehow I had to eat it first"(293).On the tape Cid Corman made ofher reading just before she died, she-like the mature Morris-remarks that her life has become so inseparable from her art that she"thinksin lines of poetry-all day long and even in the night."In 1969, having read Morris's letters and begun work on "HisCarpets Flowered," Niedecker writes to Cid Corman of rediscover-ing one of her notes about "the lines of growth, of life, unconsciouslyabsorbed from foliage and flowers while growing up," a note thatexplains both her personal engagement with Morris and her use ofplants to evoke a sense-memory steadily evolving into art ("BetweenYour House and Mine" 189). As we witness in Morris's letters a


17/26

594 - CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREsausage transformed into a "pretty pattern" or a dogtooth violetreemerging in a wallpaper pattern, we find in Niedecker's poem theprogression from "Colorful shores-mouse ear ... / horse mint" to"The StrawberryThief / our new chintz"-with its explicit move-ment from botanical to manufactured pattern (CollectedWorks293).One of the most striking lines in the Morris letters, whichNiedecker quotes in "His Carpets Flowered," is "good sport dye-ing." Morris's ebullience over the pleasure of working the dye vatswhile he's discouraged, depressed, and left alone by his wife anddaughters must have struck a chord with Niedecker, who, after all,had less than a year to live and had recently written "Why can't Ibehappy / in my sorrow" (CollectedWorks 30). She had even used thedying/dyeing pun in an earlier poem about rug-making, "HandCrocheted Rug" (102). Perhaps Morris seemed an answer to theprocesses the earlier poem describes:

Gather lltheold,ripandsewtheskirt 'vesavedso long,Sally'svalance,hetwins'firstcalicoandthe restIworked odye.

Indeed, the Morris poem is made by ripping apart and reassem-bling old and overlooked materials and returning them to usethrough poetry. As for Morris & Co., "worked to dye" echoes andrebuts the "useless toil" of merely "working to die" (Morris,CollectedWorks22:98). In her note to Corman about the evocativepossibilities of the foliage of childhood, she writes: "I've lost whatit's related to, probably Morris. I'm only glad to be taking the nextbreath, nowadays" (189).Niedecker's use of Morris's letters, Henderson's biography ofMorris, and William Butler Yeats's account of Morris in his ownAutobiographies rovides a fascinating look at the philosophy andmethod of her late poems. Even the most cursory glance at "HisCarpets Flowered" reveals that we arrive at the poem through acomplication in authorship, with William Morris appearing almostas the author of the poem, but with the title's initial "his" that sig-nals Niedecker's intervention:

HIS CARPETS FLOWEREDWilliam Morris


18/26

W I L L I S 595Just beyond the name, the poem begins with a numeral that lookslike a pronoun, a singular emphatic "I"followed by a dash, a pausefor contemplation in mid-run, a work stoppage:

I-how we're carpet-makingby the rivera long dream to unrolland somehow time to polea boat

So the poem opens into language with the wonderful rhetoricalinterrogative "how"-the how of "How I Became a Socialist," notthe what of description or the why of philosophy or the who ofbiography but the how of collective creation and social action:"how we're"! Here "we" are caught in the act of labor precedingleisure, but it is the labor,not the leisure, that is a "dream,"behav-ing like the object of our making, unrolling like a carpet. And theword "somehow"-followed by the marvel of both river andworker suddenly performing new roles-completes and echoesthe initial "how" that pushes offshore into the drift of the poem.This leisure occurs in the context of work and bears its satisfactionand wonder. Only then does the individual artist emerge out ofcollectivity: "I designed a carpet today," an act of making thatimmediately turns to "dogtooth violets," an interruption by thenatural world now reseen and translated into pattern, into use.Drawing further from Morris's letters, the poem continues to movebetween individual and collective labor, imagination and reality,work and leisure, art and activism:

I designed a carpet today-dogtooth violetsand spoke to a full hallnow that the gallof our society'scorruptionstainsthroughoutDearJaneyI am tossedby many thingsIf the changewould bringbetterart


19/26

596 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREbut if it would not?O tobe home to sail the floodI'mpossessedand do possessEmployerof labor, rue-to get donethe work of the hand ...I'd be a richmanhad I yieldedon a few points of principleItem sabotsblouse-I work in the dye-housemyself

(Collected Works 292-93)1Not only do politics and artcompete for the attention of the speakerand complicatehis relationto labor,but they serve to demand greaterthings from each other. Just as Morris's political vision demandedthat his art take certainforms and not others and that wealth be for-feited for principle, what he often called "the great change" of revo-lution must be tested by judgments beyond the strictly political,called into question on the basis of the art that accompanies it.The poem is driven by diametrical tensions and counterpoints:the flood one longs to sail and the waves of personal and politicalturbulence that drive to distraction; the "stains" of "society's cor-ruption" and the honest labor of dyeing; the bleeding throughof "society's corruption" to the less-than-dependable health andemotional allegiances of "Dear Janey" (Morris's wife); the ancienttension between employer and employed; the secular,divine, artifi-cial, natural, political, and economic "designs" held perpetually intension; the artist's imaginative possession and the owner's mate-rial possession. The subject-objecttension between possessing and

11. Correspondingpassagesfrom Morris's etters include "[Iwork] in the dye-housemyself-you know I like that" (75-76);"I am working in Mr Wardle'sdye-house insabotsand blouse prettymuch all day long:I am dyeing .. ." (76);"thestrawberrybedis a mass of blossoms"(79).


20/26

W I L L I S 597being possessed was particularly rich ground for Niedecker, forwhom ownership (of a few small cabins on BlackHawk Island) wasan economic as well as a psychological burden. The riddle of creativeand material possession spans her entire opus, running from theearly poem "Progression" ("I must possess myself, get back intopure duration"), to the ominous one-word sentence ("Possessed")that ends "I rose from marsh mud," to the late poems in whichproperty seems to be playing tricks on its owner, possessing onerather than being possessed (CollectedWorks28, 170, 269, 291).The second section of "His Carpets Flowered" further compli-cates the ownership of the poem's voice and elaborates the largelyinternal conflict between one's allegiance to art and to other beliefsystems. The two-stanza middle section of the poem relies heavilyon Yeats's autobiographical account of an encounter with Morris ata socialist meeting:

Then gradually the attitude towards religion of almost everybody butMorris, who avoided the subject altogether, got upon my nerves, for Ibroke out after some lecture or other with all the arrogance of ragingyouth. They attacked religion, I said, or some such words, and yet theremust be a change of heart and only religion could make it. What was theuse of talking about some new revolution putting all things right, whenthe change must come, if come it did, with astronomical slowness, like thecooling of the sun, or it may have been like the drying of the moon?Morris rang his chairman's bell, but I was too angry to listen, and he hadto ring it a second time before I sat down. He said that night at supper,"Of course I know there must be a change of heart, but it will not come asslowly as all that. I rang my bell because you were not being understood."

(148-49)The scene's tension lies in the disputed relation between politicaland devotional transformation, and in the failed deployment of apoetic construction within a political context. Niedecker again con-denses, unseating the subjectivity of the source text so that we hearYeats's language used to voice Morris's perspective in the firststanza and to voice Niedecker's more distant historical perspectivein the second:

Yeats saw the betterment of the workersby religion-slow in any case


21/26

598 - CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREas the drying of the moonHe was not understood-I rangthe bellforhim to sit downYeats eft the lecturecircuityet he could say:no oneso well lovedas Morris

(Collected Works 293)12

As in the poem's opening, singular authorship is confounded andhere complicated further;while the poem passes seamlessly fromline to line through a centrally situated, bell-ringing "I,"there is nosingle author who could voice both stanzas. We are left, rather,with a rhetorical sleight of hand that draws us into a deeply col-laborative voicing. The poem's mix of narrative, rhetorical, andpoetic elements captures something of Yeats's and Morris's-andone might imagine Niedecker's-frustration with both audienceand voice, their desire to reconcile political vision and poeticexpression. The passage pulses between understanding and mis-understanding; Morris clearly disagrees with Yeats's vision of reli-gious salvation but interrupts him on the basis of the obliquity ofhis language. Yet the figure of speech that is too oblique for thesocialist meeting is perfectly at home within the poem, which pro-ceeds through the rhetorical hubbub and emerges into music;"Yeats eft" collapses into a wistful "yet,"and what Yeats could notsay earlier in the poem is countered by what he could say in theend, with the beautiful canter of ordinary speech: "no one / so wellloved / as Morris."The third section of "His Carpets Flowered" again mines Morris'sletters for passages that are closely aligned with Niedecker's own

12. Elsewhere n theAutobiographies,eatswrites that Morris"hadno need for otherpeople. I doubt if theirmarriageor death made him sad or glad, and yet no man I haveknownwas so well loved;you saw him producingeverywhereorganizationandbeauty,seeming,almost in the sameinstant,helpless and triumphant;and people loved him aschildrenare loved"(144).


22/26

WI LLLIS 599experience and aesthetics. As in the poem's opening, this sectionfocuses on an act of emergence, a sailing away from solid ground:Enterednew waters

Studied IcelandicAt home last minute signsto post:Vetchgrowshere-Please do notmowWe saw it-Iceland-the endof the world risingout of the sea-cliffs,caves like 13th centuryilluminationsof hell-mouthsRainsqualls through moonlightCold wetis so damned wetIceland'sblack sandStonebuntings'fly-up-dispersionSea-pinkand campion a Persiancarpet

(CollectedWorks 94)The section moves from the launch of two telegraphic, end-stoppedlines to an unstable, sealike movement between radically enjambedlines and interrupted syntax. The first stanza flashes back from thepresent point of entry,to the past preparation for the voyage ("stud-ied Icelandic"), to last-minute tasks ("signs / to post"), creating theeffect of being in two places-or of two minds-at once. A full fourlines are given to tending this homeland vetch after this entry into"new waters," suggesting that one may be "at sea" even at home, asMorris certainly was at the time, displaced by Dante GabrielRossetti at his country manor and, by his own account, clinging tohis Icelandic studies for sanity. It was also at the moment of hisambivalent entry into Iceland that, Henderson notes in his biogra-phy, Morris's writing suddenly leaps into modern English from the


23/26

600 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREstilted prose of his sagas and "realitybreaks through into his writ-ing for the first time" (119).As in Niedecker's other works, the interconnectedness of geogra-phy, aesthetics, and the emotional life of the author necessitates asyntactical and linguistic interconnectedness within the poem. Inhis letters and journals, Morris repeatedly refers to Iceland asdreamlike-but Niedecker emphasizes its marking of limits, usingit to embody the concerns Morris expressed about both the politicsand aesthetics of his period. Here it appears in the midst of a dream-like-and textlike-telescoping of past and future, evoking both the"illuminations" of a past Morris treasured and the postcapitalistutopian "end" toward which he worked. While the speaker"enters"in the first stanza, it is the object of his gaze that rises outof the sea to meet him with a new teleology: "We saw it-Iceland-the end / of the world rising out of the sea." As meaning evolvesthrough and beyond the line break, Iceland appears at the end ofthe world and as the end of the world, then as an experiential realmand as a visual representation of a mythic territory.13"Vetch," aplant whose flower was used in dye-making, evokes the first sec-tion's pastoral geography of home and work, but this steadyground is suddenly tossed by raw, oceanic extremity,an echo of theway Morris himself was "tossed / by many things."These four final stanzas contain only one pronoun--"we"-andthree mutations of Iceland, one in each of the first three stanzas, asmall human presence within a wild, inhospitable landscape. Butjust when geographical fact threatens to overwhelm the authority ofthe maker within the poem, the roiling lines of the middle two stan-zas settle into a series of condensed images poised between com-pressed potentiality and explosive enactment, between action andresult, between making and being made. Iceland's "black sand" is

13. Morris's account reads, in part: "The cliffs were much higher especially on thisside, and most unimaginably strange: they overhung in some places much more thanseemed possible; they had caves in them just like the hell-mouths in thirteenth-centuryilluminations" (qtd. in Henderson 122). Morris writes of Iceland as "horrid," "desolate,"and "beastly," though he classifies his experience there as dreamlike, bordering on a kindof possession: "It is all like a kind of dream to me, and my real life seems set aside till itis over" (Letters57; qtd. in Henderson 140).


24/26

W ILL IS * 601the result of volcanic action on an island still in the process of beingmade. "Bunting"is a fabric or a bird and suggests the sonic pres-ence of British poet Basil Bunting, with whom Niedecker corre-sponded;14 "stone" intensifies, gives it weight, holds it down; andthus the "fly-up-dispersion" of "stone buntings" pulls downwardand upward in quick succession, concentrating then dissipating itslinguistic energy, holding the poem in an almost impossiblemomentary suspension. This kinetic, destabilized landscape is com-pleted by the poem's final two lines, as they in turn complete the actof suspended carpet-making with which the poem begins. In histravel notes, as reported by Henderson, Morris records "a hugewaste of black sand all powdered over with sea-pink and bladdercampion at regular intervals, 'like a Persian carpet"' (121). InNiedecker's condensed version, "Sea-pink"functions as noun andverb, and "campion"is both poet and weedy flower. "Sea-pink andcampion" convey, simply, a natural manifestation but also a visionof nature as prototype, equivalence, and counterpoint to the workof art. The image carries forward the tension of the previous lines,evoking both a literally grounded space and the realm of imaginaryflight-a dream, a magic carpet-and playing out the doubly mean-ingful "flowering" in the poem's title. Like Ruskin's "art-work" andMorris's carpets, such a poem is something only a "we" couldmake.isIn reading Morris's letters next to "His Carpets Flowered," wewatch Niedecker watching Morrisas words or tropes appear withinhis letters, are recombined and honed, emphasizing, as Niedecker'spoetry so often does, not so much the telling of an event as the event

14. The passage offers an example of the rich, transhistorical layering withinNiedecker's diction. Bunting, a poet whose work is, like Niedecker's, deeply entrenchedin geography and sound, worked in British intelligence and served off the coast ofScotland during World War II. In a 1941 letter to Louis Zukofsky, Niedecker wrote, "Basilis over the North Sea with a machine gun in a balloon and he sees the end of the world"(Niedecker128). With its diametric tension between machine gun and balloon and itsvision of "the end of the world," her language anticipates-and may have been con-sciously referenced in-her later rendering of Morris's account of seeing Iceland from thesame North Sea.

15. For another reading of the troubled subjectivity in Niedecker's work, seeDuPlessis.


25/26

602 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATUREof a retelling. The shift from Morris's letters or Henderson's biogra-phy to Niedecker's poem is simply a further step in the evolution-ary movement of language toward other forms of order,specificallythe evolution from prose to poetry, a development Niedecker con-nects with the great project of political change and the dissolutionof property. In "Foreclosure"(291), the short poem that immedi-ately precedes the Morris poem, capitalism clearly aligns with theprosaic law, whose clawed clauses lie in wait to take on the speakerbeyond the "bare walls" from which all art has presumably alreadybeen stripped. The predatory reality behind the otherwise comi-cally alien white-collar world of clean men and museum collectorsappears ready to claim ownership of whatever it can through legalprose. Poetry,on the other hand, remains on the side of an unown-able wilderness at peace with itself:

Tell em to takemy bare walls downmy cement abutmentstheirpartiesthereofand clause of clawsLeaveme the landScratchout:the landMay prose and propertyboth die outand leave me peace

(CollectedWorks 91)The poem reads as a last stand, converting a site of barelysuppressed violence into a record of resistance. Poetry as a genreconnects Niedecker to the deeper history of her place, to thewilderness that preceded layoffs and museums and abided insteadby Native American reason, whereby territory was defined by useand thus akin to poetry's open form rather than to the ever-encroaching rectilinear expansionism of prose.16 At the same time,the task of the poet connects her with a wishful future in whichprivate property is dissolved in the service of a greater collectivegood. In its ability to turn nothing into something, the economy ofpoetry produces the opposite of property's diminishing returns.

16. See herpoemin NewGoose: BlackHawkheld:Inreason landcannotbe sold"(99).


26/26

W I L L I S o 603Properly agitated and condensed, "property,"whomever it belongsto, may be transformed into "poetry,"which belongs to us all-thusenacting through genre the international social transformation towhich Morris referredlongingly as "the great change."

WesleyanUniversityWORKS CITED

Bigland, Eileen. Mary Shelley. London: Cassell, 1959.Black Hawk. BlackHawk: An Autobiography.Ed. Donald Jackson. 1955. Urbana:U of Illinois P, 1964.DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. "Lorine Niedecker, the Anonymous: Gender, Class,Genre and Resistances." Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet. Ed. Jenny

Penberthy. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996. 113-37.Henderson, Philip. William Morris:His Life, Workand Friends. London: Thamesand Hudson, 1967.Morris, William. The Letters of William Morris to His Family and Friends. Ed.

Philip Henderson. London: Longmans, 1950.. CollectedWorks.24 vols. New York:Russell, 1910-15.Niedecker, Lorine. Audiotape. Rec. by Cid Corman, 15 Nov. 1970. Con-

temporary Poetry Collection, W. A. C. Bennett Library, Simon Fraser U,Burnaby, BC, Canada.- . ""BetweenYour House and Mine": The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to CidCorman,1960 to 1970. Ed. Lisa Faranda. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1986.CollectedWorks.Ed. Jenny Penberthy. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.Niedeckerand the Correspondencewith Zukofsky, 1931-1979. Ed. JennyPenberthy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Penberthy, Jenny, ed. Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet. Orono, ME: NationalPoetry Foundation, 1996.Ruskin, John. St. Mark's Rest: TheHistory of Venice Writtenfor the Help of the FewTravelersWho Still Carefor her Monuments. 1877. New York:Merrill, n.d.

Shelley, Mary. Introduction. 1831. Frankenstein. 1818. Ed. Marilyn Butler. NewYork: Oxford UP, 1998.Yeats, W. B. Autobiographies.London: Macmillan, 1955.

poetics of affinity

Documents