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| Lorine Niedecker, via the Poetry Foundation |
Listening to a recent talk on ecology
and contemporary poetry given by Professor Margaret Ronda, I was
struck by how closely the aesthetic and political concerns of
Objectivist poet Lorine Niedecker mirror those of William Morris, who
was writing 75-100 years earlier. Niedecker’s work evinces a
discomfort with the new, with aesthetic and literary emphases on
innovation, and connects such neophilia with an unsustainable
capitalist ideology of disposability and overproduction. This same
anxiety about the connection between capitalist production and an
aesthetic preference for innovation is apparent in Morris’s work,
as I mentioned to Ronda after her talk. Imagine my surprise when
Ronda told me that Niedecker was deeply interested in Morris and had
in fact written a poem about him, titled “His Carpets Flowered.”
The poem, reprinted below, was written
in the late ‘60s, and it suggests that Niedecker was primarily
inspired not by Morris’s poetry, nor by his work in arts and
crafts, but by his letters, and more specifically, by Morris the man
as expressed in his letters. As Niedecker wrote in a 1969 letter to
fellow poet 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
William Morris have thrown me. Title will be His Carpets Flowered. I
can't read his poems. I'd probably weary of all those flowery designs
in carpets, wall papers, chintzes...but as a man, as a poet speaking
to his daughters and wife--o lovely” (455).
So many aspects of Morris’s life and
Morris’s thought make their way into this short poem: his
relationship with his wife (“Dear Janey”), his constant
speculations about the relation of art to socialism (“If the change
would bring / better art // but if it would not?”), his own
conflicted position as an upper-middle-class socialist (“Employer /
of labor, true -- / … / I’d be a rich man / had I yielded / / on
a few points of principle”), and his late-life love of Icelandic
landscapes and Icelandic literatures (“We saw it – Iceland –
the end / of the world rising out of the sea”).
Niedecker herself was an obscure poet
who sustained herself by working odd jobs through decades of writing
poetry in her homeland of rural Wisconsin. Now rediscovered as an
important poet in the twentieth-century avant garde, she has recently
been celebrated with a new biography (2011) and collected works
(2002).
I find it inspiring to see the traces
of Morris in Niedecker’s work, the line of influence, mediated
through Yeats, that “His Carpets Flowered” draws from Morris to
the modernists to the avant garde. From London to Fort Atkinson,
Wisconsin, Morris’s ideas nourished the growth of many flowers.
His Carpets Flowered
By Lorine Niedecker
William Morris
I
—how we’re carpet-making
by the river
a long dream to unroll
and somehow time to pole
a boat
I designed a carpet today—
dogtooth violets
and spoke to a full hall
now that the gall
of our society’s
corruption stains throughout
Dear Janey I am tossed
by many things
If the change would bring
better art
but if it would not?
O to be home to sail the flood
I’m possessed
and do possess
Employer
of labor, true—
to get done
the work of the hand…
I’d be a rich man
had I yielded
on a few points of principle
Item sabots
blouse—
I work in the dye-house
myself
Good sport dyeing
tapestry wool
I like the indigo vats
I’m drawing patterns so fast
Last night
in sleep I drew a sausage—
somehow I had to eat it first
Colorful shores—mouse ear...
horse-mint... The Strawberry Thief
our new chintz
II
Yeats saw the betterment of the workers
by religion—slow in any case
as the drying of the moon
He was not understood—
I rang the bell
for him to sit down
Yeats left the lecture circuit
yet he could say: no one
so well loved
as Morris
III
Entered new waters
Studied Icelandic
At home last minute signs
to post:
Vetch
grows here—Please do not mow
We saw it—Iceland—the end
of the world rising out of the sea—
cliffs, caves like 13th century
illuminations
of hell-mouths
Rain squalls through moonlight
Cold wet
is so damned wet
Iceland’s
black sand
Stone buntings’
fly-up-dispersion
Sea-pink and campion a Persian
carpet
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