An intertext is above all lavish. Susie Campbell uses it to point in at least two directions. The pamphlet Enclosures contains a gift in its dialogue with the past: ‘For Anni Albers: An inter-text with La Dame à la licorne tapestry’s, Paris.’ First Albers, then the tapestry in Paris. Anni Albers was a Bauhaus artist from Berlin, who fled Nazism for North Carolina eventually settling in Connecticut. Albers was the first textile artist to have their own solo show at MOMA in New York in 1949. On the motivation of this pamphlet, Campbell explains: ‘Text and textile share an etymological route in ‘texere’, the Latin verb ‘to weave’, suggesting they might belong to a cluster of linguistic values and characteristics that could be unravelled through an inter-textual exploration.’ Albers seems to play with this in the 1958 Open Letter, a fragment of which is shown above. Just as the object of an open letter weaves together many different voices, so too the 1958 textile is an expansive patchwork that unites distinctive patterns, colours, and threads. 

But the tapestry in Paris has words in the form of an ornamental inscription placed above the head of the central Lady: ‘À Mon Seul Désir.’ In February 2021, the Musée de Cluny (the home of the tapestry) shared a video on facebook showing the care given to the tapestry when it needs to be moved. A conservator describes the risk during dust removal that fibres get caught in the woollen weave. However small, these fibres need to be subsequently removed with tweezers. While a tapestry is inter-textual, once preserved it cannot allow desirous alien substances to enter the weave. There is a risk of being too precious about the ’linguistic values and characteristics’ that link ‘text’ to ‘textile.’ 

Lucky for us this need to preserve the pure state of the tapestry does not apply to poetic responses. Instead Campbell constructs an idiom in imitation of a textile weave, by making a visual plane that corresponds to the ‘millefleur’ field in the tapestry’s of the 15th and 16th century. In La Dame à la Licorne, this field becomes a ‘riot of more than forty recognisable species of wildflower—vetch and daisy, violet and daffodil—that would have been familiar from the meadows and woodlands of northern Europe.’ Campbell uses the names for this ‘wildflower’ as visual background to defamiliarize the sixteenth century reminding us of the distance from it that we share with Albers. But the interventions of the Musée de Cluny try to preserve that past. 

 Campbell’s visual textual plane brings into focus a series of descriptive responses to the tapestry in Paris. There are 14 leaves in total. Two are the visual plane itself, placed either side of the 12 leaves that jumps into the field to give us the descriptions in larger font. The effect is of a cascading text that begins with a translation of the tapestry’s title: 

As Campbell writes, the aim is to arrive at a ‘contemplative moment that has the stillness of enclosure whilst paradoxically remaining porous.’ Though the border of each leaf is static, the background creates a restless blur. Each description imagines a less constrained expression of desire than that of the tapestry in Paris. 

For Campbell the meaning of ‘enclosure’ is intimately tied to the belief of the renaissance and the early modern period that: ‘the female was dangerously pliable unless enclosed in a surveilled and protected domestic world.’ As Sylvia Federici argues, while the ‘Enclosures’, was a means used by the sixteenth century ‘English lords and rich farmers’ to ‘eliminate communal land property and expand their holdings’, it has since become ‘used by anti-capitalist activists as a signifier for every attack on social entitlements.’ (Federici, 2004, 70). Campbell seems aware that the pandemic has required us to question again what we mean by ‘social entitlements.’ Whereas Federici uses ‘Enclosures’ to theoretically assess the historical violence of the Great Witch hunt in Europe, Campbell poetically re-examines the distortions of gender effected by some of the most beautiful tapestry’s. Federici also observes that the widespread ‘battle concerning the enclosures has crossed the disciplinary boundaries and is being debated also among literary scholars.’ (Federici, 285). Campbell’s pamphlet belongs to that disciplinary trespass because it invites us to question how the past continues to enclose.

MICHAEL BLACK lives in the south of Manchester in the UK. His poems and poetry reviews are hosted in online places like: Adjacent Pineapple, Re-Side, -algia, Beir Bua, Osmosis Press, Ink Drinkers, the Babel Tower Noticeboard, and SPAM 003. Twitter: @beakyblack.