Chapter 6 - Object Lessons

Summary

This chapter begins by considering Lorine Niedecker’s reception as a "rural surrealist" as a deliberately minoritizing gesture with a primitivist agenda. It then moves on to claim that Niedecker’s surrealism-inspired explorations of unconscious processes overlap significantly with her (auto-)ethnographic take on her own rural Wisconsin surroundings. The chapter positions Niedecker’s short, witty, object-oriented poems in her book New Goose (1946) as ironic embraces of the primitive, in which the appropriation of rural artifacts functions analogously with the appropriation of the poet herself as a rural artifact. Niedecker’s work is rooted in an antimodern epistemology that links it with the overlapping discourses of ethnography and surrealism, in which the rationalized logic of capitalist modernity is challenged through an embrace of its opposites, the premodern and the prerational. The chapter contends that the objects one encounters in Niedecker’s poems are produced through a “poetics of detachment” in which, following a surrealist theory of the object, they assume a fetishistic ability to conjure up repressed and residual libidinal economies that form the obverse of modernity.