The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde

4. Niedecker: The Interior Voice Commodified

“Six months ahead of a movement and 20 years behind it”: Niedecker on Uneven Development Just prior to Jenny Penberthy’s 1996 discovery of Lorine Niedecker’s “Next Year Or I Fly My Rounds Tempestuous” in Zukofsky’s archive, National Poetry Foundation then director Burton Hatlen found her expanded version of the 1933 poem Progression buried in Pound’s papers at the Beinecke Library. If critical accounts of Niedecker’s surrealist period read it as only a brief stop on a trajectory of poetic development shaped by her correspondence with male poets like Zukofsky and Cid Corman, this is in part because the archive of Niedecker’s surrealist work has long been scattered and hidden among the papers of her male contemporaries. Indeed, Niedecker’s surrealist period has seemed thinner to readers than her “folk” period because the recuperative work of locating its contents has been made available only in Penberthy’s recent edition of the poet’s work. And, because Niedecker’s correspondence with Zukofsky and Corman appears without the accompanying letters from her male correspondents (the Zukofsky estate has refused publishing rights), the incomplete printed archive only contributes to the myth of Niedecker as a petitioner of Zukofsky’s advice; the epistolary record appears one-sided.1 The delicate archival status of Niedecker’s surrealist work has indeed had a profound effect on its critical reception. Its burial has reinforced the view of Niedecker’s surrealist period as a private, personal record that didn’t pass muster with much-admired male modernists. New access to these works speaks loudly to the contrary. Ambitious and aggressively experimental, Niedecker ’s surrealist work reveals formal and substantive resonances with works by female French surrealists such as Claude Cahun’s (née Lucy Schwob) 4 Niedecker The Interior Voice Commodified 138 The Commodity’s Inscape “Beware of Household Objects” and co-Bretonist Marcelle Ferry’s “Frenzy, Sweet Little Child, You Sleep.”2 Despite Niedecker’s quite likely unfamiliarity with international feminist practitioners working within the surrealist field, her work shares this larger artistic and literary community’s preoccupations with experimental form, gender as ludic construction, and the antinomies of capitalist social life. By placing Niedecker’s work alongside authors with whom she had no contact but who share her ideological and aesthetic approach , I am suggesting a revision of modernist alignments that is less concerned with psychobiography and epistolary exchanges than it is with global ideological and aesthetic patterns.3 This chapter considers work from this early period of Niedecker’s oeuvre, including the books Progression, Next Year or I Fly My Rounds Tempestuous, and the triptychs of Canvass and Beyond What. Attention to these early works reveals a thick fabric of formal variance and historical content. The poetry from 1933 to 1936, we’ll see, deepens our critical account of both Niedecker ’s and Objectivism’s experimental forms.4 These poems work in multiple tendencies, weaving together the strands of Objectivism and Surrealism , and in doing so, offer flourishing, hybridized materialist and feminist forms.5 The poet’s commentary on her own work reveals the centrality of her experiments with surrealist forms in her development of an overall aesthetic methodology. Niedecker writes about the curious historical coordinates of Progression’s composition in a 1933 letter to Harriet Monroe, then editor of Poetry magazine: “Progression . . . was written six months before Mr. Zukofsky referred me to the surrealists for correlation.” Niedecker closes the letter with a meditation on her own location within the historical timeline of this avant-garde: “The direction of Progression may not be Surrealism, and it may not matter, only that it’s a little disconcerting to find oneself six months ahead of a movement and twenty years behind it.”6 Within the context of her own development as a poet, Niedecker’s self-reflexive discovery, of finding herself “six months ahead” of a movement before her own familiarity with it, reveals her view of the proleptic, indeed avant-garde, character of her own work. Further, it appears that Niedecker is confessing that her work, with respect to Surrealism as a critically recognizable international movement, would belong to a second generation. More importantly, however , Niedecker’s self-representation—as unwitting and ironically belated vanguardist of an experimental practice ordinarily associated with an international coterie of metropolitan artists—upends the gendered reception of Niedecker: The Interior Voice Commodified 139 her as a miniaturist and a regionalist. In donning the...