Petalbent Devils: Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, and the Surrealist Praying Mantis

Over the past twenty years, Louis Zukofsky's sestina "'Mantis'" and its companion poem, "'Mantis,' An Interpretation," have come to occupy a prominent position in the reception of the poet's work and in general discussions of the Objectivist movement.¹ Most accounts focus on one of three issues—the poems' relations to marxism, their relations to imagism, or their relations to formalism. The latter is especially well represented in the critical literature: in the words of Zukofsky's biographer Mark Scroggins, the general consensus seems to be that "[t]he knowledge that the poem bears is a function of its relational structure rather than its referential reach."²

In this essay, however, I wish to return to the poems' "referential reach," because something has been missing from the discussion around "'Mantis'"—i.e., the figure of the praying mantis itself, clearly the "object," the rays of which have been brought to a focus by this Objectivist poem. It is as if the rigors demanded of the critical attention by the poem's formal frame render invisible the figure at its center. In her essay on the poem, Susan Vanderborg mentions in passing Zukofsky's sense of the "cost of isolating the insect from its past and present contexts"; and it is precisely these contexts—particularly the contemporary historical context of "'Mantis'"—that I wish to reinvest in the discussion.³ After all, as Zukofsky says in his essay "Modern Times," "[a]rt does not rise out of thin air"; and in "An Objective," he speaks directly to the issue of historical and contemporary contexts:⁴

A poem. Also the materials which are outside (?) the veins and capillaries—The context—The context necessarily dealing with a world outside of it—The desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars. . . .⁵

and later in the same essay:

Impossible to communicate anything but particulars—historic and contemporary. . . . The revolutionary word if it must revolve cannot escape having a reference.

("O," 16)

A poem's "referential reach," then, is the necessary other half of the Objectivist equation, demanding the same grade of attention as the "relational structure" of its form.

Thus in spite of the fact that Zukofsky stages the mantis as (literally) rising out of thin air—aloft on the updrafts from a subway tunnel—the praying mantis was visible in a host of contemporary contexts in 1934, the year the poems were written. My intention here is to recover these contexts, and my main point is this: while critics have articulated the poems' concerns with imagism, marxism, and formalism, no one has adequately discussed their relationship to surrealism: and the praying mantis is the surrealist object as it was being theorized by painters and writers—particularly Salvador Dali and Roger Caillois—in the early 1930s. References to both of these artists appear in "'Mantis'" and "An Interpretation," and both prominently featured praying mantids in their works at the time. Hence just like "the poor" in "'Mantis,'" Zukofsky's praying mantis "rises from the news"—or the newspapers, journals, and art galleries of the day—in a myriad of contexts I elucidate below.

My reading makes visible a critical element in the lineage of the "object" in Objectivism: i.e., the surrealist object as it was being articulated prior to and during 1934. Both surrealism and Objectivism are aesthetic epistemologies, concerned to understand how an object means what it means, and to provide blueprints for producing what Caillois calls "lyrical objects": paintings, sculptures, films, poems. The differences between these epistemologies are profound—for reasons I'll detail below, the differences between them preoccupied Zukofsky in 1934—and in "'Mantis,'" the poet addresses them directly; in fact, his Objectivist poem at once absorbs the surrealist object and transforms it in a movement that can only be termed dialectical. Situating Zukofsky's mantis among the numerous images of mantids circulating through...