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Waking into Ideology: Lorine Niedecker’s Experiments in the Syntax of Consciousness
- University of Iowa Press
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Waking into Ideology Lorine Niedecker’s Experiments in the Syntax of Consciousness Six Months ahead of a Movement and 20 Years behind It: Niedecker on Uneven Development Just prior to Jenny Penberthy’s discovery in 1996 of “Next Year or I fly my rounds, Tempestuous” in Louis Zukofsky’s archive, National Poetry Foundation Director Burton Hatlen found Niedecker’s expanded version of the 1933 poem “Progression” buried in Ezra 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 been scattered and hidden amongst the papers of her male contemporaries. Indeed, Niedecker’s surrealist period previously seemed thinner to readers than her “folk” period because the recuperative work of locating its contents has only recently been made available in Jenny Penberthy’s 2002 edition of the poet’s work. Critical accounts of Niedecker continue to be shaped by the earlier contours of her published presence. Because Niedecker ’s correspondence with Zukofsky and Corman appears without the accompanying letters from her male correspondents (the Zukofsky estate Ruth Jennison 132 | sounding process 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 archival status of Niedecker’s surrealist work affects its critical reception in a similar fashion. It reinforces 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 to the contrary. Ambitious and aggressively experimental, Niedecker’s surrealist work reveals formal and substantive resonances with such French surrealist feminist works as Claude Cahun’s (née Lucy Schwob) “Beware Domestic Objects!” and co-Bretonist Marcelle Ferry’s “Frenzy, Sweet Little Child, You Sleep.”2 Despite Niedecker’s 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. Modernist studies has traditionally taken the canonized modernists at their own word: cliques and personal relationships substitute for a literary history of shared formal trajectories and/or political commitments . 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 Looking toward Niedecker’s commentary on her own work grants greater significance to her experiments with surrealist forms. Niedecker writes about the curious historical coordinates of “Progression”’s composition in a 1933 letter to Harriet Monroe, then editor of Poetry magazine: “[the poem] 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” (LNWP 177–78). Within the context of her own development as a poet, Niedecker’s self-reflexive claim, of finding herself “six months ahead” of a movement before her own fa- [3.235.42.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:44 GMT) Ruth Jennison | 133 miliarity with it, reveals her view of the proleptic (indeed, avant-garde) character of her own work. Further, it highlights Niedecker’s awareness 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 her as a miniaturist and a regionalist. In donning the mantle of modernist individuation, Niedecker refuses the ideological marriage of folksy populism with the regional countryside. In this sense, Niedecker self-consciously deploys the term “surrealism” to very specific and political ends, and in doing so she will body forth a surrealist poetics that is distinct in its articulation and goals. Niedecker’s self-location as ahead of her own belatedness describes...