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Surreal Niedecker: avant-garde Poetics on the Periphery

Esther Sánchez-Pardo Complutense University of Madrid

[email protected]

Received: September 25, 2013! !Revised version accepted: October 22, 2013

Abstract: This paper frames Lorine Niedecker’s (1903-1970) period of most radical literary production, the 1930s. Her work, produced on the periphery of transnational modernisms at once participates in her local traditions –nature poetry and Objectivism– and in the transatlantic surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s and its legacy. Building on recent scholarship emphasizing the importance of surrealist ideas in a broader transnational context, we argue that Niedecker elaborated a vocabulary of motifs for the irrational or unconscious aspects of human subjectivity. Niedecker’s poetry negotiates those avant-garde tropes for the unconscious in order to generate poetry, and it is this “constructivist” aspect that will lead us in our inquiry across the Atlantic.

Keywords: Lorine Niedecker, Surrealist poetics, avant-garde, peripheral modernism

Resumen: Este artículo se ocupa de la obra de Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970) en los años 30, su período de experimentación poética más radical. La obra de Niedecker se gesta en la periferia del modernismo transnacional y participa simultáneamente de sus tradiciones locales –poesía de la naturaleza, objetivismo– y del Surrealismo y su legado allende las

IPES International Papers on English Studies 1 (2013) 11-24

ISSN: 2341-0000

e-ISSN: 2341-071X

fronteras. Las tendencias actuales en el estudio del Surrealismo subrayan precisamente su

amplio carácter transatlántico. En este contexto, demostramos cómo Niedecker elaboró un

conjunto de motivos para dar cuenta de la importancia del inconsciente y de la irracionalidad

en la subjetividad humana. La poesía de Niedecker se sirvió también de los tropos utilizados

por las vanguardias en su búsqueda permanente de renovación del lenguaje poético. Son

estos aspectos generadores de lo ‘nuevo’ en la poesía de Niedecker de los años 30 los que

abordaremos en este periplo a través del Atlántico.

Palabras clave: Lorine Niedecker, poética surrealista, vanguardia, modernismo periférico

The history of twentieth century avant-garde practices charts the contours of a genealogy

fascinated with the irrational aspects of individual and social processes. Whereas the

Freudian unconscious came to be a new and challenging intellectual object for the modernist

avant-garde, a variety of experiments exposing such qualities as those hidden in found

objects, the free association of words, or in dreams and chance encounters were also

promising methods towards the destabilization of everyday life. These chance encounters

involve the poetic voice in a journey into the terrain of surrealness that reminds us of André

Breton’s words in the First Surrealist Manifesto (1924) where he writes of “la promenade

perpetuelle en pleine zone interdite” (“the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden

territory” [137]). Here Breton’s reference is to the quest for access to the “forbidden zones” of

dreams and the imagination, where, liberated from the constraints of reason and reality, the

creative potential of the unconscious mind of the surrealist might be harnessed in the name

of social revolution.

Countering the image of woman invoked in the poetry of Breton –Nadja provides a well-

known paradigmatic example–, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Pierre Reverdy, Robert Desnos

and others, at once compelling, gifted, nocturnal and fragile, the current reappraisal of the

practice of women artists and writers –Leonora Carrington, Claude Cahun, Remedios Varo,

Kay Sage, Mina Loy, Joyce Mansour–shows that their creative input contributed in

fundamental ways to the construction of Surrealism.

This paper will focus on Lorine Niedecker’s (1903-1970) period of most radical literary

production, the 1930s. A cursory glance at scholarly work in print on Surrealism and its

legacy would certainly not include Niedecker among its ranks. It is difficult to find a


12 Esther Sánchez-Pardo

framework vivid enough to incorporate her work. Attempts to bring a literary-historical order

to read her work, or to see it in the context of one movement or another, have proved more

or less irrelevant due to her independent character and her working very much in isolation. In

this paper, I endeavour to provide a literary historical context for understanding Niedecker’s

early poetry, and to create a frame “vivid enough,” if not to contain her work, then at least to

illuminate some aspects of its construction that have remained in obscurity. My argument

rests on several methodological supports. I begin by briefly returning to the historical context

in which she emerged as a professional writer in Wisconsin (and later New York) in the

1930s, in the milieu that welcomed the surrealist émigrés fleeing war-torn Europe and

fostered the emergence of a new American style combining elements of surrealism among

other avant-garde movements. Examining Niedecker’s volumes of collected writings, and her

recently released biography, I select and analyze a series of poems representative of her early

surrealist practice in order to comment on the strategies (image-making processes,

procedures, sources of inspiration) used to generate new language and poetic styles. I

supplement this evidence with other poets’ statements, criticism and essays that have

appeared in books and journals since then.

Niedecker alludes to her experiences with surrealism as a practice of “language generated by

its will to disorder.” From a concern with the external world to her approach to dream,

truncated words, disrupted syntax, unsystematic punctuation, typographical play, and other

“unintelligible” forms, Niedecker moves to a heightened attention to the “constructed” nature

of the world.

NIEDECKER’S (MANY) DIMENSIONS

Lorine Niedecker came to be associated with the Objectivists in the 1930s. The movement

included Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi and British poet

Basil Bunting, a quite diverse group who gave themselves that name in 1931 and published

An Objectivists’ Anthology in 1932. Objectivism maintained the imagist focus on the

particular, but conceived of the poem primarily in terms of form, not of content. Certainly, a

good number of the 1930s poems feature a more complex and aesthetically realized use of

the oriental reified image than its precedent in Imagism, and we may argue that poets like

Williams and Zukofsky abandoned traditional Asian imagery, and fully transplanted the

Eastern image into an American urban environment. It was through focusing on the

mechanics of poetry, on its form, that some members of the group claimed to find solutions

to problems as wide-ranging as fascism, materialism, and the need for social revolution.


Surreal Niedecker: Avant-Garde Poetics on the Periphery... 13

Thus the objectivist poem was physical, objective, like the imagist poem, but it was a physical object that acted upon the world. In Objectivism, the poem’s time becomes both transient perception and static continuum. As time is both active motion and sequential whole, so objects in space are simultaneously active and static.Lorine Niedecker’s work can be read as both Objectivist and Surrealist, and her early poetic experiments operate as an expansion of the Objectivist materialist project to include the representation of states of consciousness. If such a project focuses on the critique of capitalist modernity’s object-world, Niedecker’s early work, along with the Surrealists, suggest that this psychic terrain as well must be subject to critique. Her perception of artifice in art, and in the domain of representation at large, urges us to perceive more immediately the intrinsically complex relations of the world itself. In other words, when Niedecker writes, “My friend tree / I sawed you down…,” she doesn’t mean that the word tree is a tree, but that the words of the poem themselves act on the mind, interact with each other, grow, flower and fail, treelike. If her poetry is self-reflexive, then, it is most often because she wishes to direct her readers to the words themselves, in all their functionality and beauty, instead of toward their referents. I see this idea very close to William Carlos Williams’ understanding of his own practice as a poet –colleague and friend of the Objectivists–, it is precisely this “concept of verbalism…the concept of words as things,” which is at the center of Williams’ cult of poetry, and constitutes for him “the sole authentic religious approach to meaning.”

Objectivism is characterized not by homogeneous forms or purity of style but rather by the emergence of a poetics that uses a diverse array of formal strategies to highlight the material mediations of language and ideology. Objectivism’s materialist forms announce a new swerve in the history of modernism. This turn itself tends in two directions. On the one hand, objectivists eschew their contemporaries’ inclinations toward transcendence and myth, by returning to that first radical stage of modernism, Imagism. Recuperating Imagism’s focus on the particulars of history, objectivist poetics construct totalities large (Zukofsky’s “A” series) and small (Oppen’s Discrete Series) of particulars whose internal consistency stands in opposition to the hegemonic logic of rationality.So far, literary history has done violence to our understanding of Niedecker’s poetry by either simplifying her into a poet of Nature, into a poet of pure solipsism, or into some sort of Emersonian idealist appropriating the world to the ego. By looking into Niedecker’s instead through the lens of compositional strategies of modern art, we can certainly give an account of her poetry that shows her work as developing impersonal structures for testing the capacity of the poet’s active, forming mind to impose its own structures on the real – not to



displace objects, but to bring them to life in the new dimension of constructed relations that, in various avant-garde movements allowed an artwork to become a reality in its own right. This seems to us a necessary corrective. It allows us to understand that the self-referentiality of much of her poetry is not an abandonment of immediate experience so much as an intensification of that experience –a shifting of the reader’s attention from mere perception of the poem’s mimesis to a perception of the poem’s structure.If Niedecker’s surrealist period has seemed less significant (scarce and erratic) to readers than her “folk” period, it is because the recuperative work of locating its contents has only been made available in Jenny Penberthy’s new edition of the poet’s work. In preparing her Collected Works (2002), the editor writes, “This collection adds previously omitted work such as all the surviving instances of her early surrealism, the impulse that Zukofsky and Pound would disparage in her work but that would remain a steady influence throughout her career” (14). This group of poems may be seen as representing a gamut of non-figuration and range from rather short compositions to longer poems (“Progression,” “Next Year or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous”) The archival status of Niedecker’s surrealist period effects its reception in a similar fashion to the rest of her work –the incomplete status of her archive, part of which was punctuated by her epistolary exchanges with Louis Zukofsky (whose estate refused publishing rights) and Cid Corman– contributes to the myth of Niedecker as a petitioner of Zukofsky’s advice. Niedecker’s surrealist period has remained up until very recently as a private, personal record that didn’t quite fit anywhere within the broad modernist canon. New access to these works speaks to the contrary. Ambitious and rabidly experimental, Niedecker’s surrealist work reveals formal and substantive resonances with such surrealist feminist works as Claude Cahun’s “Beware Domestic Objects,” Marcelle Ferry’s “Frenzy, Sweet Little Child, you Sleep,” and Mina Loy’s Ready-mades. 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 construction, and the conundrums of capitalist social life. Modernist studies have traditionally taken the modernists themselves at their own word, coteries and personal relationships substitute for a literary history of shared formal trajectories and aesthetic commitments.Niedecker’s understanding of poetry as a process of continual innovation, a process which by its very nature threatens to undermine the value of past creations, is crucial to read the totality of her work. Her interest in Objectivism and her friendship with Zukofsky does not necessarily mean Niedecker would complacently subscribe to their tenets. As Jenny



Penberthy has aptly remarked, “It appears that her enthusiasm for an object-based poetics

was limited. Instead, she pursued abstraction. Niedecker and her Fort-Atkinson friend Mary

Hoard were fascinated by the challenge of registering experience without recourse to

representational form” (Collected Works 4). Early in the friendship with Zukofsky, by the end

of 1933, Niedecker made her first visit to New York. By that time, both writers had already

different attitudes to Surrealism: whereas Zukofsky was eager to dissociate his own work

from Surrealism, Niedecker was fascinated reading Eugene Jolas’ journal transition, learning

more about automatism and writing her first poems inspired by Surrealism.

Peter Nicholls holds that Niedecker might already be following another strand of Surrealism

that found echo on American ground and which poets like William Carlos Williams were

supporting. In Williams’ own formulation, “Surrealism does not lie. It is the single truth. It is an

epidemic. It is just words.” Nicholls has shrewdly argued that: “Surrealism could become a

sort of portmanteau word for an alternative non-image-based poetics in America running

from Gertrude Stein to the Language writers” (Nicholls 198). This could certainly be the case

and it would be worth to examine the trajectories of surrealist writers and artists who lived in

Europe and in America in order to draw conclusions on how this displacement affected their

careers. André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Mina Loy, are cases in point. In other

words, how does Surrealism work across the Atlantic, how does it appear in other latitudes,

how does it sound in translation and in other languages?

Niedecker’s 1933 eight-part poem Progression, was found buried in Ezra Pound’s papers at

the Beinecke Library. If Niedecker’s surrealist period seemed only a brief stop on a trajectory

of poetic development shaped by her correspondence with male poets like Zukofsky and Cid

Corman, this is, again, in part, because the archive of Niedecker’s surrealist work has been

scattered and hidden amongst the papers of her male contemporaries. The belated

discovery of Niedecker’s early experimental work mirrors the conditions of its production.

Niedecker writes about the curious background of Progression’s composition in a 1933 letter

to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine: “…Progression was written six months

before Mr Zukofsky referred me to the surrealists for correlation.” She closes her letter with a

meditation on her position within the historical timeline of the 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.” This remark

reveals Niedecker’s sense of her own contradictory position at the intersection of modernist

poetic traditions. Interestingly, she refers to the poem’s “direction” rather than its contents or



formal qualities as the indicator of its place within the traditions of modernism. From Niedecker’s perspective, and that of other “second generation” modernists, the avant-garde is a continuous tendency, whose forms and experiments can and should be taken up and transformed by artists of various historical moments.Throughout the different sections of Progression, Niedecker outlines her method of composition in a 1933 letter to Harriet Monroe:

I had explained the poem in this way: 1st section– simple knowing and concern for

externals; 2nd section– the turn to one world farther in; 3rd section– the will to disorder,

approach to dream…the individual talking to himself, the supreme circumstance.

I had sketched my theory thus: Poetry to have greatest reason for existing must be

illogical. An idea, a rumination such as more or less constantly roams the mind, meets

external object or situation by illogical association. Memory, if made up of objects at all,

retains those objects which were at the time of first perception and still are the most

strikingly unrecognizable. In my own experience sentences have appeared full-blown in

the first moments of waking from sleep. It is a system of thought replacements, the most

remote the most significant or irrational; a thousand variations of the basic tension, an

attempt at not hard clear images but absorption of these. Intelligibility or reader’s

recognition of sincerity of force lies in a sense of basic color, sound, rhythm. (Woman and

Poet 177-78)

Niedecker’s theory of poetry turns the Objectivist attention to the specificities of history, as well as its rejection of myth and transcendence inward in order to inquire into the material conditions of subject formation itself. In Niedecker’s view, the individual subject is driven to “absorb” a vast world of particulars. An “illogical” poetics offers some response to the isolation and self-consciousness of that subject who gains awareness of its limits and is sensitive to the myriad differences existing among objects and circumstances. Memory always retains a subject’s first encounters with the world’s materials, and this sophisticated system of “thought-replacements” is constitutive of the subject’s core. Memory plays a crucial role, it can be summoned to discern originals from repeated patterns, as well as the creation of the new from the trite, banal, hackneyed old assumptions. The subject, like the external world of data that she perceives, consists of vocabularies and processes specific to her history and social milieu. The task of the poet is to explore the “progression” of these “thought replacements,” to engage in a quest to inquire into the relations of interiority and exteriority.



One of Niedecker most experimental pieces is certainly her composition, “Next Year or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous” (Collected Works 41-67). It consists of twenty-seven small rectangles of papers carefully pasted over the middle of a 1935 devotional calendar, spanning the whole year from January to December. The poem was sent to Zukofsky at Christmas time in 1934 as a present. In this piece, Niedecker experiments with collage and approaches the montage-like immediacy of calendar time through its diaristic structure importantly, “Next Year…” also leaned on current 1930’s design and illustration. This piece represents a transference of the archive (collection of events occurring on a daily basis) into the field of hegemonic time and a radical displacement of authorship. The series format of the almanac, which would normally assure the rational unfolding of meaning, here reconstructs a site of Surrealist play –the aleatory emergence of the illustrations-cum-text and their conversion into a Surrealist poem. For the images that comprise the almanac, in their monotonous seriality, far from indicating purposeful selection, exhibit a kind of aimless drift through (calendar) time. The arbitrary nature of the album indicates a submerged “illogic” that links the images associatively across the subject matter, much in the oblique manner of unconscious processes.In February 1931, upon reading Zukofsky’s Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine, Niedecker decided to send him her latest poems, one of which was “When Ecstasy Is Inconvenient.” From early on, Zukofsky was sensitive to her early work and referred her to the magazine’s editor, Harriet Monroe. As Jenny Penberthy has argued, “This poem [When Ecstasy…], which Monroe accepted for publication, reveals Niedecker’s early surrealism, a style she was exploring long before ‘Mr Zukofsky referred me to the Surrealists for correlation’ (in Penberthy 1996, 177)” (Collected Works 3). By that time, she was well-read in the major modernist writers whose work was available to her in Fort Atkinson, mainly Virginia Woolf, H. D., Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. But it was contact with Zukofsky that opened up her future interaction with the American avant-garde.“When Ecstasy Is Inconvenient” is a short three-stanza poem representative of Niedecker’s engagement with Surrealism. The poet presents us with a major Surrealist scenario in which the play between inside and outside, space and time, movement and stillness, seeing and knowing, and normalcy and madness, operate the unresolved confrontation of the polarities of existence. The voice in the poem disperses a series of imperatives inviting the reader to approach the poem both sensuously and cognitively:

Feign a great calm;

All gay transport soon ends.



Chant: who knows –Flight’s end or flight’s beginningFor the resting gull?Heart, be still.Say there is money but it rusted;Say the time of moon is not right for escape.It’s the color in the lower skytoo broadly suffused,Or the wind in my tie.Know amazedly howOften one takes his madnessInto his own handsAnd keeps it.

The poem begins with calmness, addressing a subject who is requested to feign a great

calm, a state of contemplation, free from disturbance, and ends with madness. The natural

world and the human world seem to be living in a state of suspension: “Chant… who knows

–/flight’s end or flight’s beginning/ for the resting gull?” and “Heart, be still,” delineate the

contours of an existence of arrested motion.

Suspension is a state of exception, anticipation, or absorption. It hovers, pauses and

interrupts, creating a liminal space often outside the coordinates of historical time and

physical space. Since the 18th century, aesthetic encounters have been conceived of as a

suspension of one’s understanding before the sensible experience of the artwork. As

Jonathan Crary has argued, “...the state of being suspended, a looking or listening so rapt

that it is an exemption from ordinary conditions, that it becomes a suspended temporality, a

hovering out of time ... It implies the possibility of a fixation, of holding something in wonder

or contemplation, in which the attentive subject is both immobile and ungrounded. But at the

same a suspension is also a cancellation or an interruption, and I wanted here to indicate a

disturbance, even a negation of perception itself...” This sort of mise-en-abyme of perception

appears in the poem in the transit from absorption to cognition. From the margins of

Surrealism, the dismantling of cognitive autonomy was recognized as well, through the

movement’s psychoanalytically-driven surrender of visual and experiential mastery to the

mechanisms of the unconscious.

“When Ecstasy is Inconvenient” was meant to show that “ecstasy” was as valid for the

modern poet as despair. If T. S. Eliot wrote about alienation, Niedecker’s governing metaphor

would insist on the possibility of connection with Nature and the world at large. The



“inconveniences” of ecstasy (the latter understood as a moment of bliss when the subject is

overwhelmed by an overflow of sensation) in the poem resonate with a state of

contemplation outside of the body, ambiguously located between “flight’s end or flight’s

beginning.” Historically, ecstasy has been associated with spiritual and mystic states. Bataille

conceives of ecstasy as a “ ‘yawning gap’ between the one and the other” 9 –a dissolving of

the boundaries between traditional subject-object relationships. Rather than attaching this

idea to a specific state or act, I would like to suggest we use this term as an active concept

describing a means of production. Furthering Bataille’s notion, Jean-Luc Nancy points out

“one could not properly say that the singular being is the subject of ecstasy, for ecstasy has

no ‘subject’ – but one must say that ecstasy happens to the singular being.” This concept of

ecstasy as a state outside one’s self yields potential for new forms of experience.

The ecstatic moment is predicated on being there, being present, being an event. For

Niedecker, poetry is concerned with the organization of the sensible and that organization is

to a great extent a mirror of the social; but, rather then being a one-to-one reflection of the

social, the poem can act as a vatic force for the future due to its inherently ambiguous

material and anti-material nature. “When Ecstasy is inconvenient” retains references to the

natural world –”the color in the lower sky / too broadly suffused, / or the wind in my

tie” (Collected Works 25)– but the poetic voice recoils solipsistically facing insanity. Along the

lines of Surrealism’s breaking with the notion of the unitary self that dominated post-

Enlightenment thinking, Niedecker glosses the “inconveniences of Ecstasy” embracing

incoherence, disjunction, fragmentation and madness.

Niedecker uses the recursion of sound units in her experimental work “Beyond what” in order

to allow the reader to trace the thickening of mediation that occurs from the movement of

“subconsciousness” to “social banal.” In this triptych we are confronted with words whose

strangeness arises, not only from their juxtaposition, but from their very form. They are now

lexically enigmatic, though we can usually assign them a grammatical place in the sentence

and though we may guess at their possible meaning:



As it is the case with her “triptych”-poem “Canvass,” “the poem is printed side-by-side in

allusion to a triptych of abstract paintings” (Collected Works 5). The poem invites the reader

into a journey with no fixed destination, and offers many alternatives to reading and

experiencing the structure of its three main sections. As in some sort of crossword puzzle,

there are no predetermined directions to follow, and we can suggest different combinations

of lines, violations in the order (no order is given prominence), and even omissions of

sequences when composing our own version. The journey from “subconscious” to “social

banal” makes the reader feel adrift in a strange territory, where the primacy of sound is most

relevant.

Niedecker moves in and out of what we might call “figurative” language in these early

versions of experiments that would eventually lead to poems like “Synamism”:

Berceuse, mediphala

And the continent. German and therefore unidentified.

Cricket night, seismograph and stitch. All tongues backed

By a difference. Likelihood without of left-overs cooling,

Weatheroid and furor occult, functionary tri-mundane. And

The scientific equiptical left nerves on the floor (Collected Works 36)

“Synamism,” Niedecker’s coinage to allude to an abstract noun on the basis of words like

“animism,” displays an impressive number of new words in a curious assemblage. The poem

certainly forges a new language for a poetry that projects into the future, where the poet

appears (re)born to speech;



Beyond what1 I heard2 Memorial Day3

decapitated areas too far for me to see thou hast

momently to the constant removal lest we forget not foreign aggression

liquidating aftermath no fan thank you but world disillusion

inspired marksmanship peonies dedicated to the proposition

Devil the ash trays show it if only one could of an ice-cream cone

instant with glee I was born on a farm and the stars and stripes forever

black winged lazuli I watched arrive in spring over the factories and hills of our country

beets redden and revert city your faith in arches for the soldier death

1. subconscious 2. toward monologue 3. social-banal

If you forget, remember: a wire fence

Conceals a tree if it came first to the eye. Jugdment:

A menstrualoid broke its shell, I was born (Collected Works 36-37)

Niedecker’s construction goes hand in hand with Eugene Jolas’ ideas on the “new” language

for poetry, populated with neologisms and made-up words, whose origin was in dream:

“Words have a reality which the dictionary does not know. Etymology is for the archeologists

of letters. We demand the etymology of approximation and apperception.”

Niedecker’s major contribution in her Surrealist period shows in her use of rhythm and sound

effects, which might be the biggest innovation revealed by her style. Rhythmic continuity is

developed through repetition and contrast, and a very linear sense of sonic progression. The

rhythm gains momentum from the overall result of the layering of different parts on the

syntagmatic chain. At any rate, the rhythmic sense is entirely fluid, and one could argue that

the key sequence’s soundscape provides added value because it creatively portrays both

“‘immediate” and “remembered” experiences. Finally, the mix of sounds in the sequence

presents a liminal space, an aural threshold between conscious and unconscious.

Niedecker’s surrealist poetry demands a mode of reception radically different from that of a

unified poem. In the organic poem (or work of art) the comprehension of the whole guides

the comprehension of the parts. In the poems we examined their specific parts are set in

perceptual and cognitive tension with the whole poem and its meaning, and there is a

premeditated attempt to disable compositional order. The reader’s reception forces a critique

of conventional expectations –there is no essence, no center, there are only parts set in a

chain of part-production. The process of writing amounts to a repeated staging of textual

production, and leads to an acknowledgement of the poem as a construction.

Finally, we need to focus fresh attention on the conceptual and stylistic links between

surrealism and objectivism, links that for so many years have remained in obscurity due to

rigid disciplinary and even national and linguistic boundaries. In this respect, Wai Chee

Dimock in her insightful essay “Literature for the Planet” has shared with us a crucial

reflection on how the planet appears in the horizon as a new unit of analysis in literary

studies, and fundamentally for our project, how literary relations get established between

Europe and America. Dimock, thinking through the consequences of a globalizing

readership, argues:

We can think of [literature] as an artificial form of “life” –not biological like an organism or

territorial like a nation but vital all the same, and durable for that reason. To acknowledge



this force, we need to stop assuming a one-to-one correspondence between the

geographic origins of a text and its evolving radius of literary action. We need to stop

thinking of national literatures as the linguistic equivalents of territorial maps (…) An emerging and globalizing readership is on both fronts. Theorized as the consequences of this global readership, literature handily outlives the finite scope of the nation. It brings into play a different set of temporal and spatial coordinates. It urges on us the entire planet as a unit of analysis.

As we have attempted to show, Lorine Niedecker was deeply engaged with surrealist ideas about the irrational or unconscious aspects of human subjectivity. Avant-garde writers working in New York in the 1930s, including the European surrealists and the developing abstract expressionists embarked on a collective effort to work on a system of metaphors for the unconscious, some sort of symbol system that met with wiedespread recognition amongst the writers, artists, as well as the public. Niedecker and her peers took from surrealism the conviction that unconscious psychic processes provided a fertile source of artistic subject matter. Engaging with the early work of Niedecker and with the crossfertilization that comes from the modernist revolution opens up unprecedented ways of reading and assessing an important and neglected body of work extant in the archive, a promising ground for comparative modernist studies across the arts.

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