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.

This chapter examines the seldom-discussed poetry and editorial activities of Norman Macleod, a Southwest-based poet who had strong ties to both influential modernists of an earlier generation such as Ezra Pound and Harriet Monroe, and the younger generation of communist-affiliated writers gathered around the little magazine New Masses. Macleod was an internationally visible figure during the Depression decade, when he published in many prominent venues and released two collections of poetry, Horizons of Death (1934) and Thanksgiving before November (1936). The chapter analyzes Macleod’s poems alongside his editorial activities to argue that Macleod challenged modernity’s developmentalist logic as he cultivated a regionalist aesthetics that positioned the Southwest – particularly its Chicanx and Indigenous cultures – as holistic, vital, and integrated, in contrast to the alienation and destruction he associated with the cities of the East. The chapter also scrutinizes the tendency of Macleod’s work toward cultural appropriation in its quasi-ethnographic relationship with the cultures of the Southwest.