Abstract
In Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), Sianne Ngai theorizes the "cute," interpreting the turn to the small object in twentieth-century avant-garde poetry as a symptom of late capitalism's hyper-commodification. In response, this essay argues that the cute fails to accurately describe the projects of some avant-garde poets such as Lorine Niedecker. While Ngai's theory presumes a bourgeois subject who projects a sensuous relationship onto objects, obscuring the reality of commodification, Niedecker's poems do not enjoy the luxury of this projection. As a working-class poet, she is aware of objects' impact on her comfort and survival as part of her daily labors. Instead, Niedecker's poems offer a portrait of objects in use, recognizing the poet's reliance on material conditions to live, and further, to create.
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