This article draws from the fields of queer temporalities, phenomenology, and new materialist approaches to the body, affect, and the concept of becoming to develop a cultural and literary analysis of New York Beat poet Elise Cowen. Cowen constitutes an absent presence in the Beat generation due to her lost work, the mythic narratives around her suicide in 1962 and her relationship with Allen Ginsberg. Her work, recovered by the feminist revisions of women Beat writers in the mid-nineties and published in 2014, remains largely unexplored, as is her significance as a proto-feminist in postwar bohemia. In this article I would like to further consolidate her authorship by embodying her presence in history and paying attention to the present of her poetry. I will do that under the premises of feminist affirmative theories of time that can shed light on several aspects: her gendered lived time in the Beat period; the anachronism and untimeliness she represented; the impulse in her poetry towards change and transformation; the temporality of affects such as love, compassion, and lucidity, in contrast to depression and fragmentation; the process of becoming; and the proliferation of affects in her work. Even though Cowen shared the temporalities of female trauma and mental illness, my interest will be to focus on the power of the living present, the becoming of bodily affects, the openness of the moment and the sensuous encounter with her poetry. My aim here is to give Cowen “a time of her own” and connect her to a life rhythm socially marked on gendered bodies and developed within embodiment and affective intensities. By “queering” chrononormativity and literary history in relation to gender, the article will outline Elise Cowen’s own tempo and the significant contribution of her work to the richness of female Beat writing.
Isabel Castelao-Gómez (Wed,) studied this question.