Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeIssues20-4A Time of Her Own: Elise Cowen’s ...

A Time of Her Own: Elise Cowen’s Temporalities

Isabel Castelao-Gómez

Abstract

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.

Top of page

Full text

If Elise had been born ten years later, it would have made a tremendous difference …. She was really out of—not in the right time.
Joyce Johnson, Breaking the Rule of Cool 198
I think we were trying to shake the time. Shake it off, shake it up, shake it down.
Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones 34

1. Feminist Queer Temporalities and Beat Women Writers

  • 1 I refer throughout the article to the writers of this second generation.
  • 2 Joyce Johnson remembers her best friend as a generous person, brilliant intellectual, good listener (...)

1Elise Cowen (1933-1962) belonged to the “second generation” of female writers (following the temporal model by Johnson and Grace (13)) associated to the Beat movement, who started to write in their young adulthood during the fifties and early sixties (e.g. Diane di Prima, Joyce Johnson or Hettie Jones, among others).1 Documented facts about Cowen’s life are scarce. The main sources are Joyce Johnson’s memoir, Minor Characters (1983), Tony Trigilio’s edition, Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (2014) and Leo Skir’s “Elise Cowen: A Brief Memoir of the Fifties” (1967). From these sources we learn that Cowen was born in an upper middle-class Jewish family in New York and studied at Barnard, where she met Joyce Johnson in 1952 and they became best friends. She entered the circle of Beat writers through her professor and lover Donald Cook; in this circle she met Allen Ginsberg and had a brief relationship with him and a long friendship. Even though she wrote prolifically, she never published or made public her desire to become a writer. Cowen had an early suicide attempt and was prone to depression and aloofness.2 In the late 50s, Cowen moved to San Francisco on her own and had a traumatic late hysterectomy. Before leaving, she had a relationship with Carol Heller and shared an apartment with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. In 1961 Cowen was hospitalized after a period of drug abuse with symptoms of psychosis. Back in her parents’ home, she jumped out of the window a year later at age twenty-eight (New York World Telegram Feb. 27, 1962).

2Cowen’s authorship is untimely and discontinuous, conditioned by posthumous publications and the small amount of her extant writing (91 poems). Most of her manuscripts stayed in her parents’ home and were burned by her family due to their scandalous content. A few poems were first published in City Lights Journal (1964) as “Poems from Her Notebooks,” with a brief introduction by Ginsberg and Lucien Carr. A friend, Leo Skir, jealously kept her only surviving notebook and published some poems in experimental magazines from 1964 to 1966 (Trigilio 170-172). Johnson’s memoir was the foundational book to introduce Elise Cowen in the history of the Beat generation. Also, the visibility of her work in Brenda Knight’s (1996), Johnson and Grace’s (2002, 2004), and Peabody’s (1997) books opened a critical space for her in Beat literary history. But the main work that has contributed to establishing her as a poet was Tony Trigilio’s edited collection of her work in 2014. My study here would like to analyze how Cowen’s divergent temporalities, her being “out of time” (as Johnson’s initial quote asserts), the dislocations of reception and publications of her work, her suicide, and the rich living time in her poems, contrast and diversify the corollary of Beat women’s works and practices that were an essential part in the making of the Beat countercultural and literary bohemia.

  • 3 Other contributors are Jennie Skirl, A. Robert Lee, Polina MacKay, Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, or (...)

3Translating into time Virginia Woolf’s emblematic metaphor may mistakenly indicate that the main objective of this article is to give women Beat writers and Cowen a “time of their own” within Beat literary tradition. This has been the aim of most Anglo-American feminist literary criticism, which has tried to recover women writers from the past, claiming their position in history to build a literary corpus for the future. Many works have already contributed to include Beat generation’s women writers solidly within the movement.3 However, the aim of this study is to locate Cowen and the group she belongs to in relation to other kind of temporalities beyond historical time.

4Julia Kristeva’s seminal article “Women’s Time” was one of the first to point out the vital role of time and chronological history for women and feminism. Culturally relegated to the off-historical temporality of the cyclical (time of the natural) or the monumental (eternal time), women have principally striven through feminism “for being included into collective histories” (Fjelkestam 119). McBean, however, has daringly questioned the use of the progressive linear time involved in the concepts of genealogies or waves in order to define women’s identities and her-stories. She suggests, instead, that “queer temporalities” provide a non-chronological approach to time valuable for feminist criticism because it outlines different ways of temporal belonging, affective and embodied temporalities, thus enabling alternative connections and modes of being historical for women (McBean 1). An alternative temporal connection for Cowen was her bisexuality and contact with the bohemian lesbian community through Carol Heller, which challenged heteronormative timing in specific historical terms. Queer temporal connections in literary history are also represented in her sapphic allusions to Dickinson, as in this poem: “Emily, / Come summer / You’ll take off your / jeweled bees / Which sting me / I’ll strip my stinking / jeans / Hand in hand / We’ll run outside / Looking straight / at the sun” (26).

  • 4 “Queer temporalities” originally focused on queer collectives, but the implementation of time struc (...)

5Scholars such as Freeman and Halberstam have theorized alternative ways to think about non-normative time. Western society and patriarchal thought have been grounded in a progressive and goal-oriented understanding of human temporality. “Chrononormativity” affects and shapes bodies, social behaviors, and life expectations. They approach “heterochrononormativity” as a form of biopolitics that sets narratives of movement and change through rituals such as marriage, childbearing, and death (Freeman 4).4

  • 5 These experiences are also reflected in their works, where we can see bi-racial couples and single (...)

6Feminist queer temporalities would suggest that gender power relations are implemented through temporal regimes embodied as norm. Women Beat writers shook off this normativity by playing off-beat, by untimely writing and by questioning the “heterochrononormativity” installed in that US historical period represented by the early female vocation to the nuclear family. For example, most of them lived independently after leaving their parents’ home. Joyce Johnson and Cowen did not marry and had no children during their Beat period. Di Prima became a single mother and had children from different partners. Hettie Jones was a mother in an inter-racial marriage, developing her vocation as an editor and writer before and during her motherhood. Many of them were polyamorous and Di Prima and Cowen were openly bisexual. In short, they took an unprecedented step towards unknown “life schedules” and “straight lines” of how life was supposed to be led by women (Halberstam and Ahmed in Fjelkestam 116).5

7If “queering” time implies approaching its conceptualization, social timing, and experience from non-normative temporal frameworks, then phenomenological and new materialist studies of gender and time can be situated within the broader field of feminist “queer” temporalities. In what follows, I draw on concepts from these fields—such as lived time, living present, becoming and futurity—to analyze Beat women writers’ own off-beat time in the Beat period and in her poetry.

8Feminist phenomenology has recently turned its attention to the embodied experience of time. Our “lived time” informs the perception of our encounter with the world: “how one lives time is constitutive of the kind of gendered person one becomes” (Burke 112). Simone de Beauvoir set a feminist phenomenological theory of temporality by arguing that the crucial difference between women and men was based on their different social access to transcendence and immanence (structures of human temporality). The immanent time experienced in the endless repetitive tasks of motherhood and housework deprive women from transcendence, which is the temporality of action and transformation that happens in the realms of the public and creativity (Deutscher 329). Women writers in the Beat circle represented a “transitional temporality” between these two paradigms. They transited temporal immanence in childcaring, domesticity, the emotional support for their partners, but also the transcendent time implicit in their writing vocations, or in their embodied experience when participating in public events, pad gatherings, female friendship and editorial work. Mortenson’s study of Beat spontaneous temporality also argues that in many Beat women’s works the line between the street and domestic tempos is constantly blurred (Mortenson 34).

  • 6 For a further study of the feminist implications of countercultural urban geographies see Castelao- (...)
  • 7 Significantly, Grace and Johnson describe the concept of the “art of writing in-between” (19) as wo (...)

9Rejecting the linear time of the road and the stasis of the patriarchal home, bohemian women moved to the thriving temporality of cities. They “queered” space and time in feminist terms by alternatively moving from transcendent to immanent time, from inside the home to the outside urban beat.6 This analysis adds to the identification of women Beats as “transitional,” as Joyce Johnson suggests in her memoir in relation to feminist awareness: “call us transitional—a bridge to the next generation” (Minor xvii).7

10In Cowen’s “Morning Blessing from Elohim” there is a fast oscillation between the inside tempo of the domestic and the outside temporality of the city and the natural world. There is a blurring of the contrast between the human design of time (clock time) and a universal or spiritual time (implied in the Jewish term “Elohim,” God), which makes the flower open, the sunlight appear. Semantic fields foreground the domestic in constant interrelation with the current social time (the parade, the radio). The poem seems to simultaneously express a sense of wonder at the miracle of “now,” an inner search for philosophical answers, and a social critique of chrononormativity: who says when and how something happens? How are dates and hours established?

From
Who
opened back one petal of the lavender crocus
25 ¼ minutes past 7 Feb 2 at the window
all the housework before breakfast
is blasting the wind 26 miles an hour
lightening the blue in the airshaft
carrying the voice through the small
radio in the living room here into
the kitchen along with the clock tick
28 minutes past 7 and parade music
Who bowing graciously grateful to who (16)

11Cowen escapes the confining immanence that inhabits repetition, relating domestic time to a dynamic present. In “Morning Blessing” the fast-flowing tempo of a Beat poetics stretches time between an immediate past and an instant future (the radio’s waves and voice travel in time and space). This durational temporal experience contrasts with the objective and fixed time of the clock and calendar.

12Another useful concept for analyzing Cowen and other bohemian women’s relation to time is the new materialist notion of a “living present” (Walker 47). Time is perceived as a non-chronological continuum where traces of the past and possible futures are enacted and changed in the embodied experience and affective forces of the moment we inhabit. Within a “living present,” the past informs the present always in new ways, while the dynamic present constantly engenders unpredictable futures. Translated in feminist terms, we can understand how traditional gender roles in bohemian women’s works and lives dissolve but also remain in traces that affect and change their experimental chosen lifestyles and daily decisions. A living present is thick with the past of tradition, with the experience of the present, and the multiple future possibilities for women.

13The following poems can be interpreted through this temporal concept. The poetic voices challenge the past tradition of women’s domestic roles of housekeepers and caregivers by freeing themselves from the responsibility of keeping the fridge full for others, and even for themselves: “In the / icebox / one egg / a little light one / Beans too salty / to eat / & empty plastic bags” (84). In the poem “Self,” past, present and future are linked in a continuum and unfolding process where the feeling of identity and the perception of the world are imbricated:

Self
You paper rose
A few months ago
I saw the secret shaft
where spring snow fell
Tonight soggy paper rancid cottage cheese
sour
And that imagined tomorrow?
A woman maybe (96)

14The fragility of the female self (paper rose) is grounded on a temporality where the past (the gender role of domesticity) remains inside the home but is simultaneously transformed in the figure of a speaker that actively engages with the outside and lives in a constantly changing present (tonight). The poetic subject is aware of the possibility of temporal and spatial transition and the impermanence of time (the rancid cheese, the snow falling). It is also aware of an unprecedented future for a female identity that is growing at that moment. A past that sustains the now in new ways and opens to something we cannot know.

15Inhabiting a living time involves the complex process of becoming. It is in the present of encounters (imaginary or real) where changes in becoming (being in process) occur. This being in process is purely temporal and destabilizes categories of identity. Also, becoming as constant transformation entails an unfolding of affects—understood as dynamic forces that move from and among bodies and things. Every encounter and event predispose entities, bodies, and subjects to affect others and be affected, to become and enable “becoming” in others. As we will see in more detail, some of Cowen’s poems represent encounters with domestic animals, plants, fruits, objects or the environment, where the process of being mutually changed develops through the unfolding of affects that evolve in the living present. The poem “Melon,” for example, presents the connection between the poetic subject and a melon across the distance of an airshaft. Both entities are mutually affected, generating intense emotions in the aesthetic experience of the speaker.

Melon (honeydew) on the windowsill (kitchen)
Window open
Reflection in; reflection through open neighbor window
Nearly cried—hurry
Melon ... suspended
….
Out there—
Melon no---eeeeeeeeyah
Get a camera—no
Get a knife
(Honeydew) melon on the kitchen windowsill
Window open
Through the neighbor window is
Tears—hurry
Melon—
In the sunshine— (106)

16We can see the constant change of becoming “different” from second to second, the fruit through the light and the speaker by the unfolding of emotions. Changes in the melon provoke the speaker’s desire to stop time, to control the unstoppable interchange of affect, as artists do, with a camera, with words, or opening the mystery with a knife. The speaker wishes to shorten distance and time, but the poetic language expresses the unpredictable movement and wordless nature of the proliferation and interrelation of affect (onomatopoeias and visual signs). The poetic form reflects a synchronic and unfolding process of transformation for both fruit and speaker throughout the poem. The very setting is transformative and dynamic. Cowen often returns to “airshafts” in her writing: small open patios between buildings that let the light in; an image that joins the inside and outside, domestic and street temporalities.

17The opening force of the “living present” and being in process through encounters (“becoming”) offer interesting perspectives for literary analysis. Both concepts engage with Elizabeth Grosz’s evolutionary theory of life derived from biology, which can be applied to cultural change and explain Cowen’s and women Beat writers’ time disruptions and writing as temporal emergence. In Grosz’s words: “the force of life drives nature (bodies, matter) towards complexity and variation, … it is therefore a force of time,” a force that relies on ruptures and untimely events for life to thrive, what she calls “nicks in time, or instances of dislocation” (in Sellberg 98-100). Following Grosz, time would be a ceaseless becoming where creative change emerges from unexpected and diverging directions. Biological emergence, the force of life as the force of time, is recurrently represented in Cowen’s poetry, as we will analyze later, through the image of crocuses blooming and the metamorphosis of chrysalis, springing from earth and cocoons.

2. Poetic Time and the Temporality of Affects

18In this section, I will approach the temporal dimension of affect and emotions in Cowen’s poetry. “Affects,” from a new materialist philosophical perspective, are incorporeal forces produced by bodies through encounters with other bodies. In phenomenology, cognitive science and cultural theory, affects are interchangeable with emotions. Emotions as temporal phenomena are related to perceptions, to cultural politics, and the way we live our bodies in time. They are incorporated and bodily inscribed from the inside out (from the psyche to the body) and from the outside in (from the socialized body to the self), as argued in Grosz’s corporeal feminism (Volatile Bodies 20).

  • 8 For this purpose, my translation and critical study in Spanish (Dejadme salir, dejadme entrar (Let (...)

19Due to Cowen’s life narrative, attention tends to focus on poems that portray negative emotions—such as fear, melancholy, vulnerability, and depression—as conditions leading toward suicide. My aim is to contrast this affective tendency by focusing on the affirmative emotions of love, compassion, wonder, lucidity, joy, and openness towards beauty and life.8 As Ahmed asserts, emotions have an intentional direction towards openness or closeness that involves a “stance in the world,” which results from an individual embodied experience and from “affective economies of circulation” in society (10). Even in many of the poems marked by fear, grief and madness, Cowen manages to convey a balanced and cohesive sense of temporality through feeling, intellect and reflection—joining body and mind. This is evident in the following poem, which shows a characteristic bipolar oscillation between elated and depressive moods:

Two weeks of the month
I’m half mad & half free
Two weeks of the month
I’m half drown in me

20The fragmentation of mental illness is counteracted here by a self-reflective awareness and the intentionality of form. More than order (although many of Cowen’s poems are rhythmic ballads and clean visual spots on the page), what is achieved, following Deleuze, is a plane of coherence and composition, a field of consistency generated and extracted from the excesses of the chaos of existence and mental illness: “art struggles with chaos, to bring forth a vision that illuminates it [and] renders it sensory” (in Grosz, Chaos 9).

  • 9 Weine published the first study about the relationship between madness, trauma, and creativity in A (...)
  • 10 However, Cowen died at age twenty-eight. Although, she also tried to commit suicide years before.

21Making chaos temporal in writing and poetry can be a healing creative drive to resolve trauma, as Stevan M. Weine has recently argued in relation to Ginsberg.9 In many cases, Cowen’s poems contradict the temporality of depression: the emptiness of a present that is paused between an over dimensional past (regret) and the future (fear). This non-living present unbinds the individual from the world: “the virtual world of inexhaustible potentiality …, and the open future breaks down” (Fielding 92). However, it has been studied that motor and tactile events generate an embodied feeling of forwardness, the possibility of a future through action and projection (Schneider in Fielding 95). Touch enables us to experience a living present, and hope. Cowen recurrently chooses to represent towardness, a desire for connection, through “tactile events,” elements of touch and surface contact, as in this poem, sometimes considered Cowen’s suicide note:10

No love
No compassion
No intelligence
No beauty
No humility
Twenty-seven years is enough

Mother—too late—years of meanness—I’m sorry
Daddy—What happened?
Allen—I’m sorry
Peter—Holy rose youth
Betty—Such a womanly bravery
Keith—Thank you
Joyce—So girl beautiful
Howard—Baby take care
Leo—Open the window & Shalom
Carol—Let it happen

Let me out please—
—Please let me in

  • 11 Johnson remembers that “she did not care about being pretty” (in Grace and Johnson 198). She also m (...)

22The anaphora of negations and the lack of verbs in the first stanza embody a present time closed to the inexhaustible potentiality of life, but the formal composition transforms the lack of hope into rhythm and vibration. The aspect of beauty (mentioned in line four) is relevant, because, as feminist phenomenological studies show, it relates to the emotion of hope, anticipating a future where an affirmative engagement with the world is possible.11

  • 12 These two lines are an allusion to Ginsberg’s early poem “Please Open the Window and Let Me In.”

23The second stanza reflects a counter dynamic to the lack of futurity through the image of connection. The assertive address to others by their proper name, and the visual force of the long dash, which literally connects the loved ones with the poetic subject, represent an openness towards encounter, contact and touch. The last two verses (the back-and-forth movement of a door or window), simultaneously search for belonging and distance, a reversable border that represents the freedom to choose, an intentional action and an affective orientation towards change through motion (maybe suicide).12

24The potentiality involved in forwardness is characteristic of affirmative emotions. Love, from a phenomenology of affects, expands the space of the subject, who is aware of “what it could become in the intensity of its direction towards the other” (Ahmed 126). Cowen’s poems about love express an embodied expansion and the potential of interrelation in everyday situations, and some of them allude directly to Ginsberg.

25The poem below follows the formal experimentation of Beat poetics (in its original lining) and transforms the clarity of vision when being in love into a cosmological force—one whose light is freed from contention. The feeling of openness implied in the concept of “revealing” is repeated throughout the poem almost as a physical unveiling or uncovering. The mystery found behind is a light that provokes wonder at its brightness:

Hidden the light
Revealed
In the
Coming Together
Of Allen & Elise
Revealed
In the
Blasting of the last atom
Revealed
In the
Unknown
Anguish
Of a supernova
Revealed
In the
Ultimate
Fullness of
Nothing
Concealed
How the snow falls

26Grosz’s evolutionary logic of life helps to interpret what seems to be a hyperbolic idealization of love as a leap in life and the emergence of vital unpredictability. The consequences of what is revealed through love’s openness are unexpected, since the force of life, as Grosz suggests, is the temporal force of an ongoing process. If we read here the influence of the postwar fear of the atomic bomb (“the blasting of the last atom”), we can see that the poem is able to turn death and cosmic “anguish” into an explosion of life made possible by love’s motion, which is also reflected in the poem’s sound and the original visual pattern. The dynamic form, as we see in the structured fragmentation of lines as drops falling, puts order into chaos by anchoring it in time: the image of the snow in the last line slows down the explosion of energy grounding it in gravity.

27Cowen’s recurrent image of the snow outside the window, surprisingly falling in spring, awakes wonder in the poetic speaker, who even addresses its personification in “Snow”: “I guess how you fall / Is nobody’s business but / your own” (110). We can also see in “Third day of spring” the representation of a transitional temporality and a spatial dynamic of interconnection between the inside and outside, the domestic, the urban and the natural rhythms: “Third day of spring / Snow falling finer and faster / The neighbor could hang her wash / On telegraph wires // How the snow falls through the air shaft / On third day of spring?”

28Cowen’s repertoire of small animals such as moths or cockroaches, plants, objects and food are particularly rich in its affirmative power and significance. The treatment of living and non-living bodies can be analyzed from the temporality of present becoming, in that, as Daigle says: “the self fluctuates and morphs from one moment to the other, [because] the experience of being with others and being in the presence of the world and objects is deeply transformative” (Daigle 187). The melon in the previous poem (as well as oranges or plums in others), chrysalis, roaches or crocuses, become different through the perception of the poetic voice, both are affected by the other in the encounters. They also affect the poet and the readers by reading and writing, constituting a continuous process of becoming unpredictably a different being.

  • 13 Cowen admired Emily Dickinson and was probably influenced by the deep symbolic meaning of insects i (...)

29In “A Cockroach,” the poetic voice opens to compassion affecting and being affected by the insect. An animal “creeping” also appears in “Sometimes in my dungeon, there comes a crawling thing,” where the rhythmic ballad maternally welcomes the caterpillar: “Somewhere in this dungeon / Something creeping / A bristly caterpillar / A butterfly-to-be / Will it be disappointed / That there’s no day to see?” The speaker worries about the adverse conditions (mirroring the situation of the poetic voice, and even the poet), identifying with the process of metamorphosis.13 In this poem, as in “A Cockroach,” the slowness of the movements, the temporality of care, create a sheltered domestic milieu (even in a dark dungeon) for a dynamic present where transformative encounters between living beings can happen.

A cockroach
Climbed into
My shoe
Away from cold & light
I crept my hand
In
After him

You keep coming back
across my floor
For more?—look—
You’ve lost an antenna

30The cockroach’s exoskeletal nature and inner viscosity add meaning to the poem in terms of boundaries and vulnerability. The body’s protection, anticipating possible harm, which is the characteristic temporality of fear, contrasts here with the quality of viscosity. Viscosity implies a flexible resistance ready for the unpredictable complexity of interactions with others and the world (Daigle 188). The cockroach is vulnerable and resistant at the same time, due to the flexibility of viscosity and the protection of the exoskeleton, able to adapt to the most hostile conditions. The speaker in the poem, and Cowen in her New York apartment, may not only identify with and feel compassion for the rejected insect, but may also welcome being affected by its resilience in the encounter, through a mutual transformation of becoming “different.”

31Moths and crocuses represent bodily changes through closeness and aperture, slowness and emergence, new beginnings in blooms and cocoons. The second stanza of “Sometimes in my dungeon, there comes a crawling thing” suggests that the creeping caterpillar may become a moth, following Cowen’s preference for unwanted animals, instead of a majestic butterfly in search of the daylight: “If it becomes a moth? / Such a dreary sight / There’s nothing but the dungeon walls / And I’m the only light.” Transformation is alluded here also in the poetic speaker as “light.” Moths as symbols of death represent reaching what is beyond and relate to brightness and vision. Ecologically, moths are responsible for most urban pollination, and they approach light (the poetic speaker) as a way to break from entanglement in the night (the dungeon walls) guided by a brightness that promises an escape path. The speaker facilitates this breakthrough, as the moth, in another poem, provides comfort and transformation towards vision (or death):

Thank you for the cool stream of air
You make with your grey wings
Six inches away from my pinky finger
Little moth
Death
Behind my eyes I see you
a butterfly of blue light.

32Cowen also uses the image of “crocuses” in several poems. The dynamic of aperture and expansion in spring bulbs could be analogous to the process of growth in the uterus: the bulb remains latent underground getting nutrients until germination. In “Oh sweet lavender petal crocus—mother,” the poem compares the plant’s capacity to protect and evolve (the bulb, the petals closed) with the ability to be born and grow within the womb. The poetic voice that addresses the mother infers also the active latency and slowness necessary in the process of change before hatching, blooming, or being born.

Oh sweet lavender petal crocus—mother
How could you know when I grew in you
All veins & nerves, red in the face
I’m looking at a crocus—lavender & white
one petal cupped, four petals raised
I see ‘Grant me’
What would a crocus want—water
Earth around its roots
Air & light around its petals
Petals guarding its yellow sex

33The speaker projects care, empathy and compassion towards the needs of another being. Affect is represented in the engagement of the body in the encounter (senses, perception, emotion), and in the speaker’s full attention as receiver, in the same way as the flower also engages with the sun’s light.

  • 14 Another approach to moments of illumination is spirituality and mysticism. The importance of Asian (...)

34Lucidity and vision in Cowen’s poems relate to a tempo of emergence. They occur through perceptual dynamics and embodied engagement, in the process of mutual change when two bodies (living or non-living) encounter and affect each other. Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty suggests that “Matter [living and non-living bodies] induces in life, in consciousness, a kind of elevation of itself to the realm of indeterminate creativity …. From the time [the object of intense perception] enters our life, it begins to unfold its implicit being, which is revealed to itself through us” (in Grosz, Time Travels 122).14 Moments of merging (with the melon, the moth, the roach, or the crocus) can also be read from the temporality of wonder. Wonder is a primary emotion of joy and care at the encounter with things and others as if for the first time. Even though Cowen probably saw roaches frequently (living mostly in poor apartments), her wonder translates into a bodily disposition towards the joy of writing, an openness to receive (wonder) and give (love). The roach is seen, as if for the first time, full of possibilities that unfold also for us when reading. Wonder, as a key element in Cowen’s emotional universe, foregrounds the experience of a thick living present, where the ordinary, which generally resists being fully perceived, becomes extraordinary and intensively felt. According to Ahmed, “wonder expands our field of vision and touch, [it] energizes the hope for transformation. The body opens as the world opens up before it” (Ahmed 179,181). The previous poems see beyond a simple moth, sustain a hope for connection, and reveal a desire towards proximity and touch (the offering of the hand to the cockroach, the pinky finger close to the moth’s wings).

3. Unbinding Narratives and the Present of Becoming

35Joyce Johnson’s words in the opening quote to this article suggest that Cowen was “not in the right time.” She also added that “the world treated Cowen very cruelly because she was such an odd girl. She didn’t care about being pretty. She was bright and eccentric” (in Grace and Johnson 198). The term “untimeliness” is key in queer temporalities, relating to the sense of something being out of time, anachronistic, and unfitting within normative temporal expectations (McCallum 3). Johnson’s remarks suggest that Cowen was untimely, not belonging to her time and the expectations for women outside and inside the Beat milieu.

36If belonging, according to Freeman, is a matter of timing, following the established times for achieving and producing in life (4), Cowen inhabited a narrative of failure. Not only due to her lack of participation in a female heterochrononormative progress towards a reproductive futurism (family, children), but also because death by suicide is an interruption of chronological fulfillment. An untimely event that impregnated her invisible presence with the negative affects of lack, grief, and loss, and made her narrative permanently incomplete.

37In chrononormative systems, to “become someone” is based on productivity and the ability to narrate one’s life (Freeman 2010, 5). For this, as Paul Ricoeur states, you need a sustainable integration of events, where contingencies unexpectedly alter their tempo and direction (in Halsema 115). Cowen did not have the chance, as other women writers did, to tell her version of the story, to narrate her own life’s contingencies decades later. More so, what we know about her is constructed as discontinuous appearances within others’ stories, fragmented pieces that need fictional stitches. We read a desire to reconstruct a narrative identity and a whole body in the poem “I took the skin of corpses,” where Cowen’s speaker takes a cadaver’s part in each stanza to create a better version of herself: “I robbed the eyes of corpses / So I could face the sun / But all the days had cloudy skies / And I had lost my own” (33). The poetic voice is simultaneously a female Frankenstein and her monster, both trying to build up an unfragmented being, but failing to do so.

  • 15 Johnson’s memoir tells how Lucien Carr made fun of Cowen by nicknaming her “ellipse or eclipse” (Jo (...)

38Despite an untimely life and death, and scattered representations by others, a master narrative has been consolidated. Cowen’s mental problems—which deserve a further study as cultural outcomes of patriarchal structures and institutional repression—have been absorbed within the myth of the female suicidal poet. The cult of madness in the Beat politics of emotions did not apply to women in the same way. Cowen was stigmatized through the silencing of her voice (the right for acknowledged expression) and through her invisibilization (her right to occupy time and space). These forces contributed to her “eclipsed” presence in Beat literary and cultural history.15 Psychosocial disability and suicide have helped to disembody Cowen as woman and writer, and to give her an unfitting body in time and space. As Freeman suggests, rightly temporalized bodies somatize belonging, “while not fitting in feels both like having the wrong body and like living in a different time zone” (172). Many of Cowen’s poems express a body estrangement from an intellectual distance, even a heuristic process of discernment about the split between body and mind that seems to reach a lucid awareness, not only of the dissociation triggered by psychological disorders: “Body, why that funny feeling—dread / Of what— / Death? Death so often desired? / ‘Death of mind’—peace—not the dissolution into top soil” (9); but also, of the feminine inner division of mind and body due to social pressure: “The body is a humble thing / Made of death & water / The fashion is to dress it plain / And use the mind for border” (25).

39Narratives about Cowen are created within others’ stories. Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters is an exception to the usual focus on the tragic side of Cowen’s life, for example in Leo Skir’s “Elise Cowen: A Brief Memoir of the Fifties” (1967). In Minor Characters we gain insight into Cowen’s personality, creative drive, existential struggles, lifestyle, love stories, and eventual drug abuse. Joyce Johnson presents Cowen as a central figure and best friend in this memoir of her Beat years. The book makes Cowen visible and embodied—as a singular and independent brave woman—until her collapse at the turn of the decade.

  • 16 A thorough study of Ginsberg and Naomi is developed by Weine. Johnson cleverly suggests: “Perhaps i (...)

40Even though Ginsberg has a key role in Cowen’s narrative, we don’t find many allusions to her in his work. Together with Carr, he described her poetry in City Lights Journal’s posthumous publication as having “the quality of alert solitude” (178). Learning about her death in India, he wrote a poem as a journal entry that says: “the ghost of Elise / running in panic under Bellvue [sic] / Gothic arches and dragged forth / into the daylight by her family / the police” (in Trigilio xxvi). Cowen helped Ginsberg to edit Kaddish; after reading it she wisely advised him to work on the unresolved relationship with his mother.16

41Unbinding Cowen from the fictional temporality of myth (i.e. tragic death, crazy female poet) requires stepping out of the chrononormative linearity of life narratives that remain fixed to the end of the timeline. Suicidal women poets are generally regarded from the perspective of their death, undermining the vital process of becoming writers. In this respect, Hanna Arendt’s philosophy of natality challenges Western teleological interest for death as a defining temporality of human existence (Vasterling 141). Our capacity to “begin” comes from the constitutive experience of being born; it is a creative possibility constantly realized in our encounter with others and through expression. Cowen’s preference for chrysalis and bulbs that represent transformative processes of new beginnings or rebirth counteracts a narrative of death and “ending.”

  • 17 An idea that Freeman further develops as “erotohistoriography” in Time Binds 95-136.

42I suggest binding Cowen to time by “dislodging her text from [chrononormative] temporal belonging” (McBean 150), foregrounding the dynamic present of becoming in her poems and the living present unfolded in the events of reading and writing. The embodied act of writing and the bodily engagement in reading can create other narratives through the proliferation of affects and the process of becoming different. I would like to follow an affirmative approach to building narrative and historical time (temporal binding) through the affective and enjoyable present of bodies (the body of and in Cowen’s poems, our reading bodies) and the pleasure of interaction, based on the belief that “bodily acts unbind time and change tempos” (Freeman, “Coda”).17 Engaging Cowen’s work (any work) then, is an opening of the temporal. An ethics of attentive reading and affective involvement can make Cowen justice, opening other possibilities for a time and space where she can hold an embodied presence and authorship. If all art carries the force of the future (Deleuze in Grosz, Chaos 87), Cowen’s time of her own is still in the making.

4. A Room and a Table

43The article aimed to connect Cowen not so much with Woolf’s feminist metaphor of a room as “a time of one’s own” (the need for a room of uninterrupted time for women, a room/time in literary history), but with the temporality of the vibrant and crowded table that Johnson describes in Minor Characters. She presents a “time of her own” by being in the right place at the right moment around that table in a New York Beat gathering:

I see the girl Joyce Glassman, twenty-two, with her hair hanging down below her shoulders, all in black like Masha in The Seagull, [but] she is not mourning for her life. How could she have been, with her seat at the table in the exact center of the universe, that midnight place where so much is converging, the only place in America that’s alive? As a female, she is not quite part of this convergence. (Johnson, Minor 261)

44Within this Beat scene of intellect and artistry (a temporality of transcendence where “men, always the men” raised their voice), Johnson, Cowen, and other women remained untimely present at the thriving table, representing an unexpected beat in the Beat milieu which they passionately engaged with their potential of becoming. Encounters among them and the bohemian community proliferated new affects, enabling the emergence of difference in the thick living present they inhabited: while editing and writing, in the street, in female friends’ gatherings, in Beat pads, while mothering. Past, present and future unfolded at Johnson’s table: the traces of a past of feminine expectations cohabited with the opening to an unexpected and creative change. As for other women writers, Cowen’s life and unknown work in the early Beat movement represented a nick in time where feminist and literary divergencies could emerge. They will continue emerging each time we read and study her/their work now and in the future.

Top of page

Bibliography

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh UP, 2004.

Burke, Megan. “Gender as Lived Time: Reading The Second Sex for a Feminist Phenomenology of Temporality.” Hypatia, vol. 33, no. 1, 2008, pp. 111-127.

Castelao-Gómez, Isabel and Natalia Carbajosa. Female Beatness: Mujeres, género y poesía en la Generación Beat. Universidad de Valencia, 2019.

Castelao-Gómez, Isabel. “Beat women poets and writers: countercultural urban geographies and feminist avant-garde poetics.” Journal of English Studies, vol. 14, 2016, pp. 47-72.

Cowen, Elise. Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments. Tony Trigilio, edition and introduction, Ahsatah Press, 2014.

---. Dejadme salir, dejadme entrar (Let me out, let me in). Isabel Castelao-Gómez, edition and translation, Torremozas Ediciones, 2023.

Daigle, Christine. “Trans-Subjectivity / Trans-Objectivity.” Time in Feminist Phenomenology, edited by Christina Schües et.al., Indiana UP, 2011, pp. 183-198.

Deutscher, Penelope. “Repetition Facility: Beauvoir on Women’s Time.” Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 21, no. 51, 2006, pp. 327-342.

Fielding, Helen, and Dorothea Olkowski, editors. Feminist Phenomenology Futures. Indiana UP, 2017.

Fielding, Helen. “Open Future, Regaining Possibility.” Feminist Phenomenology Futures. Indiana UP, 2017, edited by Helen Fielding and Dorothea Olkowski, Indiana UP, 2017, pp. 91-106.

Fjelkestam, Kristina. “Does Time have a Gender? Queer Temporality, Anachronism and the Desire for the Past.” The Ethos of History: Time and Responsibility, edited by S. Helgesson and J. Svenungsson, Berghahn, 2018, pp. 112-124.

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke UP, 2010.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. 1963. Penguin, 2010.

Ginsberg, Allen and Lucien Carr. “Some Thoughts about Elise Cowen.” City Lights Journal, no. 2, 1964, p. 178.

Grace, Nancy and Ronna Johnson. Breaking the Rule of Cool. Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers. UP of Mississippi, 2004.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. Columbia UP, 2008.

---. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Duke UP, 2005.

---. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Indiana UP, 1994.

Halsema, Annemie. “The Time of the Self: A Feminist Reflection on Ricoeur’s Notion of Narrative Identity.” Time in Feminist Phenomenology, edited by Christina Schües et.al., Indiana UP, 2011, pp. 109-131.

Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters. A Beat Memoir. Methuen, 2006.

---. Interview with the author. New York, 5-21 October, 2024.

Johnson, Ronna, and Nancy Grace, editors. Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation. Rutgers UP, 2002.

Knight, Brenda. Women of the Beat Generation. Conari Press, 1996.

Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time.” The Portable Kristeva, edited by Kelly Oliver, Columbia UP, 1997, pp. 349-369.

McBean, Sam. Feminism’s Queer Temporalities. Routledge, 2016.

McCallum, E. L., and Mikko Tuhkanen, eds. Queer Times, Queer Becomings. State U of New York P, 2011.

Mortenson, Erik. Capturing the Beat Moment. Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence. Southern Illinois UP, 2011.

New York World-Telegram February 27, 1962, p. 2.

Peabody, Richard, ed. A Different Beat: Writing by Women of the Beat Generation. High Risk Books, 1997.

Schües, Christina, et.al., editors. Time in Feminist Phenomenology. Indiana UP, 2011.

Sellberg, Karin. “The ‘Turns’ of Feminist Time: Evolutionary Logic, Life and Renewal in ‘New Materialist’ Feminist Philosophy.” Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 34, no. 99, 2019, pp. 93-106.

Skir, Leo. “Elise Cowen: A Brief Memoir of the Fifties.” Evergreen Review, vol.11, no. 48, 1967.

Trigilio, Tony. “Introduction.” Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments, edited by Tony Trigilio, Ahsatah Press, 2014, pp. xiii-xxviii.

---. “Who Writes? Reading Elise Cowen's Poetry.” Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation, edited by Ronna Johnson and Nancy Grace, Rutgers UP, 2002, pp. 119-140.

Vasterling, Veronica. “Contingency, Newness, and Freedom: Arendt’s Recovery of the Temporal Condition of Politics.” Time in Feminist Phenomenology, edited by Christina Schües et.al., Indiana UP, 2011, pp. 135-148.

Walker, Rachel Loewen. “The Living Present as Materialist Feminist Temporality.” Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 25, no.1, 2014, pp. 46-60

Weine, Stevan. Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness. Fordham UP, 2023.

Top of page

Notes

1 I refer throughout the article to the writers of this second generation.

2 Joyce Johnson remembers her best friend as a generous person, brilliant intellectual, good listener and roommate, adventurous, self-taught litterateur, and with no dysfunctional mental issues except periodical depressions (Interview with author, 2024). We lack psychiatric records to ascertain a diagnosis, but mental deterioration and severe paranoia at the end of her life are documented by Johnson and Skir.

3 Other contributors are Jennie Skirl, A. Robert Lee, Polina MacKay, Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, or Mary Paniccia Carden. Female Beatness is the first critical monograph about these writers for Spanish-speaking readers.

4 “Queer temporalities” originally focused on queer collectives, but the implementation of time structures on female bodies throughout history makes this theory extremely useful for feminism.

5 These experiences are also reflected in their works, where we can see bi-racial couples and single motherhood, open relationships, bisexuality, abortions, independent living in the city, even though they still negotiated with heterosexual expectations of marriage and romantic attachment. If compared with Betty Fridan’s study of white middle-class gender stereotypes in 50s US, bohemian women were real time shakers, proto-feminists that anticipated second wave feminism.

6 For a further study of the feminist implications of countercultural urban geographies see Castelao-Gómez.

7 Significantly, Grace and Johnson describe the concept of the “art of writing in-between” (19) as women Beat writers’ transit between hegemonic Beat gender and aesthetic norms and the subversions triggered by female bohemian identities, topics, and styles.

8 For this purpose, my translation and critical study in Spanish (Dejadme salir, dejadme entrar (Let me out, let me in)) try to collect and approach Cowen’s poems in three sections that modulate affects towards affirmation: the first one gathers and studies the poems about madness and depression; the second one, about compassion and lucidity; and the final section, about love, sexuality, and joy.

9 Weine published the first study about the relationship between madness, trauma, and creativity in Allen Ginsberg from a psychiatric and literary perspective.

10 However, Cowen died at age twenty-eight. Although, she also tried to commit suicide years before.

11 Johnson remembers that “she did not care about being pretty” (in Grace and Johnson 198). She also mentions in her memoir an oven accident where Cowen burnt her forehead as a teenager, leaving a permanent scar. Cowen’s non-feminine appearance was cruelly criticized by her family (Johnson 55).

12 These two lines are an allusion to Ginsberg’s early poem “Please Open the Window and Let Me In.”

13 Cowen admired Emily Dickinson and was probably influenced by the deep symbolic meaning of insects in her poetry and her compassion for other living beings in a domestic environment. Dickinson’s “bees” are directly represented in the poem “Emily.”

14 Another approach to moments of illumination is spirituality and mysticism. The importance of Asian religions for Cowen is foregrounded by Trigilio.

15 Johnson’s memoir tells how Lucien Carr made fun of Cowen by nicknaming her “ellipse or eclipse” (Johnson 125). Trigilio’s article, “Who Writes? Reading Elise Cowen’s Poetry,” studies how being a satellite figure around Ginsberg eclipsed her literary authority.

16 A thorough study of Ginsberg and Naomi is developed by Weine. Johnson cleverly suggests: “Perhaps in Elise he sees Naomi. ‘I’ve always been attracted to intellectual madwomen,’ he confesses in his journal, probably including Elise in that category” (Johnson 76).

17 An idea that Freeman further develops as “erotohistoriography” in Time Binds 95-136.

Top of page

References

Electronic reference

Isabel Castelao-Gómez, A Time of Her Own: Elise Cowen’s TemporalitiesEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 20-4 | 2025, Online since 07 December 2025, connection on 10 March 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/25642; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15oy7

Top of page

About the author

Isabel Castelao-Gómez

Dr. Isabel Castelao-Gómez teaches at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED). Her work focuses on the relation between gender and experimental writing, with a particular interest in the contributions of female authors to avant-garde movements and in the way poetic experimentation connects with women’s experiences. She has published articles and translated into Spanish the avant-garde writer Mina Loy. In recent years, she has been studying the women writers of the Beat generation and has edited and translated Beat poet Elise Cowen.She co-authored Female Beatness: mujeres, género y poesía en la generación Beat, which has received a Research Award. She is also a published poet, dancer, and mother of two.

Top of page

Copyright

CC-BY-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

Top of page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search