Lorine Niedecker, Henri Bergson and the Poetics of Temporal Flow

Bazin, Victoria (2012) Lorine Niedecker, Henri Bergson and the Poetics of Temporal Flow. Journal of American Studies, 46 (4). pp. 977-996. ISSN 0021-8758

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021875811001976

Abstract

While Niedecker's “life by water” is the subject of many of her poems, reflecting the experience of living on the flood-prone island of Black Hawk, Wisconsin, the water imagery that saturates many of her poems also becomes a way of reflecting upon time as it is experienced, of consciousness as process, of subjectivity as something pulled along by a temporal stream. The poetics of temporal flow suggests Niedecker's interest in exploring forms of experience that fall outside conscious attention and that point to her affinity with the modernist philosopher of time, Henri Bergson, whose Creative Evolution she read in 1955. This paper examines some of the short, concise poems Niedecker wrote in the 1950s, together with the later, looser-limbed poems such as “Paean to Place” where she turns away from the objectivist principles of com pression in order to produce fluid, malleable poems commensurate with the flow of experience.

Item Type: Article
Subjects: T700 American studies
Department: Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Humanities
Depositing User: Dr Victoria Bazin
Date Deposited: 11 May 2012 14:46
Last Modified: 17 Dec 2023 12:46
URI: https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/6973

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