A Spatiotemporal Collage Aesthetic: Poets and Poetry in Siri Hustvedt's Memories of the Future.

Memories of the Future (Book : Hustvedt); Poetry (Literary form); Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von, 1874-1927; American literature; American authors

In the structurally and thematically elaborate novel Memories of the Future (2019), Siri Hustvedt foregrounds the relationship between poetry and the novel. Two poets stand out as especially important to matters of plot, theme, and narrative: the modernist avant-garde poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and the New York School poet John Ashbery. These poets belong to different, but similarly pivotal moments in the evolution of American literature, one being a prescient—now recognized as iconic—modernist and the other an established, leading postmodernist. Despite their many differences, their output within poetry and the arts point to a collage aesthetics that provides a new way of probing the relationship between poetry and prose, as well as to a focus on the Bakhtinian notions of dialogism, polyphony, and voice, which inform the novel's structure and themes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]