Vscorpiozine's Blog

Elise Cowen: The Beat Generation’s Mystery Woman November 27, 2023

Elise Cowen is perhaps the best-kept secret of the Beat era. A few articles about her appeared on various websites around 2016, and internet searches offer nothing else but scant mentions – a Spanish language video here, an academic discussion there.

Cowen is usually mentioned only for her association with Allen Ginsberg. She typed the manuscript for Kaddish and dated him in 1953, shortly before he met Peter Orlovsky. The only pics available online of Cowen with another person show her posing with a shirtless Ginsberg. After her affair with Ginsberg ended, she lived with a lesbian lover, but never really lost her feelings for him.

But in her own “minor character” way, Cowen, (who was friends with Beat poet/author Joyce Johnson), explored sex, drugs, rebellion – and Emily Dickinson – in her poetry. While Jack Kerouac appeared on the Steve Allen show, and Ginsberg’s work started a censorship battle, female Beats were relegated to the background in the ‘50s and early ‘60s.  

Elise Nada Cowen was born in Washington Heights, Manhattan, in 1933. She struggled with mental illness for most of her short life, her self-confidence all but destroyed after a childhood accident. Her family didn’t understand her, and grew tired of dealing with her strange behavior.  (Getting arrested after insisting an ex-employer tell her why they fired her, for example.) Elise attended Barnard College, where she entered a relationship with one of her male professors. This relationship led her to her association with Ginsberg and put her on the periphery of the Beat movement.

A temporary escape to San Francisco proved disastrous, and Cowen returned to New York, depressed and withdrawn. Her parents admitted her to Bellevue’s psychiatric ward.  

Shortly after her release from Bellevue, Elise committed suicide by jumping out of a window at her parents’ home in 1962. She was 29 years old. After her death, her family destroyed the journals and poems in their possession. Luckily, a friend of Cowen’s kept some of her poetry, which was later published in literary journals.

Would Cowen have survived and perhaps prospered in another decade? Surely, her poetry would have gotten more attention in the underground scene of the ‘70s or 80s, or during the more mainstream acceptance of lesbian and feminist literature from the ‘90s through the present day. Her struggles with mental illness could have been treated more efficiently, and maybe she wouldn’t have been at the mercy of her family in that regard.

Even the publication of “Poems and Fragments”, featuring Cowen’s few available poems, met with a precarious fate. Ahsahta Press, which published the collection in 2014, shut down in 2019. A few copies of the book are available on Amazon for prices ranging from $199 to $952.

The University of Pennsylvania Writing Department has more info about Cowen here.