Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments

“With Elise’s Cowen’s struggling life cut short by her own hand we miss a poet’s further reach to heaven. But here we have astonishing devotion and skill in the careful writing she leaves behind, sometimes awkward but tender, forceful. Her homage and broken heart for Ginsberg who mentored her we sense was still a grounding, a raison d’etre for this poetry. And we meet the broken heart inside her gestures, invoking coming to death with a ‘passage through the white cabbages.’ It’s a feminine Deity speaking, thrumming with emotion on the simple page like a blank sky, waiting sky of hope and fear, bouncy or cloudy. Modern Art as George Oppen says, begins with a determination to find the images and these things become the ‘meaning and color of our lives.’ We see and feel the ‘things’ of Cowen. The invocation of flowers, and the frequent devilish cockroach down below, as aspiration hovers above. Emily Dickinson is also a model for a poetics of attention: Heaven, Earth, Human. Editor Tony Trigilio has done an excellent job of supplementing with notes, other versions, and fine Introduction. Another treasure for the Beat Garden.” —Anne Waldman Elise Cowen was a formidable poet who killed herself in 1962 at age 28. This book, drawn from her "lone surviving notebook" and meticulously edited by Tony Trigilio, is all we have of her life's work. Cowen was a Beat poet, a surrealist, bisexual and her own brand of feminist. Her poems vibrate with humanism, anger, rebellion, absolute candor, vulnerability, a seeking spirit and fierce yearning. She's in conversation with cockroaches, death, Allen Ginsberg (an intimate friend), God, New York city, the human body, and her demons. She was never afraid to be strange, and her poems' strangeness is fused to their beauty. Influenced by both Ginsberg and Emily Dickinson, she's a visionary unfettering herself. She was a sensitive sensualist, and I adore her poems' bold carnality. Her early death and the subsequent destruction of most of her work represents a substantial loss to poetry. Thank you, Tony Trigilio, for rescuing her poems from oblivion. —Amy Gerstler About the Author Elise Cowen (1933-1962) was born and lived most of her life in New York City. While a student at Barnard College, she was introduced to members of the Beat Generation. Her personal and artistic relationship with Allen Ginsberg became one of the most important relationships in her life. Influenced by the work of Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas, among others, her poems have appeared posthumously in City Lights Journal; El Corno Emplumado; Court Green; Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts; The Ladder; Things; and in the anthologies Women of the Beat Generation (ed. Brenda Knight) and A Different Beat (ed. Richard Peabody). Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments is the first book to collect all the work from her only surviving notebook. About the Editor Tony Trigilio’s recent books of poetry and prose are The Punishment Book (BlazeVOX [books], 2024), the fourth installment in his multivolume cross-genre project, The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood); Craft: A Memoir (Marsh Hawk Press, 2023); and Proof Something Happened, selected by Susan Howe as the winner of the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize (2021). A volume of his selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in Guatemala in 2018 by Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). He is the author of Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) and he co-edited, with Erik Mortenson, the essay collection The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation (Clemson University Press/Liverpool University Press, 2023). He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. Read more