Elise Cowen - Biography

Elise Nada Cowen (1933 – February 1, 1962, Washington Heights, Manhattan) was an American poet. She was part of the Beat generation, and was close to Allen Ginsberg, one of the movement's leading figures.

Background

Born to a middle class Jewish family in Washington Heights, New York, Cowen wrote poetry from a young age, influenced by the works of Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas.

While attending Barnard College in the early 1950s, she became friends with Joyce Johnson (at the time, Joyce Glassman). It was during this period that she was first introduced to Ginsberg by philosophy professor Donald Cook. The two discovered a mutual acquaintance in Carl Solomon, whom they had both met while spending time separately in a mental hospital. A romantic involvement followed in the spring and summer of 1953. However, it was during this time that Ginsberg began to embrace his homosexuality, and the relationship gradually dissolved. Despite this, Cowen remained emotionally attached to Ginsberg for the rest of her life.

In February 1956, she and her lover Sheila moved into an apartment with Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. At the time Cowen had a job as a typist. She was fired and was removed from the office by police officers who beat her. When her father came to pick her up at the police station, he warned her, "If your mother ever hears of this it will kill her." She then moved to San Francisco, attracted by its growing Beat scene. While in San Francisco, Cowen became pregnant and was forced to undergo a hysterectomy during a late-stage abortion. She returned to New York, and after another trip to California, she relocated to live in Manhattan.

Death and posthumous publication

A life-long depressive, Cowen began to be afflicted by increasingly severe psychological breakdowns, eventually being admitted to Bellevue Hospital in order to obtain treatment for hepatitis and psychosis. She checked herself out against doctors' orders and returned to her parents' apartment on Bennett Avenue under the guise that she was going to go on vacation with her parents to Miami Beach. At her parents' home she committed suicide, jumping through the locked living room window and falling seven stories to the ground.

After her death, her parents destroyed the bulk of her writings. However, Leo Skir, a friend, had 83 of her poems in his possession at the time of her death, and saw to the publication of several in prominent literary journals of the mid-1960s. A short biography and several of her works are included in Women of the Beat Generation: Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution, edited by Brenda Knight. Several of her poems also appear in A Different Beat: Writing by Women of the Beat Generation, edited by Richard Peabody. Cowen features prominently in Minor Characters, by Joyce Johnson.