It’s 1954, and a woman sits alone in front of a typewriter in a Brooklyn boarding house. There’s a half-finished bottle of cheap red wine next to her, and the only other furniture in the room is an unmade bed with dirty sheets. It’s the land lady’s responsibility to provide clean sheets, but it’s the woman’s responsibility to pay the rent on time, so she chooses her battles carefully. She’s surrounded by books stolen from libraries across the city (the only moral way to get books, she believes.) She takes a swig of wine before she leans forward to type.
Someone I could kiss
Has left his, her
.......tracks
.......A memory
.......Heavy as winter breathing
.......in the snow
This is Elise Nada Cowen. Today she is most famous for being Alan Ginsberg’s experiment in heterosexuality, and the typist of his poem “Kaddish.” Beat scholars place her as the footnote in the Legend of Ginsberg: a devoted follower of the poet who lived in his intellectual shadow. Others have written her as a tragic-women-poet figure (she suffered from mental illness most of her life, and committed suicide at the age of 27.) But there is more to her story than that. Her surviving poetry shows a unique perspective on the rigid cultural conformity of the 1950s and also the fringe artistic community of the Beat Generation.
http://the-toast.net/2014/04/24/elise-cowen-and-the-female-beat-poets/view-all/
Someone I could kiss
Has left his, her
.......tracks
.......A memory
.......Heavy as winter breathing
.......in the snow
This is Elise Nada Cowen. Today she is most famous for being Alan Ginsberg’s experiment in heterosexuality, and the typist of his poem “Kaddish.” Beat scholars place her as the footnote in the Legend of Ginsberg: a devoted follower of the poet who lived in his intellectual shadow. Others have written her as a tragic-women-poet figure (she suffered from mental illness most of her life, and committed suicide at the age of 27.) But there is more to her story than that. Her surviving poetry shows a unique perspective on the rigid cultural conformity of the 1950s and also the fringe artistic community of the Beat Generation.
http://the-toast.net/2014/04/24/elise-cowen-and-the-female-beat-poets/view-all/
