By Isabel Castelao-Gómez, Feb. 26, 2024
Prof. Tony Trigilio teaches English and Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago and is a renowned scholar of the Beat Generation. His books include The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation, coedited with Erik Mortenson (Clemson UP/Liverpool UP, 2023), Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics (Southern Illinois UP, 2012), and “Strange Prophecies Anew”: Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2000). He is also a writer and a poet, having published Craft: A Memoir (Marsh Hawk Press, 2023) and Proof Something Happened (Marsh Hawk, 2021), selected by Susan Howe as the winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. He also co-founded and co-edited the poetry journal Court Green, where he first published poet Elise Cowen in 2012. His edited collection of Elise Cowen’s poetry published in 2014, Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta Press), was a welcome surprise and an exhaustive research work on Cowen’s manuscripts. This work has become the primary source for anyone interested in reading this controversial and neglected Beat woman poet and has contributed to make her work accessible and alive for Beat scholarship. It is an honor for me to conduct this written interview with Prof. Trigilio to talk about his work on Elise Cowen.
Isabel Castelao-Gómez is Associate Professor at the Spanish National University of Distance Education (UNED). Her books include Female Beatness: mujeres, género y poesía en la Generación Beat (Universidad de Valencia, 2019; Javier Coy Research Award 2021); translations and critical editions: Elise Cowen. Dejadme salir, dejadme entrar. Let me out, let me in (Torremozas Ediciones, 2023) y Mina Loy. Breve Baedeker Lunar (Torremozas Ediciones, 2009, 2021); two poetry books: Abril (and the cruellest months) (Ya lo Dijo Casimiro Parker, 2022), Cartas desde Tebas (Torremozas Ediciones, 2010), the chapbook Antípodas (Las Hojas del Baobab, 2023), and has been included in the anthologies Voces Nuevas (Torremozas, 2005) and Hey, Jack Kerouac: la huella Beat en la poesía en lengua española (Garvm, 2022).
IC: Dear Prof. Trigilio, first of all let me thank you for generously agreeing to this interview. Even though your research includes other aspects of the Beat Generation, especially Allen Ginsberg’s work, I would like to center mainly on your study of Elise Cowen. I have been studying this poet for a while to translate her into Spanish and I am indebted to the work you did recovering Cowen’s manuscript from the shadows and thankful for giving us the opportunity to read and enjoy her poetry. In retrospect, how do you feel about this early work of yours about Cowen, and how do you remember the undertaking of this project?
TT: Thank you for your kind words, Isabel. And my thanks, too, for your terrific Spanish translation of Cowen’s work, Dejadme Salir, Dejadme Entrar (Let Me Out, Let Me In). I’m grateful that I was able to recover Cowen’s manuscript of poems in Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments, and, most of all, grateful that this book could help build an audience for her work that she has deserved in the more than a half-century since she died. When I undertook the project, I had two primary goals: first, my hope was that general readers would feel inspired by her work to learn more about her life and her artistic practice; second, I hoped that, for scholars, the book would open new avenues of inquiry for studying Beat Generation writing, postwar twentieth-century U.S. poetics, and postwar feminism. I’m delighted to see how important the book has become for general readers and for scholars. When I started the project, though, I was just hoping to edit it well enough—and lightly enough—that readers would appreciate her poems as much as I did.
IC: How did you get to know Elise Cowen and how did your interest in finding out more about her start?
TT: I’m indebted, foremost, to Ronna C. Johnson and Nancy M. Grace, two scholars who pioneered the study of Beat Women writers. Back in the mid-1990s, when I was finishing my Ph.D. at Northeastern University in Boston, Ronna and Nancy accepted a paper of mine on Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” for the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) Conference. A few years later, in 1998, they both asked me if I’d be interested in contributing a paper on Elise Cowen for a panel they were organizing on Beat Women writers for the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference. As exciting as it was to research Cowen’s work for our 1998 MLA panel, I also was a bit intimidated by it because so little information was available on her life and work. I met Leo Skir at the MLA conference, the person who, thankfully, had saved Cowen’s poems when her parents’ neighbors had wanted to destroy them all. We had a great lunch meeting, and he later attended our panel. Shortly after that conference, Ronna and Nancy invited me to expand the conference paper into an essay for their critical anthology, Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation, which would be published by Rutgers University Press in 2002. That essay, titled “Who Writes? Reading Elise Cowen’s Poetry,” went through many revisions based on Ronna and Nancy’s astute editorial commentary—it became a stronger essay because of their editorial insights. For several years afterward, I kept in the back of my mind the idea that I’d edit a collection of her work. Back in 1998, Skir had told me he was going to find a publisher for her poems, and I offered assistance if he needed a hand. But he never followed through, and when I had the opportunity to start working on the book, in 2009, I felt that I had to act on it. Cowen’s work had been buried for forty-seven years at that point, and I felt like it might never see the light of day if someone didn’t start trying to find a publisher for it.
IC: Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments shows a deep study of the manuscripts. What would you highlight about this process? I am particularly curious about the criteria you took to organize the poems.
TT: I wanted to introduce new audiences to Cowen’s work, so at the most basic, fundamental level, I wanted the form and content of the poems to resemble as closely as possible how they appear in her notebook. But I also wanted to the volume to highlight Cowen’s writing process. For years, she’d been relegated to a mere footnote in Beat history as the woman known only for her unrequited love for Ginsberg and for her role typing the final draft of “Kaddish.” I wanted readers to see her as a writer in her own right, not only as Ginsberg’s amanuensis, and I decided the best way to do this was to meticulously annotate for readers the many revisions she made to the poems in her notebook—to highlight her writing process by demonstrating as much as possible how Cowen shaped and reshaped her poems from their earliest draft forms.
This dual purpose, showcasing Cowen’s poems and her writing process, required a dual vision on my part: I needed to determine the form and content of her “final” drafts, based on the revisions as they unfold in her notebook, and I also needed to provide readers with a detailed map of how she revised them. In order to accomplish the former, I worked as hard as I could to maintain the integrity of Cowen’s voice as it manifests on each page of the notebook. I wanted to publish the poems as closely as they appear in the notebook itself, only editing her language to account for misspellings or typos, and only reshaping individual poems if it seemed that aesthetic choices such as her line breaks and stanza breaks had been determined by the margins of her notebook rather than by deliberate artistic strategies on her part. As I mention in the book’s introduction, I was trying to stay out of Elise Cowen’s way as much as possible. I took notes on her revisions as I put the book together, and these notes eventually became the basis for the extensive annotations in the volume’s appendix. I wanted these annotations to showcase her writing process, and also wanted them to show how conscious she was in her poems of the historical and aesthetic moment she lived in. Related to this last point, I hoped my research for the annotations would demonstrate how deeply influenced Cowen was by the art and culture of the postwar era—not just her Beat-related influences, but a full range of the artistic, historical, and religious sources that she drew from.
Guided by these principles, I worked for roughly four years, one notebook poem at a time. I was fortunate to be helped by a graduate research assistant, Izzy Oneiric, whose work was invaluable. Izzy helped me track down Cowen’s extended family members and obtain permission from them to reproduce her poems, and she also helped me decipher Cowen’s cursive handwriting (we both pored over 200% blown up PDFs many times in my office at Columbia College Chicago). As I mention in my introduction to Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments, Izzy also corrected an important, previously misidentified word in Skir’s original typescript version of Cowen’s poem, “I took the skins of corpses.” Izzy’s crucial work with this poem significantly changes the version of “I took the skins of corpses” that posthumously appeared in Ed Sanders’s Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts (1965) and in Richard Peabody’s anthology A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation (1997). Izzy’s correction of the poem’s text significantly clarifies the poem’s gender politics.
In terms of the book’s organizing criteria, I was determined that the book present itself to readers foremost as a collection of contemporary poems. Although the book’s scholarly apparatus is extensive, with an introduction, editorial annotations, a chronology, and a bibliography of Cowen’s published work, I wanted the book to be structured as if it were a volume of contemporary poetry. First, the primary focus of the book had to be Cowen’s poems—which is to say, even though the editorial context I provide is important, the poems had to be organized in such a way that they could be read without recourse to the scholarly apparatus, if a reader so desired. Second, the poems had to be ordered in such a way that they evoked a conceptual or narrative shape, just as readers would expect from any full-length collection of contemporary poetry. I ordered the poems in the same way I do when I’m putting together a manuscript of my own poetry, identifying common thematic, linguistic, tonal, and structural patterns and then using these patterns to guide the arrangement of the poems—to help me decide how one poem should lead to the next. To help identify these patterns, I began with a general conceptual map of Cowen’s work, identifying four common themes that guide her work: first, the revisionary energy she brought to her study and practice of North American and Asian religious traditions; second, her insistence on a simultaneous continuity and revision of literary tradition; third, her obvious affinity with the form and content of her Beat Generation contemporaries; and fourth, the candor with which she approach matters of the psyche—frank portrayals of her inner life that could be both wildly idealistic or darkly fatalist, depending on the situation.
Skir’s typescript version of the notebook arranged the poems alphabetically by title. This was a useful organizing tool, like an index, but it’s not how we’d generally expect a volume of poetry to be organized. (A rare exception immediately comes to mind, as such things always do: Harryette Mullen’s brilliant 2002 collection Sleeping with the Dictionary, which alphabetizes the poems by title in order to highlight the book’s experimental, dictionary-like conceit.)
IC: I would like to talk about the history of Cowen’s manuscripts. Is there evidence of the family’s destruction of the rest of her work? How much more poetry do you think she had written apart from what we know?
TT: Cowen’s parents initially assumed that their neighbors had burned all her manuscripts after her suicide in 1962. Somehow, though, they suspected that Skir had one of her journals—or at least some of her draft writing—in his possession. During a 2009 interview with me, Skir recounted a critical phone conversation he had with Cowen’s parents about the notebook shortly after her death, when her parents seemed to be making an effort to get their hands on the surviving work they believed Skir held. According to Skir, her parents saw Cowen’s journals as devoid of literary merit—as “pure filth,” in Skir’s words to me. In Skir’s recounting of the phone call, Cowen’s mother said to him: “I understand that you have writings of hers. Can you give them to us?” Skir, thankfully, lied. “Of course,” he told me in 2009, “as you can imagine, [I said] no. So I didn’t give them to her. I said, ‘No, I don’t have them.’” According to Skir, her parents then asked him, “Do you know that she knew a lot of homosexuals? Do you know of any?” Skir, who was as openly gay as one could safely be in the early 1960s, told me that he offered a whispered “No” in response. “What can you say to a question like that?” he said to me, laughing.
My hope is that the notebook Skir preserved is not all that remains of Cowen’s work. It could be. Despite my own efforts, and those of many other scholars in the past several years, nothing has turned up. But perhaps more of her poems are waiting to be found—buried in someone’s personal archive, for instance, or perhaps mis-catalogued in a university archive,.
IC: In your opinion, why did Leo Skir neglect its publication, and how did you manage to take it back to the family?
TT: We all owe Skir a gigantic debt for saving the poems, as I mention in the book’s introduction. He was one of her closest friends, and we’d have no Elise Cowen poems if not for him—we’d only know her as an ancillary figure in postwar U.S. poetry rather than a poet in her own right. Immediately following her death, Skir created a typescript version of the notebook. At his urging, several of these poems were published in important small-press literary journals of the period. But as time went on, he exerted more of a proprietary control over Cowen’s work. When I met him in 1998 at the MLA conference, he claimed to be putting together a posthumous volume of her poems. But nothing came of this. During our 2009 interview, he asserted much the same. By then, though, he was not in the best of health, and this prevented him from acting on his desire to publish a volume of her work. Still, at that point, he’d held on to the poems for nearly a half century without seeing them into print as part of a full-length collection. Skir was a novelist himself, and was close with several Beat Generation writers, Ginsberg among them, so he certainly was not lacking in connections in the literary world to bring the poems into print. I wish I knew why he didn’t act on this. Skir’s motivations are a mystery to me.
I had a copy of Cowen’s original handwritten notebook, but before I could even try to transcribe the work and shape it into a book, I needed to determine who actually owned the rights to the poems. I had to track down Cowen’s family. This is, again, where Izzy’s help was crucial. By late fall 2009, I’d done everything I could to find contact information for Cowen’s surviving family—in particular, Cowen’s cousin Ellen Nash, who, as far as I could determine at the time, was the only family member who’d supported Cowen’s work. But Izzy is a much better online sleuth than I am, and she found Ellen’s contact information. As I talked with Ellen on the phone, it became clear to me that even though Cowen’s parents felt hostility toward their daughter’s writing, Ellen was supportive of Cowen’s work, as was the entire extended Nash family. I was introduced to Ellen’s son, Jonathan, who, as it turns out, had been eager for quite some time to see Cowen’s poems in print. Jonathan, an attorney, established the Ellen Nash Main Trust, which owns the copyright to the poems. The book, then, represents the first publication of Cowen’s work authorized by her estate.
IC: From the mid-1990s on, starting with Brenda Knight Women of the Beat Generation, leading scholars such as Ronna Johnson and Nancy Grace published pioneering work visibilizing the women writers in this movement. Even though there has been almost 10 years since your contribution to this recovery with Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments, I think there is still a lack of serious academic work about her. Not only in relation to the literary singularities of her brief but intense work within the Beat corpus, but also in relation to the key issues of gender, feminism, and mental health in that milieu. Why do you think this is so?
TT: I’ve noticed much the same. I’m not sure exactly why. When I talk with Beat scholars, it’s obvious to me that the Beat Studies community is interested in Cowen’s work and its intersections with the postwar politics of gender and feminism, and with the history of psychiatry. I’ve corresponded with a number of graduate students over the years who’ve written me to discuss their M.A. and Ph.D. research on Cowen. More recently, I was an outside reader for a terrific M.A. thesis on Cowen by Anthony Jaime at Cal State Long Beach. I continue to have great discussions with Katelin Kelly, a writer whose outstanding 2017 essay in Electric Literature on Cowen and Emily Dickinson—one of Cowen’s key inspirations—is part of a larger, more extensive nonfiction project she’s doing. My hope is that the enthusiastic response by younger writers and scholars to Cowen’s poetry can help inspire more published work on her writing.
IC: From my point of view, Cowen was a significant participant of “a generation destroyed by madness”. And here I would like to make an aside to foreground the valuable recent contribution of Dr. Steven Weine’s book Best Minds to this respect in relation to Allen Ginsberg, as well as your insightful interview. I think this iconic verse and the meaning of Howl needs to be revisited to include the specific cases of women as members of the movement. What do you think about this aspect?
TT: Stevan’s book Best Minds is a terrific, and much needed, contribution to our understanding of how the history and practice of postwar psychiatry is a key context for understanding Beat literature—especially poems such as “Howl” and “Kaddish.” And I think the kind of revisiting of “Howl” that you describe would be a crucial way to explore, and recover, how Beat women writers were vital figures, too, in the gathering of “secret heroes” that Ginsberg honors in “Howl.” When I consider Stevan’s work on the debilitating effects of postwar psychiatry on iconoclastic women of the era, it seems to me that his Best Minds could be a useful starting point for an even more extensive recovery of the work of Beat women writers than we already are seeing in Beat Studies.
IC: In your article “Who Writes? Reading Elise Cowen’s Poetry” in Girls Who Wore Black (Johnson and Grace) you argued about the ways her relationship with Ginsberg has influenced the approach to her authorship in important ways. Could you expand on the Ginsberg-Cowen dyad?
TT: For Cowen, it seems, the dyad was rooted in struggle: she loved Ginsberg, but Ginsberg loved Peter Orlovsky. Ginsberg and Cowen had dated briefly, in the early 1950s, during a period when Ginsberg was following the wrong-headed advice of a therapist who felt all the poet needed to heal his neuroses was to practice heterosexuality. Ginsberg’s period of heterosexual experimentation ended pretty soundly when he met Orlovsky, just a year after his and Cowen’s sexual relationship had ended. The Ginsberg-Cowen dyad after this was one of deep friendship, to be sure, and, as we can see from Cowen’s correspondence, this friendship extended to Cowen’s relationship with the Orlovsky family. In 1960, two years before her death, Cowen typed the final draft of Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” manuscript, famously telling him afterward, “You still haven’t finished with your mother,” a comment that unsettled him enough to write about it in his journal, reflecting on his often fraught relationships with women. But as important as this comment on “Kaddish” was for Ginsberg, and as visible as Cowen was in Ginsberg’s Beat social circle in New York, until recently we knew little about their relationship beyond Cowen’s unrequited love for Ginsberg and her role as a typist for one of his most famous poems. It’s clear from her poems themselves that Ginsberg was a deeply felt presence in her life as a friend, fellow writer, and former lover. Her relationship with Ginsberg is addressed, at times elliptically, in several her poems, especially “[Sitting with you in the kitchen], “[Hidden the light],” “Teacher—your body my Kabbalah,” “[Urgent! Urgent!],” and “Emily white witch of Amherst,” among others.
IC: Following your argument in that article, I think the traditional “Ophelia” myth and the stigma of madness and love, as well as that of the female suicidal poet, have seriously interfered the consideration of the literary value of her poetry and her authority as a poet. What is your opinion to this respect?
TT: The cruel romanticizing of poet-suicides in general, and of female poet-suicides in particular, has done terrible damage over the years to how Cowen’s work is read. And this exoticizing of mental illness and self-harm exacerbates the raw pain that the survivors often feel in the aftermath of an artist’s suicide. One of the worst examples of this romanticizing can be seen in Vice magazine’s 2013 “fashion spread” on women writers who had committed suicide, titled “Last Words.” Models were hired for photo shoots that re-enacted the suicides. Cowen was among those writers included in “Last Words,” with a model representing her dead on the pavement after jumping from her parents’ apartment in New York. In an act of even greater grotesquerie, Vice included a description of each piece of clothing the models were wearing, along with the names of their stylists and, I think, the prices of the clothing—as if each woman’s suicide was the equivalent of a Vogue fashion spread rather than a human tragedy. After a deluge of complaints from readers, Vice took down the online version. But the print version had already been published. As Jenna Sauers wrote of “Last Words” in a 17 June 2013 essay in Jezebel: “It’s almost breathtakingly tasteless. Suicide is not a fashion statement.” I can’t think of a better way to say it.
IC: One of the principal achievements in your edited collection is providing us with a chronology of Cowen’s life events. What method did you use and what difficulties did you find accessing reliable sources of information about her life?
TT: It wasn’t easy, since biographical information on Cowen is often difficult to find—a situation made worse these days by the plague of misinformation that buzzes around author fan websites and social media. I used the few entries in Cowen’s notebook that were dated to establish a foundation for when she’d written the notebook itself: fall 1959 through spring 1960. Then, along with the few items of Cowen’s correspondence in the notebook and those held in various university archives around the country (especially her materials in Ginsberg’s archive at Stanford), I was able to fill in details. Most of all, though, I was guided by the biographical information in Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters and Door Wide Open, and her novel Come and Join the Dance, all of which feature Cowen prominently (Cowen is fictionalized as the character Kay in Come and Join the Dance).
IC: As a literary scholar, what characteristics do you think make her poetry singular within Beat poetics?
TT: I’m struck by how Cowen’s poetry can remind us of the limits of the Beat outlaw writer sensibility. The aesthetic openness of Beat Generation writing—and the cultural openness of the Beat community—was not inclusive enough to account for Cowen’s life and work. Her identity as an artist was, of course, a ticket into the Beat community, but it’s remarkable to me that despite how much the community valued its position on the margins of official verse culture, its foundationally masculinist attitudes couldn’t accommodate a singular female voice such as hers. This is not an attack on my favorite Beat writers. Instead, it’s a reminder of the limits of countercultural art movements—and I say this as someone who believes passionately in the inventiveness of such movements far more than I do in the often staid products of official verse culture.
IC: Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragment is out of stock, and it is a vintage and expensive book now. Is there any plan to reedit it, and if so, what would you do differently?
TT: Sadly, the book’s publisher, Ahsahta Press, shut down during the pandemic as a result of budget cuts imposed by its host institution, Boise State University. I’m currently talking with another publisher, and my hope is that a new edition can come out in the next year or so. I’d like to keep the foundation of the book as it is, with Cowen’s poems framed by the contextualizing introduction, the annotations to the poems, the chronology of her life, and the bibliography. I’d also like to add a new introduction that would explore the dramatic increase in Cowen’s visibility since the original edition was published. Thankfully, we no longer can say she is an unknown or unsung poet. Still, it’s important to get her poems back into print so that new readers can continue to encounter her work.