Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments

Beat generation poet Elise Cowen was born in 1933 into a middle class Jewish family in Washington Heights, New York. While attending Barnard College she began a brief relationship with Allen Ginsberg, remaining close to him the rest of her life. From 1956 until 1962 she moved back and forth between California and New York, struggling with increasingly severe psychological breakdowns. She committed suicide in 1962 by jumping through a closed window at her parents house. After her death, the bulk of Cowen's writing was destroyed at the behest of her parents, who were uneasy with her representations of sexuality and drug use, but a handful of poems and fragments have survived and reached publication.

Poemas, poesias