KNOWhomo

LGBTQ* Poets In History You May Have Missed:

(For more information, check out Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution edited by Brenda Knight)

“Elise Cowen, though dead more than a quarter century, is in many ways more tangible than many of the other Beat women. She is alive in the pages of Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters and in the memories of many of the survivors of the Beat Generation whom she marked forever with her generous friendship. Janine Pommy Vega with whom Elise lived for a time, says, “I still think about her every day. She was the smartest person I knew.”’

Elise met Allen Ginsberg and discovered that they had each met the now infamous Carl Solomon (for whom “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg was dedicated) through separate stays in mental institutions, and she and Ginsberg dated briefly. When Allen moved on after meeting his eventual life partner Peter Orlovsky, Elise remained emotionally attached to Ginsberg. She became romantically linked to a woman who went by the pseudonym “Sheila,” and the two couples actually lived together in an apartment for more than a year.

“Sitting”

by Elise Cowen

Sitting with you in the kitchen

Talking of anything

Drinking tea

I love you

“The” is a beautiful, regal, perfect word

Oh I wish your body here

With or without bearded poems

HOWL - Allen Ginsberg

(read full poem: http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Ramble/howl_text.html)

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall