Writer and director Elise Holowicki talked with Court Green coeditor Tony Trigilio about her newest project, On the Off-Beat, a feature film on poet Elise Cowen that Holowicki is making with producer Melissa Azizi of Sparkwood Films. Until recently, very little was known about Elise Cowen. She was a mysterious figure in Beat Generation history, remembered primarily for her close friendship with Allen Ginsberg. Born in 1933, Cowen became involved with the New York Beat community as a student at Barnard College. There, she met Ginsberg. The two briefly dated, and they remained friends afterward until her death in 1962. For nearly a half century, until 2014, when Ahsahta Press published Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (edited by Trigilio), Cowen had appeared only as a cameo figure in US literary history, often portrayed as merely the mad girlfriend-typist who flashed briefly into Ginsberg's life, with little or no mention of her work as a poet.
TT: Thanks for taking the time to talk about the film you’re making on the life and work of Elise Cowen. I’m thrilled that Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments has generated the wide readership her poems always deserved, and I’m sure your film will continue to bring new audiences to her writing. The scholarly and editorial work of Nancy M. Grace, Ronna C. Johnson, Brenda Knight, and Richard Peabody, among others, brought necessary attention to previously neglected and overlooked Beat women writers. But Cowen’s poetry, in particular, seems to be tapping into a contemporary urgency to recover the work of women Beats. There’s an even greater interest now in the work that writers like Cowen were doing within (and against) the male-dominated Beat community. I remember our first conversations about the film, and how excited I was that you were focusing on Cowen’s life as a writer. Can you talk a little bit about what drew you to making a film about her, and about your overall vision for the film?
EH: Thanks for your excitement and support Tony. The urgency is definitely apt to recover Cowen’s work and tell her story. Of course, it’s galling that Cowen’s memory had, until recently, been reduced to that of Ginsberg’s groupie. I’m thrilled to be among a community of artists who have worked to change that. Cowen's story speaks to a contemporary need to expose injustices surrounding womxn's mental and reproductive health. Cowen struggled to get an abortion in 1957. Over 60 years later, womxn's reproductive rights are still threatened in the US today. Cowen's work hits on themes of queer identity. The present-day parallels to womxn's current realities have definitely informed the vision of the film.
What drew me to Cowen initially was her dark and sardonic humor. As a teenager, her poetry felt funnier and strangely more accessible and contemporary than other writers of the era. At the time, I was in the male-dominated environment of film school on a directing track. I felt an immediate kinship and admiration for her. The way that she chose to live was so honest, and free—and that’s apparent in her writing. Given the context of the time and Cowen’s young age, it makes her legacy even more remarkable.
An intention of the film is of course, to highlight Cowen’s poetry, and consequently shine a wider light on the womxn of the Beat Generation. Cowen’s perspective and approach to her poetry offers so much in the way of rich and powerful imagery, speaking to a deep longing to find a home in one’s self. The vision of the film is to portray her unique journey through a lens that pays respect to the ethos of her short life—that of kindness, compassion, and curiosity.
TT: That’s such a great way to describe Cowen’s life and work—her ethos of “kindness, compassion, and curiosity.” Having lived so closely with her poems when I edited the book, it means a lot to know you were drawn to the “dark and sardonic humor” in her poems. The unfortunate stereotype of the art form is that poets are supposed to be gravely, stiffly serious, and I think this belief can cause readers to overlook the subtleties of voice and language in the work of poets such as Cowen. I find a biting, ironic humor everywhere in her work, especially in poems like “I took the skins of corpses,” with its sardonic mash-up of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Emily Dickinson.
As you said, the story of Elise Cowen and her work is the kind of narrative that continues today with writers who have been marginalized and othered by the conventional practices of the literary establishment. I’m reminded of a British Romantic Poetry course I took as an undergraduate 35 years ago. One of my classmates asked why we were hardly reading any female Romantic poets. The professor said, well, women weren’t writing much poetry at all in that era. But of course women were writing at that time; we just didn’t have much of a visible, archived record of their work. And, voila, less than 10 years later, scholars began recovering—and anthologizing—women Romantics whose poems had always been out there but had been ignored. It wasn’t that the poems didn’t exist. The work was there, in plain sight, waiting for academic culture to become more inclusive and bring poets from the margins into the center.
Films like yours do just this—re-center the literary canon so that writers like Cowen are eminently visible to new generations of readers. I know your project is still in early stages, but can you talk a little about what parts of Cowen’s life and work you’re emphasizing in the film? I’m wondering what it’s been like, also, to re-imagine Cowen’s poems for the language of film. What has been most rewarding, and what has been most difficult, about translating her life and work into film?
EH: Working with Cowen’s words has easily been the most rewarding part of the process, and, of course, the most emotional. Having lived with her work as well, I know that you can relate.
When I started developing the film with my mentor at the time, Polly Platt, Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments hadn’t been released yet. I had a loose framework for the structure of the story that took the form of a rather traditional linear biopic narrative. Since more of Cowen’s work is now available, I’ve been able to use those poems to inform the visual language of the film. It’s been particularly gratifying to create parallels in the structure that hit this sweet spot of both moving the linear plot of the narrative forward while revealing something about Cowen’s psyche and rich inner world through her own words.
To that end, it’s been challenging to work with some of the material knowing that Cowen may have been in immense emotional pain while writing it. I wrote a lot of the script at a brightly lit co-working space around comedy writers—I’ve had to excuse myself to go cry in an open office space phone booth more times than I care to admit.
Beyond the emotional self-flagellation that sometimes comes with writing, it has been incredibly rewarding to work with and contribute to a community of artists who are committed to getting work like Cowen’s seen and celebrated. There is so much unique and emotive art dedicated and inspired by Cowen’s work from around the world. The energy and sense of camaraderie among Cowen’s audience in this time is really moving.
In developing the story, Melissa [Azizi] and I became really interested in examining Cowen’s time at Barnard. Cowen has a mythic presence there, even now. We were delighted to learn that Columbia students recently put on a musical with Cowen serving as one of the main characters.
We render a depiction of Cowen’s later years as well. As expected, these later years are where we found the most dead-ends in terms of research—particularly in obtaining hospital records. A through line of the film focuses on Cowen typing Ginsberg’s poem, “Kaddish”; however, that isn’t the crux of her story, just a piece of it.
TT: For readers who do not know the full story, Cowen typed the final draft of Ginsberg’s poem, a moving elegy for his mother written soon after her death. When Cowen handed him the finished manuscript, she said, “You still haven’t finished with your mother.” She was right. He’d revisit his mother’s life, and his complicated relationship with her, in later poems throughout his career, most notably in “White Shroud” and “Black Shroud.” For years, the “Kaddish” typing story was pretty much all we knew about Cowen from Beat biographies. I think it’s a terrific point of contact in the film, reminding us that the conventional narrative of Cowen as only a typist is inadequate.
I appreciate, hugely, what you said about how the artistic and emotional challenges of the project overlap each other. I’m reminded of the period from 2009-2012, when I was editing Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments, often working at my neighborhood café. As I worked to decipher her cursive handwriting in my PDF of her journal, I simultaneously felt knocked out, emotionally, by the raw, vulnerable life unfolding in her poems. Like your experience in the co-working space in Los Angeles, I’d be surrounded by folks at the café busily typing away on their laptops on workaday tasks while I was on the verge of tears reading Cowen’s notebook. I think we need to get very close to our subject matter to really hear the unique emotional and artistic voice emerging from it. But that closeness, all the same, can sneak up on us sometimes, and I’m glad you had the open office space phone booth to cry into. For me, the release came in my walk home from the café—when I’d taken a step back from the PDF copy of her journal, and, in that more relaxed state, on the way back to my building, the tears would often start.
I’m fascinated by the work you’re doing to create a visual language for her life from the poems themselves. And I’m especially interested in how this process takes fragmented and disjunctive poems like Cowen’s and crafts a visual narrative from them. Are there a couple poems of hers in particular that have been helpful in creating this kind of narrative? How have these poems guided the development of the film? I’m curious, too, what’s your favorite Elise Cowen poem.
EH: Appreciate the questions, and thanks for your share about your process as well Tony.
Incorporating the poetry into the film has been as dependent on the euphony of each individual poem—or fragments in some cases—as it has been on the narrative significance. “Urgent! Urgent!” for example, informed a pinnacle sequence in the screenplay in a narrative sense. Some poems are intended to punctuate scenes and story beats within an already very active soundscape, hence the allusion to jazz and syncopation in our working title.
My favorite Cowen poem? Tough to say! I’ve had different favorites at different times of my life. The first was probably “The body is a humble thing.” A few years ago I would have said “I took the skins of corpses.” Last year, maybe “Enough of this flabby cock.” In this current moment, I’d probably say “I’ve tried”speaks the loudest to me.
[I’ve tried]
I’ve tried
Been tried
I’ll try again
Although my Being’s weak
There’s nothing worth
But God & you
And God has gone to sleep
—Elise Cowen*
TT: Thanks for taking the time to talk about the film, and to introduce the project to readers of Cowen's work. Please pass along information for us to learn more about the film.
EH: Of course! Thanks so much, Tony—this was fun! You can follow @OTOBpoetry on Instagram for updates.
* Gratitude to Jonathan Nash for permission to reprint Elise Cowen’s “I’ve tried”: Copyright 2014 by the Ellen Nash Main Trust
