Tony Trigilio Talks About Elise Cowen, Ginsberg, More

At VoyageChicago, an interview with artist, poet, and editor Tony Trigilio, who we can thank for Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments, "a collection of poems [he] compiled and annotated from Cowen’s only surviving notebook." A bit about that, and then some:

...Very little was known about Cowen’s work before this book. She primarily had been seen as a friend (and onetime girlfriend) of Allen Ginsberg, and as the person who typed the manuscript of Ginsberg’s long poem, “Kaddish.” But she was a poet in her own right, and I’m grateful that I’ve been able to bring new readers to her work. A German edition of the book was released this summer from Stadlichter Presse, and translations are in the works for Spanish and Turkish editions.

My work with Cowen’s poems grew out of my scholarly research into the poetry of Allen Ginsberg. I’m the author of Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics, the first book-length study of his Buddhist influences. It was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2007, and a second edition came out in 2012. My first book of criticism, Strange Prophecies Anew, was a study of the visionary poetry of Ginsberg, William Blake, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Fairleigh Dickinson University Press published this in 2000.

Find the full interview here.