It’s Women’s History Month, and I’m obsessed with the Beats again, so I thought I’d make a post about women of the Beat Generation.
A woman from the audience asks: ‘Why were there so few women among the Beat writers?’ and [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says: “There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the ‘50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up.” -Stephen Scobie, on the Naropa Institute’s 1994 tribute to Allen Ginsberg
While that is true, it is also true that there were women who were part of the Beat Generation. Yes, some of them were locked up, some of them met tragic ends, but many others lived longer than most of the Beat boys did and continued making their art until the end of their lives. A few of the women on my list are still alive and making art!
This list is by no means comprehensive, and it is mainly focused on writers, but it’s enough to give you a taste of the many talented, fascinating women who were part of the Beat Generation.
Elise Cowen
Elise Nada Cowen (July 31, 1933 – February 27, 1962) was an American poet. She and Allen Ginsberg were lovers for a time, and he treated her very badly, and for a long time she was mostly known for being “Allen’s attempt at heterosexuality.” She was also bisexual, and experimented with drugs, both things were incredibly transgressive for a woman at the time. And she was a fantastic poet in her own right. Sadly, her life was cut short by suicide, and her parents burned many of her notebooks because of her frank descriptions of things like sexuality and drug use. Who knows what heights her art would have reached had she lived longer, and who knows what amazing words the world is missing because her notebooks were burned?
Diane di Prima (born August 6, 1934) is an American poet and artist. She’s still alive and making her art! Five years ago, I went to a poetry workshop she taught in San Francisco, and met her! Yes, I’m bragging just a little, but it’s only because I love Diane di Prima so much. I first read some of her stuff in an anthology in the ‘90s, but the first time I bought one of her books was in 2001, and then I rapidly started trying to get my hands on all of her poetry. I can’t put it any other way but to say that reading her made me feel like I had found my spiritual kin. Some of her poetry is mystical and witchy and visionary, some of it is about the realities of womanhood, motherhood, being a lover, an artist, revolutionary. And then when I read Memoirs of a Beatnik, well… Yes, I know that book focused on all the sexy, salacious stuff because that’s what her publisher said would sell, but to know that even back then there was a woman unashamedly loving and fucking whomever she wanted to did me a world of good. (There’s more to the story of how/when I read that book, but I’ll save it for another time.)
Hettie Jones (born 1934 as Hettie Cohen) is best known as the first wife of Amiri Baraka, known as LeRoi Jones at the time of their marriage, and is also a writer herself. She has written poetry, as well as memoir and non-fiction books. She is also a former chair of the PEN Prison Writing Committee and is currently a member of PEN’s Advisory Council. (Side note: I have also met Hettie! I went to a talk about the Beat Generation she gave at the Milwaukee Public Library, nine years ago.)
Lenore Kandel (January 14, 1932 – October 18, 2009) was an American poet, affiliated with the Beat Generation and Hippie counterculture. She was immortalized as Romana Swartz, “a big Rumanian monster beauty,” in Jack Kerouac’s novel Big Sur (1962). In the novel, she is described as being the girlfriend of Dave Wain, who was based on Lew Welch. “Dave” describes how she walked around the “Zen-East House” wearing only purple panties. Kerouac described her as “intelligent, well read, writes poetry, is a Zen student, knows everything […]”
Joanne Kyger (b. 1934) is associated with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. In San Francisco she attended the Sunday meetings of poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, and moved into the East West House, a communal house for students of Zen Buddhism and Asian studies. She lived in Japan with Gary Snyder, her husband at the time, and traveled in India with Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky.
Anne Waldman (born April 2, 1945) is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. Although too young to truly be one of the Beats, during the 1960s she made connections with many of the Beat poets. In 1974, with Trungpa Rinpoche, Allen Ginsberg, and others, Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado (now Naropa University).
ruth weiss (born 1928) is a German-born poet, performer, playwright and artist who made her home and career in the United States, as a member of the Beat Generation, a label she has recently embraced and that is used frequently by historians detailing her life and works. weiss spells her name in lowercase as such as a symbolic protest against “law and order,” since in her birthplace of Germany all nouns are spelled capitalized.
This post I made last March has been going around again lately, so I thought I’d reblog it, too.
A woman from the audience asks: ‘Why were there so few women among the Beat writers?’ and [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says: “There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the ’50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up.
“We live in an age of poverty, greed, violence, destruction. Indeed, the very seat of the federal government, Washington D.C., has been reduced to what is now known as… the “Capital Wasteland.” The Capital Wasteland… How did it come to this, America?“
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