The Brooklyn Rail

Cole Heinowitz was a poet, scholar, and translator who taught literature at Bard College from 2004 until her untimely death in May 2025. Born in San Diego, she spent the early nineties moving across the San Diego–Tijuana border in punk and avant-garde collectives while writing her first book of poetry, Daily Chimera (1995), published when she was nineteen years old. She was also a scholar of Romantic literature, receiving her Ph.D. from Brown University. Her dissertation traced encounters between Latin America and England in the nineteenth century. As Cole began teaching in the late nineties, her version of Romanticism became increasingly untethered from any period, nation, or canon. She constructed her own poetics, based on intuition, translation and recuperative scholarship, which ran from Antonin Artaud and Pierre Klossowski to John Clare and Dorothy Wordsworth. 

I studied with Cole from 2010 to 2013 and taught alongside her this past summer in Bard’s Language and Thinking program. It’s hard to describe Cole’s mesmerizing way of teaching, translating, and theorizing because she followed no method besides fidelity to each writer’s idiom. Using the strategy of formalism against itself, she’d find in prosody, phonetics, and lineation an urgent political quandary, which could only be obscured by the extraction of content, narrative, and message. 

Cole frequently affirmed non-canonical and fragmentary writers as Romantics. She’d take up the fragment as an urgent demand: “you must change your life.” While Romantic writing has no immediate political efficacy, she found a kind of politics in seeing poetics as “way of happening” transmitted through a lucid mouth.

Take this excerpt from John Wieners, the queer Bostonian poet, who Cole saw as the consummation of Romantic lyric:

                            Watching the
Words come out,
                            Like a snake
From its box, it winds
About our shoulders and
          Neck like a noose.
We wait on the bed
                            Scaffold
                                    To drop
Into its pit and hang
                      Hung up there.

(Wieners, “Stone Girl” 1959¹)

Wieners’s serpentine form strangles the poem with the noose of love, words, and hospitals. A linguistic chain running from hang-hung to pit-drop drops us through the arms of the beloved, down his torso, and onto a ledge. We quaver between being hung up on a lover and hung in the gallows. Homonyms of hanging produce the double-binds of impossible love.

Through Wieners, Cole would uncover the penalizing force of law at the level of the body while also affirming his weak power as a way of resisting violation by exposing and formalizing his own heartbreak. Rather than fetishize Wieners as a bygone poet, she’d convey his force as a pulley towards the present. Wieners could be found to offer a retroactive reading of our own institutional psychophobia and our innermost fears of being dropped. In her readings of poetic spacing and breath, she heeded Artaud’s call for a poet who would forge a “place to breathe in this world of asphyxiated people.”² 

Cole invoked biography not to diagnose or supplement the text but to extend the sense of form—the form of life as an extension of the form of the page. In the case of Wieners, the maze of his institutionalization was coextensive with the maze of his poems. Neither page nor life had dominion over the Real.     

When I was an undergrad at Bard, a student’s initial reaction to the Romantic lyric was often incredulous skepticism. Cole would amplify the student’s skepticism by restating their question, and even redoubling it with her own quandaries—disarmingly syncing the class onto the same page, however crossed our perspectives. Critique soon gave way to a reverence for reading without anticipation; reading, as if for the first time, at the risk of being freshly double-crossed. She called such open encounters aesthesis, the chance to be astonished by beauty, even the beauty of terror. The more jaded the class appeared to be, the more ecstatically she opened us to the text—exploiting the awkwardness of anachronism as a way to light up and recharge aesthesis in the very moment it seemed to be snuffed out.

In senior year, I came to her office, my head jammed with critiques, as I attempted to synthesize Frankfurt school, Jacques Lacan, and queer theory. I was trying, as she put it, to summarize, speed-read, and conquer literature. Once, she replied to my critical frenzy by simply opening William Wordsworth—“The Rainbow comes and goes, / And lovely is the Rose.”³ Her sibylline voice was teleporting (some of my friends called her a siren; her readings were marked by lisping consonance and lilting aspirants). I don’t think she was redirecting me from critique back to the “work itself,” as if it contained a divine kernel of truth. She was simply redirecting my senses from the head to the ear. As she put it, echoing Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “the heart is found only in the ear.” 

Cole’s channeling of verse betrayed an epiphanic intensity that closed the gap between obsolescence and presence. Suddenly, the text would implore us to figure out how to affirm our life under withering conditions right in this very instant. However, there would be no prescribed answer to our questions, only a multitude of strategies. Her suggestions for a kind of care-of-self stemmed from avant-garde operations (Oulipo, dérive, theater of cruelty) but also esoteric wisdom (love under will), idiosyncratic advice (wear rose-colored glasses when dealing with bureaucracies), and sharing her own strategies for writing through neurodivergence. She’d inquire with disarming curiosity how students find know-how in their own struggles with writing, dropping any sense that anyone could ever attain the mastery implied by what she called “Literature with a capital L.” She seemed to be transmitting Hilma af Klint’s dual dictum: “obey intuition” and “understand only in part.” Her advice to undergraduate art majors followed suit—if you can predict the effect the work will have in advance, why do it? If you already know the theory, why simply illustrate it? Experimentation meant knowledge had to be continuously deferred. Cutting against the grain of degree-awarding programs, for Cole signaling expertise in your field was anathema to aesthetics. 

Last summer, during Language and Thinking, she was tasked to introduce the incoming class to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In a stunning lecture, she demonstrated how the text was not opaque or transparent but rather elastic and translucent. While she astutely traced the monster to Shelley’s critique of her husband Percy’s hubristic experiments with nature (including electrocuting a cat when he was young) and Shelley’s nightmare of a miscarriage, her reading pushed far beyond biographical context. Her central claim was that we are all the Monster, made up of composite organs (including millions of microorganisms) and spliced together by language viruses that cannot produce a coherent body. Echoing Artaud’s claim that “man is sick because he is badly constructed,” that is: made up of ill-fitting organs and an impossible demand for organization from God. 

Frankenstein’s monster became a transcendental signifier for a sliding set of allegorical interpretations (the Other of race, gender, humanism, and nation). Rather than restrict these interpretations to a single correct reading or claim the figure to be opaque and irreducible, she allowed the sliding of readings to help us find in Shelley’s text the capacity to produce a mirror for parallax perspectives, which are preserved without canceling each other out; foregoing the law of noncontradiction. She’d preserve the recalcitrance of the text, its secrecy, and obscurity, only to ensure that as readers, we remained unsatiated, to continue reading and writing without a refractory period of dismissive summation. As she wrote of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s writerly ethics: “Poetry must ceaselessly repel the communion it thirsts for. Its thirst serves an infinitely more vital demand: the need to continue writing.”⁴

In the past few years, Cole began to shift from taking Romantic metaphors as figurative to finding in them the kernels of existential truth. However, she did not eschew metaphor in the hopes of attaining pure immediacy but saw metaphor as part and parcel of intense mystical experience. When I first studied with her, she was ruthlessly skeptical of any conjuring of unmediated tranquility—the class, “Sympathy and its Discontents,” exposed any notion of communal immersion to be a scheme hiding Sadean violence. She hinted with enigmatic phrases that she held esoteric beliefs too obscene or fragile for academia. But sometimes these beliefs would come out during office hours—she’d say that careerism was black magic, speak quite literally of hexes and bewitchment, claim a distrust of the holy angelic order, and preach a conviction to “love under will.” These mysterious pronouncements served as enigmas I’d endlessly puzzle over with friends. I now look back on Cole as a kind of closet mystic, who slowly dropped the mask of academia and transitioned from a scholar of Romanticism to a new kind of idiolectic Romantic.

In a workshop Cole gave this past Winter in Tivoli, NY, “Poetry as Coexistence,” she began to sketch out a new theory of the heart as a perceptive conduit for poetry, metaphor, and psychic transmissions. While she borrowed from Timothy Morton and speculative realism to make her argument, she rooted her thoughts strongly in the poets—in particular Jack Spicer and his notion of receiving the poem from the Outside (connoting aliens in outer space but also the exteriority of nature and language). Spicer was not talking about receiving wisdom or prophecy but rather receiving metaphor. The aliens give us metaphors to help ferry us across our interiority toward a foreign realm. Our compulsory word usage becomes tongue-tied. Where we wish to be precious and transparently expressive, we must look to the metaphor to violently transpose and efface our sentiment. 

Cole’s sweeping claim was that Spicer culminated a tradition that spanned from the telegraphic panpsychism of Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jakob Böhme’s mystical doctrine of signatures (to which we could add the poetics of Hannah Weiner and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge). Böhme claimed that divine signatures inscribed on the heart of Being could be uncovered by patiently following chains of similitude, re-semblance, and metaphor. Cole’s sense of poetics as transmission speaks to the majority of her practice manifesting as teaching and translation. Her late theory coincided with her recent translations of Mexican Infrarealist poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, who did not simply “portray” the “bleeding heart” but rather “held it in his hand.”⁵ 

Cole was drawn to writers who led divergent lives—Wieners and Artaud were institutionalized, Papasquiaro led an exilic life, and Pizarnik took her own life at thirty-six. While she was fluent in the DSM and Sigmund Freud, she eschewed diagnostics and interpreted these writers as daimonic transmitters of sacred knowledge.⁶ She followed Artaud’s reading of Vincent van Gogh as a man “suicided by society,” that is, the interior “illness” was often a critical response to a lethal culture. 

Cole’s interest in promulgating minor literature means her preferred medium was pamphlets and chapbooks (many of which are now out-of-print). But a single pamphlet could condense a monumental thesis into a single page, as is attested by her stunning translations of the late letters of Artaud with Peter Valente. From these virtually untranslatable letters, Heinowitz distills in her intro a rigorous and coherent theory that compliments Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s discovery of the “Body without Organs” in Artaud’s radio play Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu [To Be Done with the Judgment of God]. The radio play and the late letters emerged in Artaud’s final years (1945–48), after his release from the Rodez asylum, where he received electroconvulsive shock therapy and famously met Lacan only to diagnose the doctor as an erotomanic. Cole’s introduction to the letters uncover and enact Artaud’s theory of delirious lucidity, 

Artaud recounts his torture and violation in asylums, his crucifixion two thousand years ago in Golgotha, his deception by occult initiates and doubles, and his intended journey to Tibet, where, aided by his “daughters of the heart,” he will finally put an end to these "maneuvers of obscene bewitchment." Artaud also explains the curative properties of opium and his plan to rebuild the architecture of the body, to create what he envisions as a body without organs-autonomous, absolute, and non- hierarchical and, extending this idea to the visual arts, he argues that painting and drawing must wage a ceaseless battle against the limits of representation. Yet however wide-ranging the subjects Artaud deals with in these letters, there is an unmistakable unity of vision that permeates them: the vision of an unceasing, ubiquitous, and malignant plot "to close the mouth of lucidity" (“fermer la bouche de la lucidité”) by any means, which must be resisted at all costs.⁷ 

In the moment Artaud was deemed most delusional, he affirmed that it was not his madness but his absolute lucidity which made him dangerous to a bankrupt society. As a result, he was muzzled and gagged, leaving him with no recourse but to invent a percussive and ecstatic glossolalia.

Cole seems to answer Artaud’s demand for a lucid shriek in her violently stunning and scatological translation:

The principle of the current consciousness of the so-called unconscious mass of the general public today is: Let us do harm to the man who is injured and sick for having tried to prevent us from profiting from excess, and let that excess be the vile erotic satisfaction of inflicting pain on one who has already suffered too much to remain clean, to remain detached and pure. On this plane, everybody is a wizard, everybody is that magician who bewitches the humble and withdrawn artist. I add that everybody knows this: in magic we pay the gurus, the yogis, the cenobites, the anchorites, the master teachers, the instructors whoever they are, and we pay them with a little sperm or milk or shit hurled into outer space to be cooked. Yet of 5 billion men there are 3 billion who practice this magic knowingly and consciously and who bewitch the cops and the psychiatrists to close the mouth of lucidity. (Artaud, “To Georges Braque Paris, January 16, 1947”)⁸

Cole had an unusual propensity to take even the most hesitant, delusional, paranoid, or fanciful utterances seriously. When Artaud speaks of a police state gagging our mouths with nefarious magic, she does not decide whether he is projecting, hallucinating, metaphorizing, or stating empirical facts. What holds sway is the degree of lucidity, the intensity of resolution, the illumination of sensation. Lucidity became her definition of the Romantic: not a kind of text but an infectious impulse derived from encountering the Outside—a sublime capacity to be stunned, to have one’s heart broken open. 

*

Like many Romantics, Cole sought to reunite lyric, voice, and music—a unison she discovered in the songs of the Siren. Odysseus famously tried to conquer the Sirens by listening to their call while tied to the masts of his ship, thus resisting their lethal seduction, a scene Theodor Adorno cites as the origin of the Enlightenment and the death of magic.

Cole’s final unfinished poem attests to her search for a pressing and present, undead Siren song. She shrewdly reverses the Homeric gaze in order to uncover a new ground for poetry.

What kind of real and beautiful woman did the sirens become—did they retain their own basic shapes or were they refashioned in some aspect by the man whose impenetrability broke their hearts. Could they see his hands leaving their sinews into the siren’s hands making them thicken and darken. Could you see Odysseus in their hands and love. Are we to suppose they loved him or they were astonished and insulted by his indifference to them. Are we to imagine that for the sirens love really meant conquest and control, that their hearts yearned for command, and that being denied, their hearts broke. When their commanding hearts broke, do we imagine their outer carapace breaking open to reveal the tenderness of longing or in other words that becoming a real woman means becoming vulnerable and exposed. Alternatively, what if the injury Odysseus inflicted was more than a slight, more than a rejection, more than a denial of their mastery. Is it possible the siren’s truly loved before they were a woman and longed to bring their beloved to their native domain—beyond life and death to source—not to devour him but to make one of their own—a liminal being outside of time and causality. (Heinowitz, untitled).

Before she could finish her ode to the Sirens, Cole died at sea—the sea which had always been the horizon of her poetry—a mouth, a Rubicon, a fatal seduction, a site of dissolution, dissipation, exile, homecoming, and recurrence.

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Biographic Note

Rebecca Cole Heinowitz was an accomplished writer, musician, translator and scholar. She was the author of three books of poetry: Daily Chimera (Incommunicado, 1997), Stunning in Muscle Hospital (Detour, 2002), and The Rubicon (The Rest, 2007). She translated widely from Spanish into English, concentrating on twentieth-century Latin American poetry. Translated works include Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic (Ediciones Sin Fin, 2023; Wave Books, 2013) and Bleeding from All 5 Senses (White Pine, 2020), both by Mexican Infrarealist poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro; A Tradition of Rupture, the collected essays of Argentine poet and fiction writer (Ugly Duckling, 2019); and Primeval Wing by Mexican poet Mara Larrosa (forthcoming from Ediciones Norteadas). Dr. Heinowitz’s translations from French include Succubations & Incubations: Selected Letters of Antonin Artaud (1945–1947) (Infinity Land, 2020). These translations follow an idiosyncratic method she described as “criticism by translation,” demanding “an intense penetration of the author’s sense” and “exact projection of one’s psychic content” that privileges the “fervor of the origin” over semantic fidelity. Her renowned translations of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro were rewarded with the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation in 2019.

Heinowitz’s scholarly and critical writings have appeared in the Keats-Shelley Journal, the Wordsworth Circle, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, the Chicago Review, and the Boston Review as well as in the edited volumes the Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose and Bloomsbury’s A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Empire. She was also the author of the critical monograph Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777-1826: Rewriting Conquest (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Since Rewriting Conquest, she had been working on a book-length study exploring the poetics of direct communication with the nonhuman world, Poetry as Coexistence.

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These three poems are from Heinowitz’s first book My Daily Chimera (Incommunicado, 1995), now out of print. The book was written when she was twenty years old, and features poems, plays, and prose that are in turns polemical and playful. Her poetry is violent, visceral, satirical, erotic, and sharply personal. Like the letters of Antonin Artaud, which she would later translate, there is a sense of spellcasting and malice. As Carla Harryman puts it, the poems are “curses” that “disperse and affirm fury.” Harryman also suggests that Chimera reveals Heinowitz’s early penchant for interposing genres—finding new idioms in the transitional space between translations.

A chimera is defined both as “a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail” and “a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve.” The notion that such a monstrous figure being a “daily” banality is a post-Romantic kind of irony. The gods have become quotidian irritations, stripped of their mythical force. The hybridity of her writing, its tragicomic mysticism, and cloacal fusions, is also a kind of chimera—an ideal that haunts the text and pulls it towards the impossible merger of affect, form, letter, and spirit.