The Brooklyn Rail

These are lines that I wrote during Cole Heinowitz’s “Poetry as Coexistence” workshop at the New Orleans Poetry Festival on April 13, 2025.

That morning, Cole spoke to a group of gathered poets plainly and movingly about her theory of poetry as coexistence—discussing how, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s words, we could use language to “refrain from replacing a thing with its sign.” Hers was an invitation to connect with the thing itself, the world itself. It was a clear, glorious day; Cole led us outside to a small park on a nearby corner and guided us through a series of questions, prompts, meditations, all of which led us deeper into communion with the world. In my case, a tree beside a sidewalk. She spoke to us of Jacob Boehme’s Adamic Language, and of Antonin Artaud’s “Poetry in its natural state.” Cole herself was clearly in her natural state, radiantly alive in her weaving together of places, life forms, lineages, and the singularity of the April air.

Cole and I, in addition to being friends, curated the Imaginary Elegies reading series at Pete’s Candy Store together. In the year or so we worked together on this project, we’d often meet at a diner in between our two upstate NY villages and delight in talk about poets, books, gossip, the lore and mythos of our shared literary community, which is truly an ecosystem of friendship (coexistence). Drinking coffee and smoking handrolled cigarettes in the sun outside the diner, laughing. Coming together with Cole on Friday nights in Brooklyn to host poets was a lifeline for me. Her generosity had an infinitely expansive quality—the introductions she wrote (by hand, in a black notebook) for poets were works of art in themselves, revelations of thought as cool and vital as mountain springs. Cole’s teaching, hosting, curating, translating, writing, performing, her being in friendship and presence—her will to coexistence in all forms will stay with me, always.