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Cole Heinowitz.
Cole and I had been talking a lot lately about the “heart”—for reasons that may or may not be obvious—as an organ of perception or “conduit,” as well as a metaphor…
And “broken” hearts, too—broken in various ways, by various people or events, by families and partners, by graduate school and professionalism (we went through that simultaneously, but separately)—but also broken open in and by astonishment, the Spicerean Outside, romance (w/ or w/o its isms), sublimity or ecstasy… Love, of course.
As it turns out—well, we knew it as soon as our friendship began over two decades ago (her capacity for empathy was so capacious and acute) but not quite to what extent—Cole and I were broken in many similar ways, and many places—and many similar senses too. We talked a lot about those similarities, but even more, perhaps, about the differences and different senses (of the heart, of brokenness, of broken hearts): about their commensurability (or not), their causal links (nor not) with one another, their resonances, mutual inflections, etc.
Well, “heartbreak” in any colloquial sense hardly does justice to what we’re all going through now—I’m assuming we all are, whoever “we” are (I can’t and wouldn’t speak for anyone)—but reading this again, today, felt huge to me: solace, recognition, and restoration at once.
Stephen Cope’s publications include George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, several chapbooks, pamphlets, and broadsides of poetry, and essays, reviews, and poems published and anthologized internationally. He was a founding editor of Essay Press, and is the host of Conference of the Birds, a weekly radio program/podcast of international and experimental musics that originates Friday evenings on WRFI in Central NY. Forthcoming or in-progress writings include Bellerophonic Letters (a book of poetry), Pedagogy of the Depressed (poems and essays), and Editions Vertiges, a continuation of Versiones Vertiges, a poem in different versions, first published in 2000. He is Associate Professor of Global Modernisms at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and serves as a Faculty Mentor in the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College, where he has taught since 2007.