The Brooklyn Rail

Cole was thigh-high in gently rushing water heaving bulky rocks out of the Esopus Creek onto the shore that lined her property. This is the image I saw at the devastating moment I learned of her drowning. It was an image of ardent energy more than athleticism, of familiarity with moving water and rock more than of recreation. My image gave her shorts and a cotton knit top, attire that lent her the appearance of having seized a moment without having stopped to change. Even so, this was as much an instance of ritual as it was a moment of spontaneity. The spontaneity came from the rock-heaving at an unplanned moment. Without pause she had headed out the kitchen door and down stone steps and into the water. The ritual aspect came from her devotion to the creek, which was broad enough to seem a river. Hurricane Sandy had left it murky and crowded with rocks needing to be moved so that it could clean itself; Cole sustained this activity with a will to return the river to ecological equilibrium.

Another instance of ritual: it must have been in the early aughts when Cole was still living in faculty housing on a shady cul-de-sac near the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies. I was doing a summer stint at the MFA program, and there was to be dinner at Cole’s. Her best friend Shiba Nemat-Nasser was coming down from Boston. Cole greeted us with white tubs stationed in front of straight-backed chairs in her living room. They were filled with warm water infused with salt she had brought home from a trip to the Red Sea. She sat us in the chairs to soak our feet, drying them with soft white towels and then massaging them with a light oil. The hot workday had ended in a heavenly moment that segued into intense conversation that went long into the night, conversation I can now recall only for its intensity and Cole’s, always mind-brightening, verbal alacrity. In a celebration of Cole at Pete’s Candy Shop in Brooklyn, I read her list poem, “Into the Road” to highlight her quick-witted vocabulary, as well as her crisp sound-sense and sharp timing. One cannot recollect Cole’s expressive physicality without also making note of her multidimensional verbal acuity. Here are a few lines:

rock Sally dimple pile ledge dog
buoy nestle sleep fashion cherry head
Eustace jersey kindle muddle mind frock
Milk thistle Windsor Mary mig sop

The last time I saw Cole was in Barrett Watten’s company in July 2023, over a series of days in the Hudson River Valley in which there was a visit to her Boiceville house, tea in Hudson with our son Asa and his partner Ora, and a series of performance rehearsals at Rachel Levitsky’s Woodstock house for a festival at the Flow Chart Foundation. The Flow Chart events included Cole performing as a Typewriter Instrumentalist and Hannah Arendt in my poet’s theater play Hannah Cut In and a barely rehearsed reading of a current favorite play of Cole’s, John Wieners’s Asphodel, in Hell’s Despite, in which I read the part of The Woman, and Cole performed, spectacularly, the part of The Girl in the Green Dress.

The last we corresponded was on January 12, 2025. She texted, “Happy late birthday from San Diego dearest Carla,” under a photograph of a La Jolla hillside with electric yellow wildfire blazes tumbling down it about to consume a silvery plant with red blossoms. This was followed by notes about our just missing each other in San Diego as Cole would be returning to Bard to teach before we were headed that way to attend the memorial for Jerome Rothenberg at UCSD, the university where Barrett, as a visiting writer, had had a sixteen year-old Cole in a poetry class and I had later taught and socialized with her over several terms; and where Jerome Rothenberg, Michael Davidson, and Rae Armantrout had been steady lights of her undergraduate education. Stephen Cope, her long-time friend and now grieving partner, was also part of this world as a grad student studying the Objectivists in the Literature program.

Cole wore a green dress at our Hannah Cut In rehearsals, the color of dress for the Hannah Arendt figure in my play as well as for the girl in Wieners’s play. In a photo of that rehearsal against a backdrop of aluminum siding she and Marianne Sheehan are seated at a long table next to each other in front of the manual typewriters used as instruments for the performance. Marianne is making notes on her score, and Cole, in the foreground, faces the camera with her head slightly tilted, her eyes looking off to the side. At her waist, she holds a zip-lock bag at its edges with the thumb and index finger of each hand. Her hands have the flexible and smooth look of a child’s. She appears to be striking a pose for the camera while she is also paying attention to something else beyond the scene of the rehearsal. One can look at any number of images of Cole and make up a story, which I will refrain from doing here; but for me the details in this picture add to the sense that she was, as she often was, in more than one place at once, or doing or performing more than one thing at one time, or expecting something consequential coming from more than one source while also being genuinely focused on an objective.

Our mutual interest in performance goes back to the early-mid nineties and a course I taught at UCSD on poetry and performance. Our readings included Guy DeBord’s film and film script Society of the Spectacle, Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double, Fiona Templeton’s YOU-The City, and Ben Jonson’s Masques. We had some wild conversations about whether or not her play Aways Both had to take place in an actual colosseum, the relationship of written description in the play to utterance and performance, the relationship of concept to literal presentation and scale of performance, and what an actual rupture between theatrical time and space would look like, with the scale of the human and monumentality coordinated such that an audience could experience the live performance. Or maybe there would be no audience and everybody would be part of the performance with or without knowledge of it. The text seemed to generate more options than it could hold. Here is a sample from her notes: “The colosseum is extremely high. Seats set at a grade of 80 to 85 degrees. Seat backs are propped at a slight incline. Retractable food trays attached to the armrests. Two types of faux vendors circulate through the audience.”

Her play got into my dreams for a while, and my dream-life turned her play into a recurring dream reality in which the petite Cole took command of a vast amphitheater with steeply raked seating and with all the action taking place in the audience.

“‘External’ players wear concealed body mics which project their voices through speakers inside and outside the colosseum. They sit among the audience, as the audience.”

In the spring of 2001 for a symposium at Oxford Brookes University, Cole performed in my play Performing Objects Stationed in the Sub World along with Redell Olsen, cris cheek, and Miles Champion. Cole had been taking classes and doing research at the university in Seville for her Ph.D. in comparative literature on the topic of British Romanticism and Spanish America, a study that led to her phenomenal book Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777-1826: Rewriting Conquest. Barrett and I had visited Cole there a few months earlier. My hope was that she was still in Europe, a hope that turned into a life changing event. She was desiring a break from scholarly research and lectures, so she grabbed the chance to spend time rehearsing and hanging out with fellow poets. From the outside, it seemed pretty evident that Miles and Cole held in common a facility with verbal expression that would foment something between them.

But what was Cole like in the play? She was at ease in uncomfortable situations when it came to art making. I remember her having an aptitude for performing on the floor; sadly the video documentation was lost in the mail.

In his presentation at Cole’s memorial at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn, Barrett recalled our visit with Cole in Seville, where, even though a bit run-down from studies, she offered buoyant company and guided excursions she thought would particularly interest us. Barrett had mentioned something I’d almost forgotten, a cavernous roadhouse she took us to on the outskirts of the city. It was a place we could go only with a local—or Cole, whose ability to fit into low-life-gothic and otherwise (other) worldly environments with linguistic ease is worth remarking. I recall the bar having dirt floors, perhaps incorrectly, that its walls were also earthen or made to look so. Candles seemed the only light source. Our faces flickered in chiaroscuro and people appeared in and out of blackness and shadow. Its curving walls were decorated with skulls, crosses, and World War I and Civil War paraphernalia. We became bit players in a theater of historical palimpsest. It may be that Cole and I were the only women present. A familiar there, she bantered with servers.

On the day of the memorial in Brooklyn, I was distracted by worry about my Iranian friends, their sleepless nights, their fear for their families and friends and culture, the toll this was taking on them and by extension a multitude that extends to anyone where bombs will land. One of these friends was Shiba. I was feeling rage at US support of and complicity in the bombings. In order to do Cole justice at this awful moment, layered in grief as it was, I felt I needed something to override my anger, a curse, something to break a spell. I was certain I would find something along the lines of a curse in one of Cole’s three books of poetry. I opened Daily Chimera, her book of poetry, prose, and plays published in 1995 when she was twenty. I wasn’t looking for something thematically related, but for words with the tone of a curse:

Jack

You have bored a hole in the wall and fucked it. Sawdust is everywhere, it cuts you. You’re the man that bored my hole and look, I’ve made you a poem. I took this tongue and musiced your dull throb even though I swear you disgust me. If I let you speak it would only be to humiliate yourself—but not in the early morning, not at twilight, and not in hotels. You are invisible speaking behind words that you call blunt. You are an airborne virus caught up in the walls.

When I read the poem, it dispersed and shared the fury, and it put us in contact with Cole. The poem is part of a sequence titled “Five Poems from the translation of Jeff Grimes’s His Body Smiled”. This is the first published work of Cole’s I know of that is identified as a translation, a transposition in English from fiction to poetry. The marvel of Cole’s writing resides in part in its embrace of many genres and its invention of genre as well, which emerges afresh in largely unpublished writing that addresses her poetics of coexistence, a practice that as her collaborator Iris Cushing states, is “a way of experiencing life and the world that transcended the ordinary bounds of human perspective.”

Cole is the only person I can say I knew before I knew her. In the early 1990s Barrett told me that he had met a sixteen year-old student that was a kindred spirit of mine. Something about Barrett’s transmission caused me to know she and I would meet.

In the summer of 1993, in a classroom at Naropa University Summer Writing Program I asked students gathered around a long seminar table why they were taking the class. A young woman with long dark curls was sitting directly opposite me at the foot of the table. She held up my book Animal Instincts: Prose, Plays, Essays and said, “you.” A day or two later, after there had been time for students to write, I saw Cole walking alone across a sunny lawn wearing a long, sleeveless, midnight blue vintage dress. She had been up all night and wanted to show me her notebook. From there we launched into a conversation on the topic of impossibility and opera, or that’s how I imagine it now.

*

Coda

In making an account of moments spent with Cole Heinowitz, I followed remembrances that led one to the other, that came readily to mind, and that felt appropriate for a public imagining. Yet, it is what Cole made of her capacious language gifts that in part sew the social relations that bring us together now. Her book publications most easily accessed are of her translations, including selections from the late letters of Antonin Artaud, the Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s critical writing, and two volumes of poetry by the Mexican Infrarealist Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. Many of her works are difficult if not impossible to find or access. Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777-1826: Rewriting Conquest is available as an ebook through academic library sources and for purchase at an exorbitant price. There is much to contemplate, between her critical readings of British Romantic poets’ ideological investments in and responses to the Spanish Americas and her own deep investment in “ways of representing the full integration of the poet into all areas of life,”an attitude that inspired the Infrarealist group in the mid-1970s and that becomes part of the weave of Cole’s thinking, translating, poetics, and teaching. The rarest of Cole’s writings are her books of poetry, all of which are out of print. And for this reason, I want to draw a bit more attention to Cole’s poetry.

The poem “Into the Road” I cited earlier stands out in Stunning in Muscle Hospital for its gleeful sonic materiality. (You can listen to Cole’s reading of the complete poem here). The rest of the poetry in her truly stunning collection is more muscular, drawing from narrative devices to bend and refashion conventions of poetry and prose into poetic lines that are full of movement and displacements that reimagine the relationships of parts to wholes. Her poem “Five Men” is a favorite of mine, and perhaps it was of hers, as you can find it in two of her three readings put up on PennSound. It’s as if novel or Western genre movie were condensed to twenty lines, lines that provocatively torque games of gender, sexuality, and genre as played out in conventional narrative and land upon instances of comic automatism, “Finally it started to rain. / The droplets fell against the shopkeepers ‘daughters’ / faces, their maidenheads running in the streets.”

This line of exploration can be identified with avant-garde feminist and queer poetics that work against the logics of stable categories. Cole’s address to these interests are charged with linguistic play, eroticism, and imaginative excess:

Line, Euclid’s child, had no desire                                                                              
to free Eurydice when he vibrated                                                                              
a rope for the mind using flesh                                                                              
for an alphabet, but what if the heart                                                                              
leaps in a grateful subjection different                                                                              
from these object rotations for evident                                                                              
masters? Could that bee express it                                                                              
or is the bee itself a stand-in for other                                                                              
borderers bulging in some kind of wave                                                                              
to become a giant man?                                                                              

These lines are from the penultimate poem in her serial work The Rubicon. The poems appear as flush right compositions on the verso page and flush left composition on the recto. In a comment at a Segue Series Reading, Cole remarks on how she had only recently come upon the term “crossing the Rubicon,” the trope for “a classical model of history made by unchangeable choices by great men and then nothing can ever be the same.” She continues:

That model of history was so attractive to me, that there could be such moments of such gravity. And I thought okay I’d like to try that model on for size … a model in which there is one picturesque pivotal moment, and I could not do it, I could not think that way. So what resulted was a series of poems about my inability to believe in that historical progression. It seems pretty obvious …so what’s here turns out to be what’s left out of that narrative.… It turns out to be an extremely disjunctive poem … if you don’t feel that you are crossing a Rubicon, that’s fine.

The look of the poems with the alternating right and left flush margins give me an impression of uncultivated terrain with a lot of geographical variation; or alternatively I imagine them as zones that have been trammeled, grown over, and activated by all that has touched them. The alternating form also suggests a pairing of cultures across linguistic divides; Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian are read from right to left, and Hebrew would be one of Cole’s languages.

The first stanza, in a cut-up fragmentary fashion characteristic of much of the writing, invokes the co-presence of disjunct historical periods and modes of destruction mingled within an immediate physical and tactile present:

Whether the plain in flames
said whole for the Sphinx
remarkably used to machines
you see grains would betray
us heads that I stepped on
from cracks in the leaves

The diction of these works is drawn from numerous samples: high literary diction mingles with contemporary relaxed expression and idiom. The poems are remarkable for their grammatical inventiveness, of drawing fragments into an un-replicable, mixed sound that shows Cole as a star DJ of word and phrase. In fact, music and song are frequently referenced in these works, as are Virgil, ethics, and waves to name some repeated words that stand out in my present reading. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” seems to shadow the work as does the dark romantic, Herman Melville. This stanza from poem “23,” set on the recto page across from the segment of poem “22” I quoted on the verso page earlier, offers an instance of her references to music and song.

In skulls that oft
blank the mid-sea
curved in leaping part
huge of bulk
his branching whole
head and voice
I show that
the precipice demands music
like myself
and so we sing

To be continued…