Remembering Cole

R. Cole Heinowitz, who died in May at just 50, was an accomplished poet, translator, scholar, and rate-my-professor-star, as well as an inventive saxophonist. She was also my friend. I first met Cole back when we were both “just kids” of the poetry scene of the 1990s. 

I re-met Cole again after a long caesura in 2023, at a Hudson, NY bar and a friend’s house party nearby afterward. She still resembled an art brut Mary Pickford, with her black hair, her white skin, her red-lipstick-ed-mouth a cupid’s bow.

“How did you become someone so interested in the real world?” she asked me, with her glamorous lisp. Since knowing her in our early twenties, I’d become a journalist and she a bona fide scholar, but the truth was the reverse: I was still an academic closetcase and she was the one who really lived, in the realm of the senses. The later-life Cole was delighted by Esopus River’s grit, the Hudson River’s state-spanning length, the heights of trees, the loam of New Orleans, and a Brooklyn that was for her as full of plants as it was jammed with people and commerce. Being with her, you felt she was someone who could blur lines between groups, major categories, and even species. This was true of nature.  As she wrote, “[w]hat kind of poetry does this intimate and potentially unsettling coherence with the world of animals, minerals, and plants (as well as ghosts, viruses, iphones, toxic waste dumps, and global warming) call for?” Her answer was partly her poetry, which offered acts of attention to the earth—from snail slime to the sea to mammals’ breathing. In this way, she was in line with the great naturalist Charles Darwin: while the popular understanding of his is often a nature-is-violent cliché, in truth, he didn’t think it was all gory melodrama. Just revisit his account of how mistletoe grows around trees, symbiotically, a parasite that lives off two hundred species of shrubs. In other words, nature itself is also in a state of mutual aid. Cole liked that framing, what I and others call “socialist Darwinism.” 

Could Cole be called something of a socialist Darwinist? After all, she encouraged me and other friends to take weeds seriously—weeds as in marginalized or despised plants. 

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I first met Cole at the Ear Inn in the 1990s, on a sunlit New York City day, when we were descending into a reading, as we did routinely, in a dark bar—we would attend these readings devotionally, as if we were sailors or seminarians. Our scene was constituted of hand-distributed mimeographed zines and small presses, of living room readings and bar sets, coming together on the West Coast and in New York City in the long wake of the New York School and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movements, It crossed nonchalant coterie urbanism and a quasi-neo-Marxist formalism. When Cole gave a reading, I’d be particularly entranced. I remember one reading at the venue Double Happiness in Chinatown, when she read the poem: “That’s all.” “I see the truth now/it sparks my desire and my wretchedness.” In retrospect, those days seem sepia to me, every bit of an Atlantis of literature, bohemia and literary pettiness as my parents’ Beat era. In retrospect, our 1990s poetry scene carried the spirit of the 1970s. Cole and I were among the younger figures there, trailing the experimental poets we admired with the devotion of novice abbots.

Back then, Cole told me and others she had joined a young socialist organization as a teen—she routinely impressed less politically-formed young poets with her ideological clarity. She would sometimes talk about being raised in an English-speaking household in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood. It explained how she grew up bilingual, crossing the San Diego-Tijuana border back and forth, in the years when NAFTA was passed, in a punk and art scene that was both American and Mexican. In conversation, she could seamlessly slip from Spanish to English. With her friends at the time, she painted a mural of Subcomandante Marcos on the front of a co-op she ran with them. 

Even in the 1990s, Cole read Romanticism into poets who might themselves have been surprised to be named as such, including Jack Spicer and John “I took love home with me” Weiners. The critic Felix Bernstein, her mentee and colleague, would explain this, when he wrote recently, “As Cole began teaching in the late ‘90s, her version of Romanticism became increasingly untethered from any period, nation, or canon. She constructed her own poetics, based on intuition, translation…” Some of her best work—her translation, her conversation, her poetry—was rapid and cross-pollinated, as if produced by a manic bee. 

She brought this same untethered and potent poetics to her friendships. Every time I spoke to her, her attention to a topic or a person was intense to the point of mesmeric. Her remarks were always perfect sentences, as if from a book—her comments were also like sculptures rising up in the air for their sound and precision. Her outfits were also singular—vintage silk dresses, black men’s cut trousers. She and her friends would sometimes walk the streets of Williamsburg or Greenpoint at night in the early naughts, after leaving one friend’s huge, falling-down floor-through on Manhattan Avenue with limited cold water, near an indoor fish farm, observing and partially participating in gentrification, before the finance bros took it to maddening levels.

But Cole wasn’t just some hipster flaneur. She obtained a real tenure track job at 30 at Bard College, which was awfully hard to do: already by then such jobs were a rare commodity. She also published acclaimed translations from the Spanish of the poets Alejandra Pizarnik and Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. 

Over the course of decades, Cole created and recreated her own name in a Romantic fashion as well, like a modern-day Pineda or Pesoa. In her lifetime, Cole traversed from her given name of Rebecca to the downhome-Ashkenazi-girl appellation Becky, to the academic grandee title R. Cole Heinowitz, and finally to Cole.

I last saw Cole soon before she died in a tragic accident in a river in Northern California, when I read in a poetry series she co-curated with her friend Iris Cushing, Imaginary Elegies, at the bar Pete’s Candy Store. My mother had just received a diagnosis of liver cancer: before the event, I walked the rainy streets of Williamsburg, crying and talking on my cell. 

When I got to the venue Cole immediately wrapped me in her signature embrace. She was in a nervous place herself—she was looking for a new home. Yet her face was also lit up, both by the venue's David Lynch-ian red lighting scheme and a fresh happiness. (I later heard she had just fallen in love.) She held my head in her hands and stared into my eyes: I felt more witnessed—witnessing was one of her numerous gifts– than I did by many. “Are you—is it—alright?” she asked. 


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Alissa Quart is the author of five acclaimed books of nonfiction including Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream (Ecco, 2023). They are Squeezed, Republic of Outsiders, Hothouse Kids, and Branded. She is the Executive Director of the non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She is also the author of two books of poetry Thoughts and Prayers and Monetized. She has written for many publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and TIME. Her honors include an Emmy, an SPJ award and a Nieman fellowship. She lives with her family in Brooklyn.