Cole Heinowitz was a poet….
Somehow, from all the accounts of her I read this morning, I don’t think the past tense is appropriate.
Cole Heinowitz remains a poet, scholar, and performer whose life brings to mind the question that Cary Nelson posed at the end of “Repression and Recovery”: “What is the social value of a life devoted to poetry?”
One possible answer is that the social value of a poet’s life resides in its capacity to articulate the munificence of a gift exchange economy. Given the number of other poets who have testified to Heinowitz’s generosity in sharing her knowledge, I am left with the wish that she could have spent more time on the West Coast; to that extent, there is an irony to the fact that she died while on a jaunt on a river in Northern California.
On Monday, October 27th, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in NYC will host a memorial service for her, at 8 p.m., featuring Cat Tyc, Carla Harryman, Christopher Funkhauser, Nada Gordon, Matvei Yankelevich, Barrett Watten, Anna Moschovakis, Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, Iris Cushing, Abe Etkin, Marianne Shaneen, Felix Bernstein, a performance by Shiba Nemat-Nasser, Lea Bertucci, and Stephen Cope.
For those unfamiliar with her work and life, I recommend the tributes that are posted in the Brooklyn Rail.
https://brooklynrail.org/tribute/a-tribute-to-cole-heinowitz/
https://brooklynrail.org/tribute/a-tribute-to-cole-heinowitz/a-tribute-to-cole-heinowitz-champion/
https://brooklynrail.org/tribute/a-tribute-to-cole-heinowitz/imagining-cole/
https://brooklynrail.org/tribute/a-tribute-to-cole-heinowitz/a-tribute-for-cole-heinowitz-cushing/
https://brooklynrail.org/tribute/a-tribute-to-cole-heinowitz/for-cole-kaufman/
https://brooklynrail.org/tribute/a-tribute-to-cole-heinowitz/for-cole-katz/
https://brooklynrail.org/tribute/a-tribute-to-cole-heinowitz/grays-elegy/
https://brooklynrail.org/tribute/a-tribute-to-cole-heinowitz/a-tribute-to-cole-heinowitz-cope/
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In today’s post, I would also like to note the passing of Susan Griffin, a West Coast poet whose work emerged of the small press movement in the 1970s with a publication by Alta’s Shameless Hussy Press. Griffin went on to instigate a critique that came to be known as ecofeminism. I was somewhat surprised to see that the New York Times allotted her significant space for an obituary, given that the NYT did not believe that Lyn Hejinian merited such a notice. Griffin’s generosity in giving of her life as a poet to address the environmental crisis, however, seems to have caught enough attention on the East Coast for the NYT to acknowledge her contribution to this discourse. Author or compiler of over 20 books, her writing was translated in 12 languages.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/12/books/susan-griffin-dead.html
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