This month, Chris Funkhouser visits the studio to discuss the life and work of poet, translator, musician, and professor Cole Heinowitz. Chris and Cole played music together in multiple Hudson Valley ensembles; we listen to audio from those projects as well as archival recordings of Cole reading her poetry.

Poet Ray'd Yo: Cole Heinowitz Tribute

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Cole Heinowitz was born and raised in San Diego, California. She earned a BA in creative writing and comparative literature from the University of California San Diego and an MA and PhD in comparative literature from Brown University. Prior to coming to Bard College, she taught literature and Spanish at Brown University, Brandeis University, and Dartmouth College. 

Dr. Heinowitz joined the faculty at Bard College in 2004 and became full professor in 2021. She was a vibrant member of the Division of Languages and Literature and taught courses that spanned Romantic and Gothic Literature, Romantic Imperialism, 20th-Century and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Cole Heinowitz was an unforgettable and unique teacher and colleague. Her mind and personality were magnetic and singular. She combined a mesmerizing presence, uncommon perceptions, and a deep and intense enthusiasm for scholarship and art and the community of learning. 

Most recently she led a seminar at BardNYC titled Poetry as Radical Community: New York Poetics from 1960 to the Present, that extended the classroom space to introduce students to the network of poetry communities active around them. Other courses Cole Heinowitz developed and taught at the College include: British Romantic Poetry, The Powers of Horror: Sublimity, Exoticism, and Monstrosity, Rewriting Conquest/ Envisioning Latin America, Poets Theater, Empire, Sexuality and the Making of Romantic Travel, Romanticism and the Philosophy of Language, and many more. Dr. Heinowitz also regularly taught First-Year Seminar and was co-director of the course, with Robert Weston, from 2013–2016. She was a guiding light of the Literature Program as director from 2016 through 2021. She joined the Language and Thinking Program faculty in 2024 and was a frequent guest speaker, introducing students to the world of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through a careful consideration of how “the creature has become such an apt metaphor for the diverse range of persons that society excludes,” ultimately encouraging her audience to consider interdisciplinary questions of kinship and belonging. 

An accomplished writer, musician, translator, and scholar, Cole Heinowitz’s unique gifts spanned many literary-historical fields, genres, and languages. She was the author of three books of poetry: Daily Chimera (Incommunicado, 1995), Stunning in Muscle Hospital (Detour, 2002), and The Rubicon (The Rest, 2007). She translated widely from Spanish into English, concentrating on 20th-Century Latin American poetry. Translated works include Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic (Ediciones Sin Fin, 2023; Wave Books, 2013) and Bleeding from All 5 Senses (White Pine, 2020), both by Mexican infrarrealist poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro; A Tradition of Rupture, the collected essays of Argentine poet and fiction writer Alejandra Pizarnik (Ugly Duckling, 2019); and Primeval Wing by Mexican poet Mara Larrosa (forthcoming from Ediciones Norteadas). Dr. Heinowitz’s translations from French include Succubations & Incubations: Selected Letters of Antonin Artaud (Infinity Land, 2020).

Cole Heinowitz’s scholarly and critical writings have appeared in the Keats-Shelley Journal, the Wordsworth Circle, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, the Chicago Review, and the Boston Review, as well as in the edited volumes The Oxford Handbook of Romantic Prose and Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Empire. She was also the author of the critical monograph Rewriting Conquest: Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Since Rewriting Conquest, she had been working on a book-length study exploring the poetics of direct communication with the nonhuman world, Poetry as Coexistence.

Dr. Heinowitz was the recipient of numerous awards and honors including a 2019 New York State Council on the Arts Grant (for her translations of Pizarnik) and the Cliff Becker Prize from the American Literary Translators Association (for her translation of Bleeding from All 5 Senses). She performed her poetry in a myriad of venues including the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, Washington Art Gallery at Dutchess Community College, the Boston Annual Poetry Conference, and the Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour. Rebecca Cole Heinowitz was also co-host and co-curator (with Iris Cushing) of the Imaginary Elegies Reading Series at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn, NY. 

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Christopher Funkhouser is a writer, musician, and multimedia artist who has authored of two scholarly monographs, Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archeology of Forms, 1959-1995 and New Directions in Digital Poetry. I have taught Communication and Media courses at NJIT since 1997, and was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Multimedia University, Malaysia, in 2006. As a publisher he worked closely with Amiri Baraka and Kamau Brathwaite, and many other writers and artists. He was commissioned by the Associated Press to prepare digital poems for the occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, and in 2016 he performed at the Whitney Museum’s Open Plan: Cecil Taylor exhibition. Christopher is a Contributing Editor at PennSound, host of the POET RAY’D YO radio program at WGXC (Hudson, NY), and is a member of the improvisational musical ensemble Most Serene Congress.

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"Specific Objects" is a monthly freeform discussion hosted by Miriam Atkin that invites artists from a variety of disciplines to describe, ponder, interrogate, interpret, and celebrate their current projects. The focus is on guests who live and work in the Hudson Valley/Catskills region, though people will occasionally visit from farther afield. Tune in to learn what artists in your neighborhood are thinking and making right now.

Miriam Atkin is a Catskills-based writer whose work concerns the possibilities of poetry as a medium in conversation with avant-garde film, music, and dance. She is cofounder of Pinsapo, an international publishing collective, and teaches writing around the Hudson Valley region at Bard College and the Otisville Correctional Facility.

Intro music: "Sing Out" by Joanna Mattrey