HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRUCE ANDREWS/R.I.P. ROCHELLE RATNER

Last night I went to a birthday party for old friend, poet Bruce Andrews at his partner, the dancer and choreographer, Sally Silvers’ East Village pad, as we used to call apartments back when I was first hanging around that neighborhood.

Somehow I wrote the address down wrong and where I had it was the middle of Tompkins Square Park. I worried for a minute I’d been punked, since it was April Fool’s Day, but eventually I found her place and the party and at it several old friends from the downtown poetry scene of the 1970s.

One of them, the poet and critic Charles Bernstein told me Rochelle Ratner had died the day before. Another loss, as time marches on but seems to be making more stops for family and friends these days.

Rochelle was not just a poet, but a poetry enthusiast. I liked her a lot and we spent many afternoons and post-poetry reading evenings in local bars talking poetry back in the ‘70s. She interviewed me once for one of the alternative newspapers of those days, THE SOHO NEWS, and produced a very flattering article for it that made me feel famous for a few days, at least on the downtown scene.

Rochelle and I didn’t have a lot in common, except for our poetry jones—as poet and publisher James Sherry put it last night, referring to all of the poets of those times as having a “poetry jones,” and pointing out that had a lot of us poets from those days been able to give up that jones, we would have been better at making a living.

At any rate, I felt the loss of Rochelle in my heart when Charles told me, that feeling of shock and loss, despite the fact I hadn’t seen her in many years, decades probably, though I’d heard from her and of her a few times over that period.

But the loss I felt was balanced by the fullness of what I found at the party, old friends and acquaintances, as well as new ones, hopefully, who have that same kind of jones, whether for poetry or dance, or whatever creative or intellectual expression that offers great rewards to the heart and soul but few, if any, financial rewards, and only fleeting fame or renown—or, as often in my case in the old days, notoriety.

That was the common thread connecting us all in Sally’s East Village space that was like a dance studio with a bed and bookshelves, and a sound system that still included a turntable and audio cassette tape player. It reminded me of the loft I lived in with my two older children back when Washington Market had just been renamed “Tribeca” by the real estate business.

Sally’s been dancing in downtown venues for decades, and like the rest of us was known to other artists, whether painters or dancers or poets or etc., especially from her collaborations with Bruce, but now may be a little better known to the wider world since the dance critic of THE NEW YORKER began giving her much deserved kudos.

It’s always a pleasure to see people whose work you dig getting the attention and acclaim they deserve, especially when you know that whether they get it or not, they will continue to do the work and keep developing as artists.

Most of the poets at Bruce’s party, at least the ones of his generation (the first wave of so-called “Baby Boomers” born after WWII, as opposed to my generation of “war babies” born a few years earlier) were associated with the creation of the poetry movement known as “Language Poetry.”

I was associated with that scene as well, as many others were when it began, but Bruce and Charles and James were central to it, both as poets and publishers (Bruce and Charles edited the magazine that brought their approach to the poem to a wider audience and influenced many younger poets to pursue the same or similar approach(es)—the little mag called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E).

I’ve been known to knock some of what that movement has wrought, including a kind of exclusivist demarcation that puts anything other than that approach into the realm of reactionary or backward looking creativity, a claim I would argue with strenuously, obviously. And just the generally elitist perspective of some of the “lang-po” (as people call it on Silliman’s blog and elsewhere) advocates.

But these guys were the originators, along with, as I said, many others, including friends who had a similar approach to poetry before the “language” moniker was even created, like Ray DiPalma, who I have written about before on this blog. And to their credit, they were usually more inclusive than many of their followers have become.

But all that aside, the pleasure of the party was seeing folks I hadn’t seen in years and some in decades, running into younger poets who I dig as well, like Anselm Berrigan and Corrine Fitzpatrick, and meeting people for the first time whose intellect and artistic interests made for stimulating conversation for me, though I suspect my life-story-anecdotes dominated the conversation.

And add to that the pleasures of a Spring evening, that finally felt like Spring, walking through Tompkins Square Park in the dark, remembering my first and great love “Bambi” as she was when I first met her, both in our late teens after she had just moved from Atlantic City to an apartment on the South side of the park, one of the very few African-Americans in the neighborhood back then, and all the changes I’ve seen that park go through over the years, and that neighborhood, from Eastern European ethnic working-class, to hippie central, to darker-skinned and more inclusive, through riots and celebrations, and now this ongoing gentrification that diminishes for me the power of the place, but obviously creates a new kind of urban personality that will go through its own phases over the course of my little boy’s life as his yet-to-be-labeled generation grows old.

And isn’t that what the “poetry jones” and other creative compulsions that cannot be denied are all about? That unstoppable drive to extend into the unknowable future not just the genes and/or the personal and generational history, to see it continue to live and infuse the future with the meanings that mattered to us, but also to see the intellectual and artistic discoveries and subsequent developments inspire the next generation of creative activity, to take future generations to places of not just inspiration, but contemplation and engagement, even enlightenment, or—not to be dismissed—entertainment, and pleasures beyond the intellectual and artistic. Pleasures, perhaps, yet to be discovered.

Maybe someday they'll even discover the "poetry jones" gene, and other creative cimpulsion markers. I certainly know that I was born with mine in me already. I remember making the decision to become a musician, an actor, and other creative activities I've pursued in my lifetime, but poetry? I was born with that jones.