IN MEMORIAM | Rene Ricard (1946 – 2014) by Raymond Foye December 18, 2014

RENE RICARD IN MEMORIAM | Rene Ricard (1946 – 2014) by Raymond Foye December 18, 2014 RR by Allen Ginsberg, 1986. Courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Estate. Growing up in Lowell, Mass., I often took the train to Even from an early age Rene Ricard was famous in the Boston to visit Gordon Cairnie’s Grolier Poetry Bookshop Boston poetry community for his wild beauty, fierce in Harvard Square, hoping to encounter an authentic poet. intelligence, and fearsome wit. He dropped out of school Harvard and Inman Squares in Cambridge had a handful after completing eighth grade because he knew more of cafes, storefront galleries, and publishing collectives. than his teachers, constantly correcting even his French The scene was dominated by the gothic shadow of John teacher in class. Soon he embarked on an independent Wieners, already possessed by drugs and madness. In a study program that largely involved seducing Harvard rare reading on Mother’s Day 1973, I witnessed a stunning boys. When I visited Provincetown for the first time in performance by Wieners, who read every poem he’d ever the early 1970s, Rene was also famous there. Even when written to his mother, about 15 in all. It was over in five there were only 15 or 20 people who knew who he was, minutes but remains as vivid as anything in my life. Thirty he was famous. It was an aura that surrounded him from years later on the day John Wieners died Rene Ricard left the start. a wet gray canvas at my door that read, in a desperate scrawl: “John Wieners, my mother, is dead. Oh my God.” RENE RICARD Born at the marvelously antiquated-named Boston Lying- In Hospital (later Brigham and Women’s), Rene would always bristle when his birthplace was listed as New Bedford. In his day that was a considerable step down, despite the fact that in the 19th century New Bedford claimed the highest number of millionaires per capita in the U.S. (courtesy of the shipping and whaling trades). Rene grew up in Acushnet, which was also the name of the ship on which Herman Melville went to sea before writing Moby-Dick. He had an abiding love of Melville, and in his younger photos I always see Rene as Billy Budd, the sensitive youth fighting to survive in a claustrophobic environment full of Catholic torment, gratuitous violence, and sublimated homosexuality. Rene told me the defining moment of his life was seeing a Warhol flower painting at the Boston ICA in 1966. “I sat in front of that painting for two hours and plotted out my entire life.” When Warhol came to Boston for the opening he shot several reels of the Chelsea Girls at the Cambridge apartment of Ed Hood, who was a close friend of Rene’s. Rene appears in the film, sitting silently on the bed, peeling and eating a grapefruit slowly enough to fill the 20-minute reel. I can say without irony the performance is riveting. Unlike most poets who were happy to give readings The exterior of 190 Bowery, at Spring Street. Credit Willie Davis for The New and attend each other’s, Rene hated to do either, so his York Times appearances were rare. When he did read he usually arrived at the last minute (extremely high) and left immediately after. He let it be known that for him poetry me up banging on my basement window that faced the readings were poor and déclassé, and anything less than street. He had a plan: he’d agreed to write an essay for a fancy cocktail party on the Upper East Side was well Pace Gallery and wanted to collect the $10,000 advance. below his dignity. There were, however, a few memorable We went up to West 57th Street and waited for the gallery readings, such as the one Rene shared with his then- to open. A check was written with a letter to the bank boyfriend. Between the time the reading was booked and manager and a few minutes later Rene had $10,000 in the evening it took place Rene and the young man had cash. We immediately went to the Russian Tea Room for split up, and Rene had composed a long hate poem filled bellinis, caviar, and vodka. The bill was $900. From there with the most embarrassing sexual details recounted we visited the Charivari boutique where he bought $900 in excruciating detail, which he recited with his friend’s worth of Jean Paul Gaultier underwear. The day went on parents sitting in the front row. This was typical of Rene: in this manner, and early the next morning I dropped him he was our Catullus, writing elegant and obscene poems at the men’s homeless shelter on the Bowery—penniless. of love and hate with brevity and dispatch. But maybe it was best to avoid him? Several days later I ran into him and inquired about the underwear, which for some reason was the thing that day Finally I met Rene at Allen Ginsberg’s apartment during that really impressed me. It had been stolen. He’d washed one of my first visits to New York in 1978. I was 21, he was it and placed it out to dry on a park bench and when he 31. I gave him my address and the next day he woke woke up it was gone. RENE RICARD I realized I had met one of the extraordinary figures I’d whom he adored, he never mentioned the family. Once always read about: Villon, Poe, Nerval. The classic poéte he thought he saw a brother on the street in New York maudit who lived by a crazy economy that involved and he spent two weeks hiding in his room, refusing to go throwing something away as soon one possessed it. Yet out. After he died and I cleared his room I found several throughout the day he repaid loans, treated his poorer touching letters from nieces and nephews reaching out to friends lavishly, and in general lived like the ruined him on the topic of art or poetry. I don’t think the letters aristocrat that he was—an esoteric French count fallen on were ever answered. Some were never opened. hard times. It is difficult to describe the fierceness of the man from this distance. “So many years and so few poems,” was what Warhol said to him in his fey but acerbic way at the book party for Despite that picaresque first day, it took me about four Rene’s first book. But Rene was not the prolific type. The years to win him over. Contempt, disdain, and mistrust poems were condensed, intense, and few. Some were lost were standard with him. As I got to know him better and he due to his disarranged life, but he also had the good sense told me about the beatings and sexual abuse he’d grown to always leave copies with (mostly) responsible friends. up with since the age of eight, his defensiveness became And when he hit on the idea of making poems/paintings, more understandable. The animal instinct to strike out the writing had a much higher survival rate. was always just below the surface, and did not take much to scratch. It was only after I’d edited two volumes of John But it was really the Artforum articles of the early 1980s, Wieners’s work, and told Rene I held his work in the same on Schnabel, Haring, and Basquiat, that put Rene on esteem, that he began to warm to me a little. center stage. (The world owes a considerable debt still unacknowledged to his editor Ingrid Sischy.) Importantly, One thing we shared from the start was our Massachusetts the dynamic had changed between Rene and his artists. background. He liked the fact that I knew of his hometown He was now their elder and they were his students. Not of Acushnet, a tiny farming village not far from Cape Cod. since Apollinaire and the Cubists was a poet able to stand Rene prized the local, and with our statehood pride we on the shoulders of his audience and explain the vast often used to laugh about Robert Creeley insisting he was terrain. No longer mere publicist or court jester, Rene was not from Acton but West Acton—a distance of about half a now teacher and mentor, and he loved the role because mile. Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Longfellow, Dickinson: it meant his vast body of arcane art historical knowledge Rene’s literary pantheon was likewise local. When the could be channeled into contemporary works. It made him Library of America began publishing their remarkable feel useful, which is pretty much all anyone wants in life. series Rene pointed out to me that 19 of the 21 writers from the 19th century were born within a 75 mile radius No artist made better use of what Rene had to offer than of Boston. Jean Michel Basquiat. Rene saw his work on the street and at the home of friends, and sought him out. His Rene’s feminine and extravagant side was always a remarkable work of agitprop on Julian Schnabel had just problem for him growing up. His book God With Revolver appeared in Artforum. At their first meeting Jean said, describes a scene where he was raped and molested by “Can you put me in the ring with Schnabel?” “I’ll lace up one of his older brothers and his gang of friends. An your gloves,” Rene replied.

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