Rose Lesniak, "a feminist poet who dazzled and upended the male-dominated literary scene in New York during the 1970s before suddenly bolting to South Florida, where she worked as a child abuse investigator and then--in the final act of her kaleidoscopic life--became a dog trainer," died on February 1, the New York Times reported. She was 70.
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| Rose Lesniak | |
Lesniak moved to Manhattan in 1977 after graduating from college in Chicago, where she edited Out There, a literary magazine. ''You know how they say somebody lights up the room?'' asked Bob Holman, a close friend from those days. ''Rose was actually the lightbulb. Being with her was like living on another planet. It was the Planet Rose.''
With her friend Barbara Barg, Lesniak "plunged into the avant-garde world that orbited the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, the Times wrote. "The stars were Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, John Giorno, and other men. At readings, Ms. Lesniak and her friends would heckle them, calling out their sexist tropes, sometimes by making loud animal noises."
''We weren't really anarchists, and we wouldn't hurt anybody,'' she said in an interview in Women in Independent Publishing: A History of Unsung Innovators, 1953-1989 (2024). ''We wanted to ask you: 'Why did you say that? Where'd that come from? Do you need therapy?' ''
Lesniak explained that she and her friends were fun: ''We'd all get high together, and we'd drink together afterward, and we'd get to know each other.'' They knew she was a serious writer, however, working on poems that were later included in her books Young Anger (1979) and Throwing Spitballs at the Nuns (1982).
Lesniak shared a loft in Chelsea with Barg, who was also a poet. They hosted readings and parties attended by Ginsberg, Giorno, Andy Warhol, and others. ''Everybody just wanted to be around Rose,'' said Eileen Myles, a poet and former lover of Lesniak. ''She was crazy beautiful. She was brash. She carried this big, exciting energy everywhere she went, in everything she did. There was nobody like her.''
To help pay the bills, Lesniak worked for Majority Truckers, "an all-female company that delivered gay male pornography to newsstands using old U.S. Postal Service trucks painted bright pink. (New York in the 1970s was something to behold.)," the Times wrote. Lesniak usually drove the truck. Author Sarah Schulman recalled that she "was the jumper. So we would stop at all these newsstands, and I would jump out with the deliveries. We'd go up Broadway and then come back down. Rose was extremely efficient.''
In the early 1980s, Lesniak helped start Out There Productions, an organization that funded and staged performance art, and the Manhattan Poetry Video Project, which produced short films in which poets recited their work.
''Rose was just full of life, love and the pursuit of poetry,'' Holman said. ''She was full of ambition for poetry and poets.''
In 1988, she left New York for Miami. ''I just wanted to get out and do something different,'' she said. ''I said, 'You know, I'm going to Florida, I'm going to do investigative work, that's what I want to do.' '' She worked as an investigator with the Florida Department of Children and Families, at an office in the special victims unit of the Miami Beach Police Department. In 2003, she reinvented herself once again by taking classes in positive-reinforcement, or ''force-free,'' dog training.
Lesniak told her friends that she had put poetry aside once she moved to Miami, but she did keep writing. In 2023, she published What the Dogs Tell Me, a collection of poems about her dogs, Martha and Joey.
From her poem "Little Dog":
And I am so proud, little dog,
To take your paw ...
We look out at the
Beautiful world...
And bark like hell.