R.I.P., R.P.

In the late '70s, when I was in high school, I saw a production of Kennedy's Children at the Penn State/Behrend theatre. After the show the playwright, a hippie longhair type in bib overalls named Robert Patrick...

...gave a Q&A about life in New York's Off-Off-Broadway Theatre scene, of which he was a co-founder; he wrote prolifically for Caffe Cino and LaMama and other celebrated venues of the period. Kennedy's Children was his most famous play, premiering in London before opening on Broadway in 1975, where it won a Tony for star Shirley Knight.

I was already something of a theatre geek, but Patrick's talk made a big impression on me about the possibilities for doing theatre outside the mainstream, even though I didn't have the nerve to ask him a single question. A few years later, in the '80s, I was assistant director of another production of Kennedy's Children, and also appeared in it.

Decades after that, in mid-2021, I connected with Robert over Facebook. He was in his '80s and lived in L.A., in poverty, I think, but also in seemingly immense good cheer, still socializing, still walking and photographing his neighborhood, still performing with underground groups...

...and most certainly still writing. He seemed to devote himself mostly to pouring out poetry--witty, urbane, sophisticated, classically learned, allusive, ruefully romantic, gloriously rhymed poetry, posting large amounts of it almost every day. Sometimes he would post five or six poems at once, under the heading "Who Left the Poet On?"

The best of this stuff was, to me, stirringly beautiful, but as far as I know he never submitted it for publication, though I doubt I was the only person who urged him to. He was probably right that his style was too out of fashion for most bigtime rags these days, but I hoped that maybe his illustrious status as both a New York icon and a gay icon might persuade some of the big mags to make an exception and publish some poetry that was actually, you know, good.

In any case, I regularly commented and messaged Robert in the most effusive manner--quite sincerely, mind you; he may have been my favorite living American poet. And then, alas, yesterday I was jolted to learn that he was no longer a living American poet. He had a date for coffee with a friend, and when he didn't show the friend had the police do a welfare check on his apartment. They found that he had died in his sleep, at 85.

I'm more rattled by this passing than I would have expected. I realized that I had, for the last couple of years, nursed the daydream that I would stage Kennedy's Children or one of his other plays here in the Valley somewhere, and bring him out here to soak up some well-earned adulation. Like so many projects I think of, I wish I'd jumped on it a little sooner.

I can't claim that I really knew him, of course, but I spent a long time last night going through the many lengthy online chats I was lucky enough to have with him, discussing everything from the poetry of Catullus to the Oscars. I sent him a few of my own poems, about which he invariably gushed and even kindly posted a couple of them on his own page.

The Thursday before Easter I sent him a poem of mine called "A Prayer for Maundy Thursday," and on April 12 he wrote back to say that he read it ten times and found it "...more frightening with each reading. What a brave poem." I'm choosing to take that as praise; in any case the idea that Robert Patrick saw fit to read anything by me once, let alone ten times, is quite an If My 18 Year Old Self Could See Me Now sort of moment.

He then asked me if I had ever heard the story that Dante's neighbors called him "the man who's been to Hell." I replied that I hadn't heard that, and he asked "Do you think Milton's neighbors whispered about his trip to Eden?" This was his last message to me; I messaged that maybe Milton's neighbors thought that's why he was blind, but he never replied.

R.I.P., and peace and joy eternal on your own travels sir. Thank you for the encouragement, the example and all that abundant, exquisite verse.