The Face of Downtown

Every place and time has a representative personality. For downtown New York in the period just ending—the New York of Soho and the East Village, middle 1980s—the representative personality is a certain type of bohemian, similar to other bohemians we have known, but with distinctive traits. No single art work has managed to evoke this personality in all its characteristics. We do not have a Henry Murger, no Scenes de la vie de l’avenue A, not yet, anyway. Nonetheless there are portraits. I point to one called The Birth of the Poet.

The Birth of the Poet was a spectacular theatrical failure of 1986 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was a collaboration by Richard Foreman (staging), Kathy Acker (book...