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| Jim Cohn |
In
what can only be called an heroic effort on behalf of poetry, Jim Cohn has
built, repeatedly expanded and tweaked an enormous database in American Poetry
traditions and individual authors, and as the vision grew, the World Poetics of
which we are all a part—and he has done this largely alone over eighteen years,
using his own funds and research time to build this monument to poetry. At last count, The Museum of American Poetics
(MAP) contained 1272 exhibits—individual links and pages in twenty different
collections, an astounding task for a database handled by a single curator (see
Appendix for breakdown of collections and exhibits). The MAP website grew from its initial
emphasis on Beat and Postbeat poetries, developing as an online database for
poets, researchers, students, and those looking for new directions in the
art. He first developed the site (http://www.poetspath.com) as a result of a vision that came to him after Allen Ginsberg died in 1997, in which he foresaw
an encyclopedic webpage where poets might find representation on the net. Jim later convened a meeting at the West End
Café in Boulder with Randy Roark, Joe Richey, Thom Peters, and
Sue Rhynhart; Thom Peters suggested the words that became the MAP slogan: “The
Poetry of the Future is Opening Its Doors.” This became a guiding principle for the page.
Jim recalls, “it was a play on John Ashbery's famous line ‘The Academy of the Future is
Opening Its Doors,’” a quote he first encountered in Ted Berrigan’s “Sonnet 62.”
True
to his own collaborative spirit, he then wrote
to other poets, asking how they would envision such a page. Almost all were then neophytes in the possibilities of the net and some—myself
included—misunderstood the scope of the project he had envisioned, but the project got off the ground
and flourished. He notes that:
MAP
went live in January 1998. . . . The site at that time, and ever since, was
captured by Internet Archive, and it really is a matter of beginning to work on
the architecture of the site and graphics development as much as it was a
matter of content. It was a brave new
world back then.
A
Pattern of Organic Growth
One can trace the entire
phenomenal growth of MAP from its skeletal beginnings in December of 1998 to
the current 2017 page via the page’s Wayback Machine, which captures and
retains every change in the site, date by date, over 18 years of continuous
development (see http://web.archive.org/web/20041212204934/http://poetspath.com/transmissions/). The initial page featured Jim’s poetry magazine, Napalm Health Spa, as an online journal,
beginning with the digitized contents of the 1990-1997 print versions of the
journal, and extending from 1998-2015 in an annual upload that usually featured
works by twenty-two to thirty-eight poets, a robust group featuring mostly
Beat, Postbeat, “outrider,” poets from many diverse backgrounds, including
forays into newer territory, as in the work done by Chinese scholar Zhang
Ziqing with Vernon Frazer, Jim, and myself, among others. The long run of the magazine ended with three
major issues, each of them a formidable anthology: the 2013 Long Poem Masterpieces of the
Postbeats, featuring the works of 53 poets; the 2014 Heart Sons and Daughters
of Allen Ginsberg issue, with 63 poets, many of them represented by large
selections of their work; and the 2015 Anne Waldman: Keeping the World Safe for Poetry issue,
which had 71 major entries. The annual Spa would be a formidable task for any
editor or curator, but it was only one of the many areas that Jim developed for
the website.
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| MAP, 1998 |
That initial 1998 page
also featured the American Poet Greats Lecture Series, a Boulder series
featuring poets and former students of Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School
of Disembodied Poetics lecturing on elder poets that moved them. There was also an Exhibits section which
included submission guidelines for exhibits, and a variety of mostly
Beat-influenced or Beat pages, as well as exhibits by the Academy of American
Poets. The Floating Muse Bookstore
presented books on sale largely by Beat, Postbeat, and New York school poets,
and the Poetry Links page had twenty-three key links to poetry and poetics
which expand the vision into the larger domains of American poetry. The original MAP page, then, begins with a
vision of outrider, beat, and postbeat poetry, but already shows a desire to
develop a broader scope of American poetry in its first, foundational
architecture.
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| MAP, 2002 |
In
the following years, Jim would make major graphics changes to the homepage,
moving from the original black background with blue and blue/white lettering to
the rectangles in orange, pink, and chartreuse over a light blue or green
background (2002-2005).
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| MAP, 2006 |
2006 saw a major change to an attractive collage
featuring poets, designs, graphic acrobats, and an encircled number 5
reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’s famed Great Figure. In this incarnation, one had to enter through
this collage (E N T E R) to a more elaborate collage on the next page, which
also featured links to the contents of the site.
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| MAP, 2009 |
A more simplified approach came in 2009: a white background, photo of poets, a
mission statement and a double columned set of contents. This approach lasted until 2015, when an
expressionistic background in light moss green with scrape marks and white
swipes replaced the white page; the mission statement was removed and placed in an "About Us" link at the top of the page, and the contents
become more prominent.
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| MAP, 2015 |
Through all of these changes, there were
also incremental—sometimes massive—changes to the contents themselves; the
website became a poetics of sustained organic growth. 2006 saw a great expansion of individual
poets’ pages, with poetics organized by categories: ethnic or cultural or racial groupings:
Latino/a, Middle Eastern American poets, African American Poezee, Asian-Pacific
American poets, and Native American Words Between Worlds, The Sexuals,
Troubadours, Daughters of Stein, Invisible Empires of Beatitude, and Golden
Bodies. There were also Digital Vistas
and Magnificent Rainbow: Kids Form
Poems, and the introduction of a larger group of online readings. The inclusion of categories such as these has
persisted throughout the rest of MAP’s history; in 2010, for example, Jim
divided the exhibits into three major categories, beginning with International
Exhibits, including both Old Globe Masterminds, 20th Century
International Bards, and Today’s World Voices.
This move more directly connected American poetry with the rest of the
world, avoided what he called “America First Mind,” and it opened another door
to understanding poet greats “outside our borders as well as back in
time.” The Exhibits were divided into
two other categories that year, too:
Diversity Exhibits as those above given their own space, and Medium
Exhibits (Poets and Painters, Publishers).
The second decade of this century saw
further division in 2011: Transmissions
was developed with two categories:
Legacy Transmissions, involving cultural and poetics statements by
elders, “emancipating countercultural knowledge” left behind for those to come,
and the Postbeat Poets Activist Scholarship page, a gathering of then-younger
poets’ musing on poetics, their lives, their visions, as seen in statements,
interviews, speeches and essays. This
decade involved many other changes, too:
more multimedia poetics, as in the introduction of the MAP Channel
Youtube Poetry Videos (2012) and the 2015 film additions to the Medium
Exhibits. These include two
collections. First, Beat Generation
Films displays a fine collection of legendary films, ranging from Pull My Daisy and Dutchman to The Life and
Times of Allen Ginsberg and The
Poetry Deal: A Film with Diane di Prima,
and many others. The second group, Postbeat
Generation Films, includes Dylan’s Don’t Look Back, The United States of Poetry, Before Night Falls, Piñero, The Poetry of Wang Ping, An Evening with
Nikki Giovanni, The Last Waltz, Anne
Waldman’s Makeup on Empty Space, and Straight Outta Compton, with an
extensive group of interviews, short readings, talks, etc. from other leading
lights of this younger group. Finally,
2015 saw the development of a link to the new Facebook MAP page, giving yet
another portal for poets, scholars, students and those lovers of singing speech
and visionary dreams.
The
Guest Curators and the Latest Great Expansion
Perhaps
the largest change to the site came between 2015-2017, when Jim asked seven
guest curators to suggest additions to several major categories, expanding the collections
of pages by individual poets in each—a
necessary periodic task, given the growing and changing landscape of
contemporary poets. Thus, the great
Chinese-American poet Wang Ping took on Asian and Pacific American
Shapeshifters, I (David Cope) handled the Euro-American Shapeshifters, Andy
Clausen and Pamela Twining made significant additions to the Invisible Empires
of Beatitude, Ali Zarrin made us all aware of newer and overlooked poets among
Middle Eastern American Poets, and Dave Roskos and Ingrid Swanberg made
significant additions to the list of Publishers who have shepherded outrider
and gifted indie poets into print. 2016 also
saw the establishment of a Google Custom Search option on the homepage, which
will make the search for an individual poet’s work a matter of entering the
name of the poet.
Coda: Into the Future
At
this point, Jim has taken a break from further work on the page. His funds are barely sufficient to maintain
it, and he has occasionally expressed a wish to sell it to a university library
page or a college page which could maintain it for poets to come. MAP
is organized in a distinctly
different manner from college archives and their finding aids: it is strictly an online archive which,
through its search option, makes finding those poets’ pages archived here
quickly accessible, and its Wayback Machine makes tracking the growth of the
page a matter of clicking on dates. This
last option is important, given that the site is dedicated to a major
significant time in American poetics, the period of wars and freedom movements
from the Beats and Vietnam until today’s Syrian and other conflicts—one in
which experimentation was continuous and political and equality-based activism
was a part of one’s work. In all of its
incarnations, the MAP page serves as an exemplary model for DIY special
collection digital archiving which in some ways complements the physical
library and its special collections archives, and if some library or
institution were to take it on, the task would be to give it a presence on a
special collections page for poetry, and to continue expanding it and
maintaining it. Big task in a time when
such institutions are in the middle of retrenching and reinventing themselves
to keep up with the yearly revolutions in communication!
As is, the site does
present the architecture for many kinds of indie sites, both large and
small—one could envision sites devoted to a given scene, to a certain kind of
poetics. Imagine, for example, the best
of digitized readings by poets under 30, a site exploring the writing of many
kinds of poetic song lyrics, etc.—any of these could include search engines, a
Wayback Machine, changing graphics and newer forms of media and multimedia
presentations, and god knows what else.
Many of these sites are out there, but the question is whether they are
open to field-broadening suggestions, aware of the depth and breadth of the
chosen presentations in their fields, prepared to continually take on new
voices and new movements over the long haul.
Jim has done that throughout his history as a curator, engaging in big
conversations with potential collaborators and fellow travelers as a way to be
as inclusive and comprehensive as possible.
This is a major part of his genius.
MAP is, of course, a
tribute to one poet’s love of his art, of a major lifelong commitment to
expanding the varieties of expression available in the art, of dedication to
the many poetries of diversity. The
individual webpages themselves vary from fully developed pages useful to
graduate and undergraduate students, to Wikipedia pages that can serve high
schoolers and freshman or sophomore undergrads.
Poets of all stripes may encounter new brothers and sisters in the art,
expand their awareness of what their poetry might imply as a mode of
expression, and grow to appreciate those writing through adversity. Whatever comes of this website in the years
to come, Jim deserves enormous thanks for this sustained effort in the American
Grain of our poetics. Kudos—and if you
have lots of honestly earned funds, send them to Jim so that this great page
may live on without being turned.
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Jimmy and Isabella
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Appendix
Individual exhibit counts as of July 2016
Old Globe Masterminds - 113
20th Century International - 95
African American Poezee - 132
American Indians Words Between
Worlds -51
Asian-Pacific Verse Beings - 61
Daughters of Stein - 44
EuroAmerican Shapeshifters - 62
Ghost Rangers of the Wild - 70
Invisible Empires of Beatitude - 113
Latino/a Web Heads - 59
Middle Eastern American Poets - 47
Pioneer Masters - 50
Postbeat Era - 77
The Sexuals - 44
Audio Exhibit - 21
Beat Generation Films - 47
Postbeat Generation Films - 85
Magnificent Rainbow - 18
Poets & Painters - 26
Publishers - 57
Total # items in all of exhibits =
1272
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