Chelsea Debarros: What is poetry to you?
Jim Cohn: The 20th century poet William Carlos Williams had a theory about the nature of poetry and language that helped me appreciate what poetry is early on. WCW argued that there are two functions of language. Its secondary function pertains to the informational: science, technology, culture, society, politics and journalism. The informational is the material realm, the world of suffering. Williams then went on to say that the primary function of language is poetics. That is, the generative, creative and imaginational realms of language––the engines of poetry––are its primary function because language, like people, changes and adapts to the new, the present. For me, that suggested a personal engagement with bardic liberation within myself: with cutting the ground of ego, and with using one’s sensorineural radar to encourage others to walk in the long march of freedom, justice and equality throughout history, time and space. Using the power of language to secure feelings of spaciousness, mindfulness, openness, compassion, sustainability and peace, I can draw a line from WCW’s notion of poetry’s aesthetic primacy over information back to Shelley’s notion of the poet as the world’s “unacknowledged legislator.”
CD: What influenced you to start writing poetry as a vocation?
JC: The question you’re asking revolves more around taking on the poet’s walk of life. Taking on the poet’s walk of life isn’t something most people want to take on. They would rather hold poetry up on a pedestal for special occasions and engage in it as little as possible. What happened to me happened to me as a teenager. I was taken by lyrics and music, but I didn’t see going to concerts or listening to records as entertainment. I wasn’t entertained by the poets and singers I grew up listening to. I was being instructed through engagement in the art they were making and I studied their work and their work influenced me directly. I was learning from the work I listened to and I was influenced by it to aspire to enter the arts myself.
The first book that grounded me for the poetry walk of life I took up was one I read in my late teens or early twenties. The book itself was somewhat shrouded in mystery. I’m speaking of Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Castaneda was getting his masters in anthropology at UCLA and the book appeared as a result of his Anthropology master’s thesis as if it were an authentic ethnography. Other significant authors who were also ethnographers include the Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston and Beat Generation poet Gary Snyder. Although Castaneda’s books are understood today to be fictional, he did suggest through the real personage or fictional character of a Yaqui Indian sorcerer named Don Juan Matus that one follow a “path with heart.” Those words were critical to me as I was trying to decide what I would “do” “with” “my” “life.” Here’s what Castaneda’s book said that so lit me up on the question of how do you decide your own path in life: “Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.”
For me, the writing of poetry was neither a vocation nor an avocation back when I began nor is it today. Back then, I had moved to Missoula, Montana, into a tiny shack maybe 300 square feet I was renting over the fall 1978 through the spring of 1979. I’d just received a letter from Allen Ginsberg accepting me as a teaching assistant at Naropa’s Kerouac School. After reading the letter, I went outside on what was a 30 below zero and hip-deep snowy Missoula night when I felt a great and knowing sense that poetry was going to be my life. I told my mother about the experience over the phone. She replied, “But honey, everybody writes.”
CD: For new readers learning about your book of collected poems for the first time, would you explain its title, Treasures for Heaven, and say something of its origins?
JC: “Treasures for Heaven,” the title poem from which the book takes its name, came after a talk given by a Kerouac School colleague named Randy Roark. Randy had just completed a lecture on Bob Dylan’s praxis of offering different versions of his own material in concert. In the follow-up Q&A, Allen Ginsberg suggested that Dylan had work that nobody would ever hear. That work, Allen suggested, Dylan was leaving as “treasures for heaven.” This was in the summer of 1992. I wouldn’t get to writing the poem “Treasures for Heaven” until 1999. And the book Treasures for Heaven wouldn’t be published until 2022. So, I’d been carrying around these three words in my head about this idea of poetry nobody sees for three decades. I realized immediately that leaving my own “treasures for heaven” would be an accurate way of describing both my life and work as an artist and as a person because I had no interest in fame and fortune. I had no real interest in the book industry either because I was unwilling to look for approval outside of myself over the merit of my work after reading Jack London’s novel Martin Eden, a book admired by the Beats. I came up considering the idea of submission of manuscripts to be a form of institutionalized slavery. I would have also disagreed with anyone who considered me a hobbyist.
CD: Having begun writing these poems in 1976 and having continued to the present day, did you know that would happen? What inspired you to begin this organizing process?
JC: I had zero idea what would happen to me as a novice poet or how long I might feel enamored with making poems or contributing to poetry culture. Some students in my cohort were shattered by the experience. I was electrified. I didn’t know if I had anything to contribute or if I would have anything to contribute. All I knew was I was both woodshedding and experiencing the culture of poetry firsthand, and that it gave me great pleasure to see my thoughts on the page and how changing my thoughts on the page could be considered medicinal and healing for myself and perhaps for others.
I came up in a poetics mix of diverse performative and progressive poets from various schools and communities, as well as musicians, social and political activists associated with the Beats and their impact on the Postbeats. All the vital news you get from poetry that you can’t find elsewhere I feel that I found at the Kerouac School. As one of Ginsberg’s TA’s and students, as well as my being a student of Anne Waldman’s, I was introduced into organizational aspects of poetics and building poetry communities, be these aspects related to compiling one’s own books, the books of others, editing and publishing poetry magazines or coordinating poetry reading series. This was during a period when the analog poetics world was shifting into the digital, but these master poets I studied with had a handle on all aspects of walking a poet’s life that was quite useful starting out.
In the years since working with Ginsberg in 1980, as well as the quarter century he’s been gone, I’d recall from time to time that Allen was working on his collected poems for that book’s first edition at the time of my teaching assistantship with him. Many of the later poems that went into the first edition I had the privilege to hear him read just after he’d written them and a few I published for the first time in print. And then to see his collected poems when it came out, I appreciated the fact that he was quite forensic in his dating poems and posting their locations where they were composed. Context mattered to him. I marveled at the book’s depth, breadth and scope of forms and topics, his X-ray language, the psychological and cultural revolutions that he in large part masterminded, and simply his first edition collected poems sheer size at 838 pages.
It intrigued me that he included his own endnotes. That was something I aspired to do with Treasures for Heaven. That, and to provide essential context was something I tried to cultivate with my own annotations which in some ways were determined by my revisiting the design of Allen’s original endnotes layout in his Collected Poems: 1947-1980 (HarperCollins, 1988). Allen was also of a mindset that the trajectory of a poet’s work across a lifetime provides a “model of mind,” something that could be of use to society, the arts, and likely to neurology and psychology as well as ongoing studies of consciousness. Ginsberg was 54 years old when he was working on the first edition of his collected poems. I began organizing mine in my 66th year.
CD: Can you please describe your poetry writing process? How did you establish your unique poetry writing style/form?
JC: You’d have to go back to Frank O’Hara’s tombstone at Green River Cemetery in Springs, New York, and the words there: “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.” I once heard Tom Waits say to the effect that fame and fortune is like having a sandwich named after you. I really had no desire to attain that. The energy of life’s changing nature was something I wished to portray across the span of my work. We know that Golden Ages of Poetry have come about in history as a result of the language of the street, vernacular language, overcoming the official language of state.
I have a deep sense of how language changes and grows in order to keep up with all the new naming of new things, new situations. I also have a strong sense of how racial, ethnic, gender, sex, religion and disability keep evolving new vocabularies as well as new ways to consider history, such as critical race theory or the 1619 Project. Pound’s dictum––make it new––is something timeless that I believe every poet aspires to as a response to experiencing the changing nature of language in one’s time. But do I have a “signature” style? There is no “Jim Cohn” poem that encapsulates what I manifested. Instead, I thought of myself more as a tertön, a term within Tibetan Buddhism that refers to a person who recovers hidden or lost teachings, called terma.
My writing began in the field. Not necessarily Charles Olson’s “open field.” More akin to Whitman’s lines “Now I see the secret of making the best persons, / It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth” from “Song of the Open Road,” (6) in Leaves of Grass, upon which Treasures for Heaven is modeled. All I needed back then was a cheap back pocket copybook and a pen and that post-Kerouac, Grateful Dead idea to “get out of the door and have a look all around.” I grew up attracted to Chinese and Japanese poetry and art in my teens because I saw nature animated in ways you don’t see in the Western canon. Here, the natural world is largely displaced in poems by matters of identity and the “I.” My Oriental poetic heroes, both poets and painters, had the capacity for downplaying the “I” for a more emotionally signifying imagery that allowed readers to fully enter the poem. Whenever I was field writing in nature, pulling back on the I-experience and allowing the sacred experience of being one with nature to permeate the poem was what I was documenting.
My poetry is clearly image-based. Ezra Pound argued early in the 20th century that there are three kinds of poetry: melopoeia: the charged sound and rhythm of language; logopoeia: the wit and wiles of language play; and phanopoeia or the casting of images on the visual imagination. Both Pound and later Ginsberg affirmed that the image was the only one of the three types of poetry that can be translated clearly and vividly. I would see this power of images in a proof that occurred during a Deaf-Beat workshop I organized for Allen to do with Deaf poet Robert Panara. The workshop was for American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters in 1984, and I’d also invited a few deaf friends in the performing arts to attend. At that point in their lives, my Deaf friends Peter Cook and Debbie Rennie had worked in the theater. They thought of themselves as storytellers in the great Deaf sign-based literary tradition. They considered poetry a hearing thing. I was advocating the opposite: that ASL poetics may be, in their hands and bodies, the ultimate language of poesy. So, they were there, watching.
Ginsberg asked if any Deaf person attending the workshop could offer up a spontaneous ASL translation of the key juxtaposition in “Howl”: the enjambed words “hydrogen jukebox.” The esteemed Deaf poet and actor Patrick Graybill stood before the group and spontaneously outlined a jukebox’s shape, the way a record is pulled out of a jukebox’s rack and mechanically carried, turned and placed on a turntable, and then with the record spinning round faster and faster, the jukebox begins to shake and finally explodes. It was a perfect translational enactment via the signing space of “hydrogen jukebox” “That’s it,” Allen said, laughing. It was a supercharged moment and it changed my Deaf friends’ minds about poetry being an exclusionist spoken word thing.
How I work making poetry has expanded over time from my own sense of visual language to how painters may paint a scene and how directors may make films. When I was making and then revising my book-length fem-action poem “The Ongoing Saga I Told My Daughter,” I sometimes felt like the 13-lined sonnet form I’d chosen to work with was a canvas, a tableau. Writing my achronological historical-fantasy long poem “If 45 was 16 & 16 was 45,” I found myself thinking that the poem itself was highly cinematic and would actually make a powerful movie in its own right. I even included an imaginary film made by Spike Lee about Donald Trump, a 2012 film entitled Trump: Sic Semper Tyrannis (“thus always to tyrants”). When my friend, the Ginsberg heart-son poet Antler, responded to seeing this poem, he wrote me “I didn’t know you could do this in poetry.” I didn’t know it either. Till I did it. There are rules to be broken.
CD: In the introduction of your book, you mention that you attended the Dharma-oriented program at Naropa University. In what ways would you say that this meditation-and-poetry training influenced your approach to writing as well as creating community?
JC: As a Buddhist postsecondary institution, dharma was the focus at Naropa, but in the Poetics Department, it was more subtle. Gandhian Truth-force and Thoreau-to-MLK civil disobedience were more a political stance of the Kerouac School and in that regard, studies there in the mid-1980s shifted away from the Beats to a more inclusive poetics featuring poets from communities of color, women’s poetry movements, and international poetic communities. This made the project Anne Waldman was carrying on at that time a matter of dharma to listen to student demands that times had changed and that there was much other equally important poetry to discover than the Beats in the 1980s, some thirty years since their literature took the country’s youth by storm. I have always felt that this shift in curriculum and faculty was itself a form of dharma poetics in action.
While the entirety of the Beat Generation––inclusive of all Beat scenes around the country (and the world) as well as all the women of the Beat Generation––remains, for me, the most significant literary and cultural phenomena of the mid-20th century, its historical significance remains firmly rooted in the fact that people have only continued to be more outspoken about class, status, race and gender inequalities. There is every reason to believe that the Beats opened the door for Amiri Baraka taking steps to form the Black Arts Movement in the mid-1960s, and that the success of Black Arts inspired every other poetics community based on race. I’d also say that the women of the Beat Generation had a critical impact on the Women’s Poetry Movement that is still being felt today. In addition, who can deny that Ginsberg himself was essential to the varied LGBTQX poetries and communities?
Another element of Buddhism at Naropa as it filtered through the Kerouac School was the reality of karma. When you find your relationships problematic regardless of who you are in relationship with, you have to begin to ask yourself about this pattern of negative outcomes. That our actions have direct consequences for us is something our society deals with more seriously today at the individual level via Me, Too and Black Lives Matter movements, but what about nations as a whole and their actions and inactions as it relates to karmic theory? Several years after Naropa’s founder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche died in 1987, he appeared in a dream of mine advocating for “American Karmic Studies.” Here’s the poem I wrote about that:
Brief Proposal for American Karmic Studies
after Chögyam Trungpa appeared in a dream
Rinpoche, drinking from an old tin can, said to me––
The homeland is in the midst of its own terrible mistakes.
The government spends billions to broadcast neurosis.
This does not imply an open situation
With things as they are.
Taking another sip, he laughed––
You never read about bodhisattvas receiving medals.
If you’re serious about what a democratic people should pursue,
Set your sights on burning off
American karma in your own lifetime.
That way, you will realize the country’s pure
Sitting Bull nature.
Boulder, Colorado
10 January 2005
CD: Would you elaborate more on your sense of building a poetics community? I am thinking of the website you created, the Museum of American Poetics, with its multiple tribes of writers interconnected and co-existent, living and dead.
JC: Poetics community building was the essence of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, whether or not students understood it as such. Anne Waldman, who founded the school along with Ginsberg, wanted to prepare students to start up mags, interview poet-teachers, participate in and organize readings when they went back to the towns. These are each in themself practices of poetics community-building skillful means. Around the mid-1990s, I was into deep and long correspondence with another Ginsberg heart-son poet, David Cope, over multiculturalism and those discussions oriented us to begin branching out to diversify our own individual circles and to consciously reach out to poets outside of our own communities for the poetry magazines we edited and published. Cope had his long running Big Scream magazine and I had ACTION, which I’d published in Rochester, New York, and then my own twenty-five-year poetry zine Napalm Health Spa.
The evening that Allen died, 5 April 1997, I had a dream that all of the extended Beat Generation project would be lost to history, and with it, my own sense of being a Postbeat poet––someone writing after the Beats, with a direct influence from Beat writers themselves, dedicated to furthering the impacts of their work on culture. I founded the online Museum of American Poetics (MAP, poetspath.com) as a way for me to at least place the Beats within a context of historical poetry communities as well as to educate myself about who makes up the expansive realm of poetry communities in the U.S.A. today. And since neither the Academy of American Poets nor the Poetry Society had interest in the Postbeats, I also saw MAP as a critical project in the quest for a truly multiracial and multiethnic peaceful society. This introduced me to both curating and online museums. After years of building up MAP’s content, I realized that there was no way I could know the big picture poetry scene without help from members of the various communities with whom I might ally. During the mid-2010s, I did just that, asking poet friends I admired to take over respective exhibit curation of communities of which they were full-fledged members.
CD: Another influence I could not miss in the poems is the life you have led. You’ve studied with amazing people, traveled widely, lived in communes, helped raise a daughter, worked with deaf poets, and counseled students with disabilities. It all seems to come together in the poems. How have these life experiences influenced your world-view and the poetry you write?
JC: Our life experiences are the greatest influence on one’s world-view and poetry. Poetry is always moving forward. And yet, Pound said, “Only emotion endures.” With every poem you make, you set up your poetry’s karma. With every book you compile you are involved in a chain of decisions you’ve made. Every public statement you make, including these statements I’m making here, has consequence. You might call it the “Rolling Thunder effect.” Has anyone been harmed in the process of you making your poems? As a father or a mother, a husband or wife, a friend or lover, a sister or brother––can you maintain your writing doing no harm? Whose ally are you? How far are you willing to go for others? To me, the business meetings at a commune are no different than the faculty or staff meetings at a university. Can you recover and change if you’re a victim, if you’re a perpetrator? Consider the world of political poetry. If you make your poems from events and stories in the news today, how relevant are those poems a month later, a year later, 10 years later, going to be to others? You better be writing at the level of the Beat Generation poet Andy Clausen, the great “vox populi of the democratic unconscious” heart-son of Allen Ginsberg. How can you write something that anyone anywhere at any time can relate to? This is where every single poet rises and falls on their own consciousness and their own merit. What I heard Allen Ginsberg say, that I never heard from the lips or fingers of any other person, was “Mainline into mass suffering.” This went to the heart of informing me as to the poetry I wanted to write and the life I wanted to live.
CD: What do you consider to be the chief legacy of the Beat poets in your own work? On poetry in general? On American culture as a whole?
JC: Early in the twenty-first century, I introduced myself to two Chinese translators interested in the cultural impacts of the Beats on American culture. Wen Chu-an was the Chinese translator of Kerouac and Ginsberg. Wen held Beat-East summits as part of his Chinese Beat Studies program. Zhang Ziqing was a colleague of Wen’s and a Chinese translator of the Postbeats as well as the esteemed author of the three-volume History of 20th Century American Poetry. Zhang made clear that the Chinese were interested in how a literary community such as the Beats could have such a powerful impact on culture and society and were also curious to see if and how such an impact may continue to be felt.
The most enduring Beat, Postbeat and Outrider cultural and social effects are these: wilderness protection for a sustainable Earth; retrieval of Old Ways customs, rituals and histories; love of travel and Kerouac’s notion that “there was nowhere to go but everywhere” (which I also see whenever some kind of exclusionist glass ceiling is shattered); consciousness-raising spiritual practices and teachings for achieving peace, sanity and liberation from suffering in one’s lifetime; out-of-the-closet sexual lives and a full continuum of sexual identities and orientations; legal access to marijuana as well as benefits to access of hallucinogenic drugs for medicinal, psychiatric and consciousness purposes; as well as support of communities with histories of institutional oppression and disenfranchisement.
CD: What is Treasures for Heaven saying to Gen Z-ers, especially those about to graduate college, like me? And, in your opinion, how can we keep poetry relevant to the lives of younger generations who use social media as a primary source of expression?
JC: One thing Treasures for Heaven may say to Gen Z-ers is that your desire for social, economic, procedural, environmental, electoral and restorative justice is a universal and enduring emotion that will remain true. Justice is an aspect of the long march of freedom that we humans have entered and endured. I do feel that Gen-Z has perhaps the most clear-eyed sense of social justice that America has ever seen. Will this generation make errors? Undoubtedly. Will social media be an asset or a liability? For some younger poets it has already been useful. In which direction will such influencers point their followers and fans? How will poets speak truth in such an partisan and disinformational and hate-spewing echo chamber environment? Will they be able to mobilize others for peace and justice and what will these protests look like? Will “like-minds” find one another to form new schools of poetry? Who will center the communities and who will be the new pillars of these scenes? Who will take on the organizing and what will the anthologies of the future be filled with? What poets and poetries before them will be of use and inspiration? Will this generation even survive, and if they do, how will Gen Z be looked at by their children and their children’s children? What indispensable works will you all make and then leave behind?
For many reasons, making poetry is a dangerous business. It is not a walk of life for the faint at heart in any time period. The history of poetry is one of poets who have faced silence, exile, imprisonment and death for speaking out. Like many, I saw this play out in Amanda Gorman as she read her poem “The Hill We Climb” at Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration. It took a lot of clarity to write the poem she did, but to deliver it live and before the nation, that was a risk she felt and has described. It takes courage to believe in your own work, regardless of your audience’s reaction to it. Regardless of whether or not a publisher is standing with you in solidarity with the work. Gorman wrote of the danger she felt in the days leading up to her standing at the United States Capitol to read her poem to the nation, the youngest person ever to address a presidential inauguration ceremony with poetry. She had a mantra that helped her through this: “I am the daughter of Black writers. We’re descended from freedom fighters who broke their chains, and they changed the world. They call me.” Although my spirit totem, lineage and tradition are going to be different from any other poet, I believe in words that Gorman said to herself and they are more similar than different words I said to myself when I began writing my poems and continue to say to myself if asked to present work for the benefit of others. I am empowered in this temporary human form by being aware of the traditions, works and lives I carry forward in a tradition of speaking truth to power. For me too, my poetics descendants call.
Jim Cohn’s Treasures for Heaven can be purchased on Amazon.
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