A Visionary Gateway for American and World Poetics: The Museum of American Poetics, by David Cope

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. 

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.

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).

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. 

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. 

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, 20^th 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.  

 

Jimmy and Isabella

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

Norman Ball Resolves Television in Six Easy Payments: Here's Installment One with Kirpal Gordon

(press release)
 

KIRPAL GORDON: First of all, Norm, welcome to Giant Steps Press as author of our latest title, Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments available on Amazon, Kindle and in just about every other e-format.

 

 

NORMAN BALL: Thanks, KP. It’s great to be aboard the good ship GSP.

 

KG: Reading your book-length essay on TV, technocracy and the internet was like revisiting the birth of Giant Steps Press. We formed because we’re after work like BR&R, books that cause readers to question the status quo via humor, candor and, for lack of a better phrase, “raids on the Unspeakable” (Thomas Merton) or visitations from the supernatural. I also love your illustrations, many of which appear here. They are an irreverent mixture of high and low culture, like the book itself.
 

NB: To me it's all sort of the same--high, low, tech, po. In fact, I'd love it if this book helped lateralize the debate and collapse divides, all in pursuit of a less-fractured union. I'm glad you said ‘supernatural’ first. I was no great Ginsberg aficionado prior to the writing of this book. Yet he suddenly appeared all over it like an unbidden insurgency. I came away utterly convinced that the ‘Whitman of his generation’ appellation is well-earned. From 1947-66 he was like the interwar voice of America. Speaking of America, I challenge you to find anything funnier than this Ginsberg recitation. America loves to construct  its icons with the seriousness of a dam project. So it's easy to forget that Ginsberg was funny as hell. By the end of the poem--after a chaste, attentive start--people are laughing their asses off. What's wrong with that?
 

KG: Nothing at all. On that score you’ve done our readership a great service by providing such a sterling interpretation of his opus, the often misunderstood "Howl." In fact, you trace a through-line from Blake and Keats and the Romantic tradition in England all the way to the present in order to create an antidote for American couch potatohood. It sounds like you had something of a conversion experience while reading the Beats and other beware-of-media literati like Don DeLillo.




The Author's Father

NB: Thanks, Kirpal. It’s funny. I’ve always had a natural aversion to TV. Maybe it’s part-Oedipal as my dad (Emmy-awarding winning TV pioneer John Ball) (PDF) was all about it, though in his own conflicted sort of way. It’s the universal slack jaw of the TV-watcher that confirmed my suspicions of TV as being an energy sink. The Beats, for example, had ants in their pants. Sheer mobility made them bad actors for the TV room. They kept to the road and avoided the spell. An admixture of high gas prices and HDTV informs the dull sustenance of the couch potato. You heard it here first. OPEC and Sony killed the Beats.

 

KG: Speaking of gas, your lampoon of Route-66 (the TV show) and its attempted neutering of Kerouac’s On the Road is a hoot. To you TV is the Great American Expropriator. Nothing is too sacred that it can’t be flattened, profaned and turned into an ad for jeans. I’m guessing your eye to the politics of American media technology was greatly served by your father’s work in close captioned TV? While working with him in DC you saw the selling of cable and community TV’s future up close. Before that, you’d been weaned on the BBC, yes?

NB: Yes, I cut my teeth quite literally on Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men before emigrating to the States at the ripe old age of four. So I sort of internalized two television worldviews. I’m a walking TV dialectic. In fact I discuss the origins of the BBC in the book. As you bring up antidotes, I'm swallowing more Keatsian pills with each passing day. We start with this Vale of Soul-making, really a  laboratory whose ingredients are spirit and intellect. From there, we rub against earth’s afflictions, producing that stuff called soul. The mediated world diverts us from this direct Keatsian process. Indeed there are powers within our society that encourage this diversion for a host of reasons. Let's just say false consciousness is big business. My father was immersed in TV. But he hated it. He’d also be scratching his head over Keats, Rilke too. Poetry was not his bag. I also spent two decades in telecom in a variety of roles. During the writing of this book, I got the distinct privilege of corresponding  with George Stoney (the Father of Public Access Television) before his death last year. If you can believe it, George began his career in the FDR administration as a socialist firebrand (he was born in 1916)! He was a fascinating blend of social activism and technical know-how. He was lucid to the end and will be sorely missed.

KG: You got the Sixties' New Left philosophers down cold, too, and I found myself concurring with Adorno, Marcuse and Norman O. Brown: TV isn’t just prone to manipulation and distortion; it’s a diversionary device by design. Even the weather’s all wet. Everything is a lie and that’s the truth!

NB: I should hasten to add I'm not a Marxist. Actually I'm a homesick capitalist who mourns the current deformation that strives to drape itself in capitalist narrative, corpo-fascism. Jerry Mander was unequivocal. TV should be tossed into the dumpster. On the Weather Channel the postures of the on-the-scene reporters are often exaggerated during torrential rains and high winds to inject entertainment value and a sense of danger. So yes, the storms are suspect too.

KG: Be very afraid but don’t switch the channel because the sexy weather gal is about to have a wardrobe malfunction? Like Marcuse’s Domination Principle regarding “the establishment,” TV seems capable of absorbing any joke we can foist on it.  As you point out, it’s a shot of mad, greedy, tyrannical Moloch all the way. Yet your lampooning of our entrapment (cultural entrancement?) is more than just a hoot and a howl. I don’t think I’ll ever view “the tube” or surf the Net the same way again, and that’s the secret power of your book.

NB: I'm really not saying anything new in that regard. I'm hoping my cross-weaving of parallel narratives will coax inquisitive generalists like myself into a broadened debate. But yes, TV as vampire is part of the energy sink phenomenon. The Left knew their worker-led revolt was doomed due to TV mesmerism. So they scrambled, added 'New' to their brand name--you know, whiter-whites--and injected Freud because Marx alone wasn’t cutting it. Media is in the business of manufacturing  consent which is as much a psychological phenomenon as a political-economic one. Anyway it was all largely for naught. The proletariat is not about to stream out into the streets with a 70-inch sensaround box singing in the corner. You never know, in the mad rush to the Bastille another prole might sneak in and steal it. Ferlinghetti said it just this year: Ginsberg was dead on the money with Moloch. We sacrifice our children to him every Saturday morning. He feeds them Sugar Craps. They hand him limbs later on as teenage-mutant diabetic amputees. Moloch trades sugar for souls. Appendages are the appendices of the screen era.

KG: The book moves deftly among many topics that you manage to cohere into a single focus: your own immigrant’s tale, growing-up vignettes, insider lit lore, poetic leaps over philosophical matters and riffs most extraordinaire on Milton Berle, Father Knows Best, JFK’s assassination, inventor John Logie Baird, The Housewives of This 'n' That---you name it.

 

NB: Yes, I named it and then some. My point of origin was really the late David Foster Wallace’s 1993 essay e Unibus Pluram where he notes to his fellow fiction writers the overwhelming effect television has had on his (and my) generation. Ours was the first where television was not subsequently introduced into the home. It was the glowing a priori box in the corner. You can feel the difference in older writers such as John Ashbery in terms of their relationship to TV. At the time Wallace was writing the essay, I was immersed in management consulting circles breathlessly trumpeting the approach of the 500-channel universe. A few years ago a literary colleague who was familiar with my technology background asked if I’d read the Wallace piece. I hadn’t. After reading it, I felt a strong compunction to offer my own State of the Union, sort of a ‘where are we now’ twenty years later. Of course the Internet has happened in a big way since then too, which I cover extensively. The book went on to explode in a hundred directions from there because TV is like the Khyber Pass of our culture. As you mentioned a moment ago, it gets its mits on everything sooner or later.

KG: Your immigrant ‘observer’ status is yet one more mediating screen?
 

NB: Screens atop screens. The stranger’s eye often sees the obvious with a clarity unavailable to the habituated onlooker.

KG: So what does the title mean?  I know it is a translation from the second of poet Ranier Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies.

NB: Yes. Between River and Rock is part of a line from that elegy where Rilke posits a uniquely authentic human place apart from the machinations of capricious gods, of which Moloch would certainly be one. For me it means many things; the flitting images on the screen, the inanimate passivity of the viewer and the mediating space between. On a more personal level, it is the constant internal negotiation I engage in between my mother the Keatsian spirit and my father the Socratic inquisitor. Finally the book is about a child striking an immigrant's bargain between the fluidic, idealized mythos from whence he came and the hard realities to which he arrived. Like all of us, I am multiple iterations of a split-screen.

KG: So who is the book written for? Who is its target-market audience?

 

NB: Well it's not a learned treatise nor an academic discourse, that's for sure. It's something between an extended riff and a protracted romp where I drag in various voices from multiple spheres to keep the thread smart, alive and multifarious. The book targets intelligent, non-academic folks who think they’re losing their minds when in fact they're losing their souls, a far worse predicament. People like you and me, I guess. I meet them every day: bright, cowed, vaguely aware of a slow spiritual leak but unable to localize the fissure. Getting back to the slack-jawed TV face, I'm reminded again of lines from the Second Elegy (written in 1923): "suddenly, solitary mirrors: gathering their own out-streamed beauty back into their faces again." This is downright premonitory of the Media Age! I go into some detail about the way people dressed for TV in the 1950-52 era. It's funny to us now but the early adopters of TV would invite others over for a night of TV. Invariably people would dress as though it was a night at the opera. It took us a while to realize that we could veg out on the sofa because TV wasn't 'watching back'. Lassitude permissioned the couch potato in the TV room before spreading to the public space. In many ways, our self-regard got sucked through that damned screen. I believe we must retrieve ourselves from Wallace's "alone, together" isolation and gather our out-streamed beauty back from the beautiful and haughty deceptions that flicker endlessly on our screens. Media means us harm, you know. This is the Keatsian in me speaking, but for reasons that are not entirely clear, soul is real. Soul matters. Soul content can be expanded or it can be relinquished. Media eats soul for breakfast. To me, it’s become very elemental.

KG: What else ya got cooking, present and prior?

NB: As for the not-too distant past, I have two short-form essay collections How Can We Make Your Power More Comfortable? (2010, Del Sol Press) and The Frantic Force (2011, Petroglyph Books). The first is more politics-oriented. The second tends toward culture stuff, though both bleed profusely across that demarcation. My new Civil War musical play Sides (more on it here ) is partnered with Richard Stafford's play 'Yours'. Also, a guy by the name of Stephen Crane pitched a small novel of his The Red Badge of Courage into the mix too. (Actually Crane was a pushover as he no longer speaks up for himself and the novel's in the public domain.) Included are essays and commentary from a number of history experts. I'm really excited about it.

 

(Amazon, Kindle and other ePub forms)

Finally, I have a poetry collection coming out in 1Q 2014 from White Violet Press entitled Serpentrope.
 

 

KG: Where can people find you on-line?

NB: Well, returntoone@hotmail.com is a good email; also, Facebook is good for keeping up on things. I have hundreds of video on my Youtube channel and I keep up a Jung-Bowie blog, Red Book Red Sail here.

KG: Thanks so much, Norm.

NB: Thank you, Kirpal.