Interview

J I M C O H N

interview

December 27-28, 2000

Maura Gage: I enjoyed listening to Antenna; would you discuss why you chose this format instead of the printed page?

Jim Cohn: Recording Antenna, as with any word-music project I do, involves a level of spontaneity and an openness to the unexpected direction the work might go. Being that the making of poetry is generally a very solitary practice for me, improvising with others is a bit of a respite, and provides its own kind of test of the work's essence. I've collaborated with musicians who are virtuosos in their own genres over the years now, different configurations of players, but Antenna took it to a whole other level. I’ve always been influenced by the spoken word of Jack Kerouac; especially the November 16, 1959 Kerouac—Steve Allen Plymouth Show session live on NBC. Poems like "Sounds of the Universe Coming In My Window" and "Charlie Parker" really speak to me to this day with a warmth and sincerity nothing else touches. I've made three previous recordings: The Road, Walking Thru Hell Gazing At Flowers, and Unspoken Words, but Antenna was different. For one thing, it includes a meditative forty minute piece called "Treasures for Heaven" which begins with the line "Forgive me angels, you had only wings, I poems. . . . " I meant to say I felt sorry that angels have only wings because poetry is the ultimate "wings of man." "Treasures" is written in an anti-narrative stanzaic form that moves between heaven and hell and back to earth in order to demonstrate that poetry is a decision, a force, to be reckoned with while you're still alive. With something as other as Antenna, its intimacy is conducive to just lying on the floor in the dark or driving long distance across the great open spaces. MG: Your background as a poet and as an advocate for the deaf seems unique in that you have to contend with opposites—sound and silence. Would you comment on how it affects your poetry? Do you think you are more aware and sensitive to sound or the lack of it (silence) in your poetry than you would be had your life's path gone a different route?JC: "Sound" and "Silence" in and of themselves don't represent any kind of duality for me. I don't even see them as even meaningful units. People tend to make of "sound" something distinct from "silence" but that just isn’t, if you watched yourself thinking in such a polarity you might identify that as some kind of societal binary disorder—you could put it alongside societal body image dysfunction and all the pathologized ways our culture imposes or creates as a function of polarity oversimplification. It’s just an easier way to allocate limited resources if you establish arbitrary cut-off points where you’re allowed in and someone else is kept out. "Sound" and "silence" in their exclusiveness is unreality, a lack of negative capability, intellectual tension-sustainment, paradoxical mindedness—call it what you will. Think of the way normality depends on abnormality: normality is dependant on abnormality in the way the disabled early twentieth century social scientist Randolph Bourne once said "War is the health of the state." If "war" is the "health of the "state," then that says there is an investment that says "peace" is the "disability" of the "state" which makes it clear really what we’re talking about in the separation of a lot more than even "sound" and "silence." These are truly organizational abstractions, in a sense, tied t o immigration policy more than people would like to admit. Government like it when people hear what they are saying in the language they are telling it. And where exactly does "sound" become "silence" and vice versa? Everybody knows that there is no person to fit the statistical average "person." That's a joke. Most of what people think of as "silence" really sends very loud messages. Why would we be so visually dependent if a picture did not truly emit thousands of subjective words? The Beauty Industry or the Music Industry or the Publishing Industry or the Movie Industry or the News Industry makes for good daily kensho instruction in socially-induced illusion of what's pretty and what's ugly, what's smart, and what's dumb, what’s informational purposeful ("sound") and what’s censurable ("silence"). The truth is that once all these people whose weekly paycheck are based on constructing standardized composites of taste and style and the interpretation of law and order go home at the end of the day, you're left with a lot of uncaptionable material and internal confusion about what it is to be a person. That can make for an excellent trailhead from which a poet may enter the thicket of whatever oppression people have internalized from a dysfunctioning society.I think I am more aware and sensitive to suffering because of my experience in working with people on a daily basis outside the norm for a number of years now, but not in a "sound" and "silence" way. I have observed that Deaf poetry in American Sign Language provides many useful illustrations of prosody as a spatial and manual medium, not an orality medium, and because that's a cultural difference, it says something unique about the image and the relationship of objectified language to clear subjective representation of objects. I have always thought that Williams' notion that a poem is a "machine made out of words" found its best expression in sign language, because, when the deaf poet is performing the ASL poem all the parts, the prosody are visually experiential. Deaf poetry also supports the work of phonologic poetry because there is a degree of apparent iconicity in which signs appear to represent object shapes and forms and even their inherent character and stereotypic hue -- something less available to the fuzzy alphabetic grapholect poetic medium. When I invited Allen Ginsberg to meet with the deaf poet Robert Panara in Rochester, NY in 1984 and he saw "hydrogen jukebox" from "Howl" signed in ASL by Patrick Graybill, that was a extralinguistic moment that verified the sonic quality of images. A visually gestured nuclear explosion is not a silence event. Out of the prosodiac black lagoon of conscious and unconscious lexicons and taxonomies come dactylic-handshape meters, gestured symmetries and asymmetries -- all within a cultural context of being a Deaf American, part of a long and burdenous historical voyage of exclusion, social immigrant underclass status and aesthetic deportation. I have remained friends with Flying Words Project poets Peter Cook, who is deaf, and Kenny Lerner, who is hearing, for almost twenty years, so I have had a good deal of time to contemplate two of the best poets of my generation at work deconstructing sound and silence. Also, I coordinated the first National Deaf Poetry Conference in the United States, and I was booed off stage while giving a lecture at the ASL Poetry Conference in 1990 during the heady years of Deaf militancy that swept the country, so I have a certain insight into the personhood of that audience to whom the sound/silence nexus is most applicable. I have written that I am not the hearing person I used to be; that's something probably anyone who is bi- or multilingual feels, except for me, that was an entry into the entire stigmatized field of Disability and the culture of the American Enfreaked. My own writing in Sign Mind, a collection of prose works about my time immersed in Deafness, offered me the opportunity to stress the importance of translating the poetry of endangered or oppressed or marginalized colonial communities as a means of slowing down the mass ethnocultural genocide that American homogenous middle-class statistically-average monoculture is ramming down the throat of the planet.

MG: What caused you to work with the deaf?

JC: As a young journeyman piano tuner and rebuilder I noticed some difficulty hearing the unisons on the high end notes. This got me to thinking about how the percussive nature of acoustic keyboard sound might impact me down the line and I began to wonder if I might be going deaf. The immediate cause was an epiphany I had walking down Broadway in Boulder, Colorado in 1980 after accompanying Allen Ginsberg, whom I was assisting while a student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, to a doctor's office appointment . While seated together in his doctor's office, Allen began telling me about Ezra Pound's notion that "Golden Ages of Poetry" occur when the vernacular language and official language of the court are at a politically-charged confluence. He referred to Dante as a prime example of a poet writing in his own tongue the language of the street as a political action. I felt like that was a vocation I was willing to set out to find wherever it was. Walking down near the iris gardens it occurred to me that the confluence I would head for was where ASL and English might come together: subjective aesthetic language expression— poetry. Strange as it was, I knew instantaneously that sign was the last secret vernacular, the silent vernacular of America. I didn't know anyone in my family or among my friends and acquaintances who was deaf, as is a common experience for those who find their way to sign language classes or interpreting programs. I wasn't a CODA -- a child of deaf adults. It was a decision based on imagination.

MG: Most people who know you are aware of your website. Would you pleaseexplain the history of this particular site and express why and how it came to be?JC: I began the online virtual Museum of American Poetics website in 1997 after a nightmare I had the night Allen Ginsberg died that between the dominant media conglomerates and the privatized corporate academy together there would be a movement toward as quick a strike from the public record of any sensible interpretation of how deeply the Beat Generation invisible empire had not only influenced American consciousness, but formulated numerous works of lasting duration that befit the best aspects of a democratic people. That said, years before I had visited the Walt Whitman cabin on Long Island—where the late, poet Chris Ide once got drunk in Whitman's bed & fell asleep—and I had a sincere awe for the things, as artifacts of poetic culture, the poet was surrounded by. The whole crazy idea of starting a museum also goes back to 1976 when I learned that the poet Frank O'Hara had worked at the Museum of Modern Art as a curator, was an expert on Jackson Pollock, and an editorial associate of Art News. Since 1998, I've been working with Chris Healer, a gifted film-maker and webmaster to constantly upgrade the Museum of American Poetics site. The museum received mentioned in the New York Times in October of 1999. In 2000, MAP began making its own exhibits—beginning with a site to honor Gregory Corso, and a tribute to Anne Waldman. I should also say that it was founded as a "living museum" and by that I mean, as was suggested by poet Tom Peters, that the Museum of American Poetics be a place where "the poetry of the future is opening its doors." MG: Should the role of the poet today resemble that of the Beats? I know I'm generalizing, but I wonder if the poet, in your estimation, has a "true" purpose. JC: Poets are people and people can get very stuck in the past, very obstructed in various post-traumatized states of mind from which they know they are hurting themselves, but haven’t a way out, back to the present. Whole schools of poetry can. I mean, can fall prey to the historical and archival preservation of loss. It has not been my goal to be a footnote to a footnote. From my perspective, the experimental renaissance of American twentieth century poetry is not dead, nor am I a valet or a roadie of those coordinates that are now returned to dust. As for "true purpose," I've seen many people destroyed by "poetry," by the fame machinery surrounding the expectations of what might be bestowed on them if they only tune up the angst, crank up the sexual. I’ve seen the embodiment of cruel honesty, which is just a sickening cruelty that abuses the inherent trust of power relationships. Every generation comes into its own knowing emptiness intimately through its own volatility and confrontation with the unknown: "You say you’re leaving home and you want to be alone. Ain’t it funny how you feel, when you’re finding out it’s real." For me, spending my teenage years in Cleveland, it was all very ugly and I promised myself I wouldn’t make the same dumb mistakes of my parents. Of course, I made a delightfully hideous pile of my own instead. Most people don’t arrive at orbits where there is no nostalgia for the past. Instead, it exists as that Sugar Mountain force they waste their skillful means in trying to compare today with, and live up to. What I see as my true purpose is to unrepress my own consciousness, make friends with my ghosts, and then stand naked in whatever grief and love I find. Because I don’t just live in this time, I see myself as providing human instruction to a world unborn. So, for me, "true purpose" is to stand in the mists between history and the cosmos, and having done all I could to prepare my language, set it free. MG: What significance do the places appearing in your poems, book sections, and so forth, have to your poetry, work, and life?JC: I am a wanderer, and for people like me, there is a rich and ritualistic literary tradition of wilderness travel. For me, it starts with the Chinese masters: Li Po and Tu Fu, Wang Wei, and Han Shan, and comes through Whitman down to the Beats through Kerouac's Desolation Angels, which is probably the underlying impetus that drove me out and on the road hitchhiking cross county at the age of 13 and kept me enjoying the spontaneity of meeting strangers until it became an actual model that surfaced in the very work I do as a disability specialist. There's a summer, I think its 1953—the year I was born—in which Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen all have written separately about the same back country wilderness area: the Skagit District of Mt. Baker National Forest That is some of the most magical writing we have on American Wilderness in our literature and it comes from poetic experience. I would say no single person will have as much impact on a green Global Mind as Gary Snyder who brought such an enormous amount of ancient wisdom forward he must have consumed forest fires of karmic debt this lifetime. I am sure my poetry will continue to speak with the voices of rivers and mountains I have heard and walked upon, but it was out of a sense of reluctance that I even gave their names away. I had to balance the fact of my engagement with wild places and homelands of the ancients in such a way so that they could not be confused with names for automobiles and housing developments. There comes a point where you begin to carry wilderness inside you wherever you go, whatever work you do, and slowly you become like a deer who moves freely within its old territory because the humans who have colonized it move so fast and so unawakenedly they cannot make you out from the landscape.MG: Emotions are not often subtle in your work. You are a man unafraid not only to have them, but to use them, express them, completely feel them. Pain seems to be especially prevalent, but so are joy and humor pervasive enough to "temper" seriousness. What are your comments on this idea?JC: I like what you said and I’d hope it was correct. "Emotions are not often subtle" in my work, but then again, I suppose that is the nature of "emotions." It’s the work in which emotion is subtle that you might want to pay attention to where you are. That’s the kind of poetry you hear touted as something artful on National Public Radio. It has the power of reproduced paintings on the wall of a Motel 6. The psychic energy that I carry is very receptive to Pound's notion that "only emotion endures." Although I greatly value the work of poets who are guardians of language, language poets, my desire was to create a poetry of feeling. This was something I gained, interestingly enough, from male poets as diverse as Garcia Lorca, Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara, Paul Blackburn, and Pablo Neruda—whose homes in central Chile I made pilgrimage in the summer of 2000. My sense of feeling comes from my mother: Lois Marilyn Lewis Heimann Cohn Bialosky. Because my mother took my brother and I out of a violent home situation at an early age and raised us through two surrogate fathers, I can say I grew up without any male father figure to deflect any natural emotional nature I was born with. I suppose I was the result of a certain genetic extremism as a result of the union that brought me into this bodily composition because I was first sent to a psychiatrist at 12. A dark man with his own demons, he killed himself soon thereafter by putting a pistol to his mouth and pulling the trigger in the very office where we met. My mother was a powerful force in my upbringing. She never lived in the past and always offered me encouragement to use my mind to claim a personal power over the toxicity of emotion that I could not at the time place language to. To this day, my mother, who is nearing her seventieth year, is a source of light and inspiration and witted guidance and exuberance of spirit to me. The moment of truth came during my own divorce at age 39, which seemed to be a revisitation of a destiny of separation I had internalized since my childhood. It brought on panic and great anxiety, and was its own medicine. I learned the immense value of intuition, and trusting my own judgment. By going into therapy during a period of about five years—including marriage and post-marriage counsel—I began to rewrite the book of my own personal narrative and felt the first clarity I had ever known. I had really drawn into myself an enormous amount of cruelty which I seemed powerless to abate, until, suddenly, I realized the ever-present choice I had to watch any neurotic channel that was playing on the inner screen, and know that it could not negate the reality of my own sanity and spirit. The next thing I knew poems I had written through this period were appearing in books next to people such as Thich Nhat Hanh. The quality of my work with people with disabilities also began to deepen and somehow I become more effective in assisting others in reaching their own perfectly faulted emotional readings. MG: Compassion, in a Zen Buddhist sense, and as your personal philosophy, seems to be a theme running throughout much of your poetry, written and spoken. Would you please speak to this idea? How does compassion fit into your life, work, and poetry?JC: Compassion is a way out of paranoia and victimization. I had to learn self-compassion the hard way. It’s one of the hardest lesson there is. If a poet doesn't have that compassion, what is it they’re doing? You can only run on very heavy fuel for so long before the raw ambition of ego turns the writing to excrement. Two things Allen Ginsberg said remain with me quite strongly: once he wrote, "If I am not the Buddha, who am I?" Second, during a recording session we did of a piece he’d written to Bob Dylan while at Plymouth Rock during the Rolling Thunder Review Tour of 1976 entitled "Lay Down Yr Mountain, he told me the lyric was about "simultaneous renunciation and proclamation." He said compassion is the only way to mainline into the masses. Compassion seeks to assist us feel our way meaningfully through the death and dying of the numerous suicides and genocides of the infinite nation of selves we have been, and those of those we have known and loved. My work as a Disability Specialist permits me to notice again and again these wellsprings, and also why I keep a deep affection for the siddha tales, the Mahamudra tales of the Siddhas. Even in an utterly secular environment, as a worker of the state, I see the lives of the siddhas as a sourcebook for my own practice of serving others and myself. The eighty-four siddhas were preeminent disability specialists renowned for their ability in advising "means of achievement." The siddha's art makes no attempt to dissuade others out of habitual nature. That becomes, instead, the raw material with which to realize "the extreme of no extreme," and this then creates a situation in which suffering itself may dissolve all the specific characteristics of one’s existential situation.

MG: Of the writers and poets of today, whom do you most admire and why?

JC: I've always held a torch for Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, and Anne Waldman —the Three Fates—since my days as at Naropa. Each one has been so majorly inventive with language in such different ways. Alice Notley's poetry emits a lyric deconstructionism and formal intelligence toward a grammar of difference while maintaining a depth of emotion true to the losses she has personally endured. Bernadette Mayer has shown everybody how to write—each successive book is a monumental imagination device of study and experimentation. Anne Waldman's thematic, discursive epic making poesy centers around male energy. A Vajra warrior of performance, her vocalization style signifies the shamanic alchemical and ceremonial heritage of spoken word. I sit with their works always nearby and turn to them often for insight, and new direction. The male poets of my era have revealed an exceptional ability to cleave through the thought-patterns of masculine darkness. I am thinking of Andy Clausen, David Cope, and Antler in particular. There is a lot more confusion for men today—straight or gay—and perhaps the lesser emphasis on formalism—that marks much of the women’s poetry I take interest in—is a reflection of that liminality. I look to these three poets for their cosmic and numinal vistas. The poems of Andy Clausen contain the quintessential refinement of Neal Cassady word enjambment, working class perspective, world holy land travel, and awe toward the dignity of love. Before there was rap there was this wired psychedelphic Belgium American marine talking Mayakovsky, his proletariat spoken word blues fit as tight as wet cement between bricks in the hard eternity of Enigma's peasant soul. Antler's poetry touches something childlike. His work strangely employs the language of science as if he were a Dr. Sax of the wilderness with motif-making riffs unmistakable in their causal associations. I've taught Antler's work to Mormans, to the dying, to new writers, to the world weary, to children, to those who say they hate poetry because they can never understand it—and without fail, his language is the ultimate in accessibility to the parallel universes of the Great Unknown. I also admire his homoerotic poetry and his struggles against censorship of his own work. David Cope is the poet to whom my own life is most entwined. The appearances of not only his poetry, but his friendship, are a grace without measure. His poetry reaches into true silence and from that place within himself derives its indelible sanity of gothic dreams, direct musicality, sustained multiple resonance, objectivist heart, vernacular ear. Once janitor where now he is a professor of Shakespeare, Cope is the unquenchable scholar of the Infinite Tome, more mindful than Sherlock Holmes of the minutia and miracles of seasons.In terms of my own immediate circle of contemporaries from across the country with whom I keep in contact and publish regularly in Napalm Health Spa, I consider the work of Eliot Katz, Todd Beers, James Ruggia, Carmen Bugan, Bob Rixon, Marc Olmsted, Eileen Myles, Tom Peters, Richard Wilmarth, Steven Hirsh, Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner, Shira Segal, and Bob Holman to be the real thing.MG: What one notices about form when reading your printed poems is its variety. Would you comment on your sense of form, technique, writing habits (set time and place, when the mood strikes), or anything else about you as craftsman?JC: I've always felt form was an extension of childhood. The two major figures whose poetry informs me most in this area are Philip Whalen and Paul Blackburn. The practice of letting the eye lead content is a delight in their work. I return to them often when I sense content getting a little pushy, a little domineering. To write in such a way that the reader can see the poem as an object on the page, not words—and can pull in and back between the canvas, the margins, the anti-space, and then return to the content itself—that's one of my most favorite things. They gave me permission, in their own visual calligraphics, to follow a direction that expands on the representational peripherals of our otherwise too much taken for granted twenty-six XYZ saints of the information age. Also, somewhere behind my eyeballs there's always Frank O'Hara who said all you need to know about form is that you want to wear your pants tight enough so everybody will want to go to bed with you.As for my own methodology, basically you could say I'm a sun dance painter. Most of the work that I've done that has any lasting currency has been documented via backpocket copybook and a pen across the fading miles. I'll just be walking and—holy bat shit—my hand is telling me what my thoughts are feeling. It may be that I never actually wrote in any kind of ordinary fashion at all. I just saw and translated ghost talk, spirit news. I'm disciplined and relentless and not a little obsessive in keeping, as Ed Sanders says, my zen zone open so that I'm centered wherever I am, whatever I'm doing, whomever I'm with, to accept what I'm hearing as life shapeshifts into the poem. That also means poetry, for me, isn't only making poems. The more inclusive a variety of projects and activities you assign yourself, the better you can determine the direction you need to go in and the more high grade material you have to get in and out fast. Several years ago I began a lecture series at the Boulder Book Store, an independent book seller, because I perceived that poets in my community did not have the opportunity to share their knowledge of poets they love and are influenced by in a public forum setting. So, I began a series, the American Poet Greats lecture series, and that’s offered me a form of cultural resistance.Then there's the digital side. When I've visited archival repositories such as the National Archives to study the Pound file at St. Eliza beths Hospital, or the UCSD Mandville Special Collection archive to see the Blackburn collection, I have held the typewritten pages of manuscripts that were cut and pasted, literally, with Scotch tape and scissors. And it's just all the more remarkable to see the radically experimental mimeo zines of the 1950s and early 60s, and up through and including my own ACTION magazine of the eighties and Cope's Big Scream until he switched technologies, and wonder how all that pre-digital constructed identity got done. Never mind the various adjustments of switching technologies to the digital format at midlife. The computer makes us, as a people, seem smarter than we are, and being the first writers possessing the tools to bring batholiths of information into their work, this is a pioneering time. I think that's one of the reasons we see more epic poetry. The real frontier is the digital page and all the indeterminancies available through that software-based medium. I've noticed some deep content sites that are remarkably rich in concrete poetic structures. When it comes to writing, I am not a creature of set habits. I don’t turn on the baking timer and write as fast as I can for an hour and then move on. As to the manner of my own composition, sometimes I'll e-mail myself something that has occurred from work and later I'll get home & find these weird lines or poem kernels I forgot I'd mailed myself during the day. I have a long ongoing "poem-o-scope" entitled "Birthday News" which was assembled from extensive files I've kept on the historical oddities related to the time I was born. I've just completed a series of poems called "Coyote Steals The Presidential Election of 2000" which was a mystifying coming together of American coyote mythos and Florida post-election judiciary politics. These and other more occasional writing all happen at unusual hours and over varied.

MG: Have you kept your "old dreams" or "let [them] break slowly away" as you write in your ultimate and penultimate lines in "My Country's Ceremonial Dance"? What is the "situation" of this poem written "for Gary Lawless"?JC: "My Country's Ceremonial Dance" writ February 20, 1990 was a response to Maine eco-poet Gary Lawless—who travels now throughout the world with the poet Nanao Sakaki—to the Gulf War and the censorship that the military placed upon the news media, the untruths that military spokespersons conveyed regarding precision air strikes, and the atrocities we committed, including the strafing of escaping Iraqi motorists—the infamous Highway of Death—the live burial of 100s if not thousands of Iraqi infantry troops, and the suppression to this day of accurate accounting of the chemical compounds that led to our own troops being exposed to toxic dust clouds and massive debilitation. And now all these people have returned to political power. Those anti-war demonstrations I took part in while living at Birdsfoot Farm, an organic farming community in St. Lawrence County north of the Adirondack Mountains, were part of a nation-wide spontaneous response to the way in which presidential power, when faced with a failure of intellectual responsibility to create the political will for peace, always finds some patriotic way to rally the national death-machine. This is always most troubling when intellectuals become too comfortable or scared to compose counter narratives for the nonviolent resistance to war. It's interesting, this poem, because the same choices exist today in the face of world trade policy demonstrators fighting against the financial elite's disregard to environmental and workers' rights issues —some of the most grievous of which take place within our own borders through the automobile industry and the resultant environmental racism that exists. Ceremonial Dancing -- demonstration -- as we know resulted in massive illegal domestic arrests during the 2000 Bush-Gore campaign conventions and will continue to call upon all of us particularly in the coming Global Warming apocalypse. MG: Spirit, Native American beliefs, Buddhism, dreams, duality, letters, numbers, signs (the arbitrary markers in society), popular cultural figures, television actors, factories, thoughts of extreme situations listed to "rattle" the reader, violence, and so much more come up in Grasslands and elsewhere in your writing, and I wonder how this "layering effect" comes to you. Are you shaking up your own system, pulling together parts of your own psyche, making the reader think about the arbitrary in what is normally viewed as accepted fact, all of the above, none of the above? "George Washington Bridge, Lower Level, Clear Day" is an example.JC: One of the rules I make for myself is not to write poems that are specific to a particular, as Master Dogen wrote, "time-being." Spirit has a time-being. Buddha had a time-being. The universe known as Jim Cohn has a time-being. As a Jew, I’ve experienced neo-Nazi anti-Semitism firsthand, and I’ve experienced Israeli neo-Zionism firsthand as well, so I know people can really get worked up into super-irrational states. Hitler was a time-being. Sharon is a time-being. I don’t shy away from the ugly. I embrace it as a means of atonement, forgiveness. I don’t close my eyes to chaos, to the diversity and the coincidence of all these time-beings all around me. It isn't to hurt anyone that I reflect these beings in time. When I entered upon the GW that one beautiful day, just returning from the Yucatan, it simply hit me—who would take the lower level of the George Washington Bridge on such a beautiful day? And from there, the poem was basically written in the time it took to pass across the river in the automobile. MG: Children, war, freedom, a lack of freedom, panic, the duality of all aspects of life--these are concepts--among others--you seem to be grappling with in Prairie Falcon (and elsewhere). Do you "solve" any of these opposite forces, these larger concepts, or is it the poet's job to present them, not actually to resolve them for the reader?JC: "Prairie Falcon," the title poem from my second book, was written as an exploration of my own masculinity, and the problem of male rage, which has otherwise kept many a good man in the hell of his own creation, and the resolution of that rage. The immense loneliness of men—love rage—and the tender lessons unlearned in a world without fathers, in a world of functioning automatons—to me, that was the psychic Dust Storm Woody Guthrie sang of. "Prairie Falcon" which was recorded on a record I made with The Abolitionists, is one of the few places in my work where I've called upon an animal I felt a deep affinity with to assist me in its spirit powers. That is the meaning of the prayer within the poem:". . .in the God language of my plainsman heart there speed a prairie falcon to all who suffer." MG: How did you and David Cope become and stay best friends, chosen "brothers"?JC: I met David Cope in 1980 while I was a teaching assistant for Allen Ginsberg. At Allen’s request, I had done all this cutting and pasting and xeroxing of David’s chapbook writing, and began a correspondence with him at first to pass along editorial comments from Allen and send off drafts for Cope’s review. This is how we began our correspondence. Our friendship began immediately and our correspondence would follow me everywhere I went, through all the highs and lows, ins and outs. Our correspondence became a house of study, a source of immeasurable learning, testing of knowledge, and inner strength. We also shared a certain geographic comradery. We are Great Lakes People. Having been born on Lake Michigan’s western shore north of Chicago, as a boy I gazed east out at waves and in so doing might have been picking up with my psychic antenna young Cope also gazing westward from his eastern banks. When you’re younger and writing with everyone around you doing the same thing you get the feeling this is how it is, this is how it will continue—I’ll be in this refuge of the muse all my days with the sangha of my compatriots. But slowly, those colleagues vanish, or become part of another social apparatus. Our friendship has assisted us through many a stormy Monday and darkest hour with a voracious tenderness and a shared sense of poetics mission. We saw ourselves become the poems that became our books, and through that had that rare gift of glimpsing the highly encoded decipherings of one another’s own restlessness and aspiration, and acceptance. Cope is a far more prodigious scholar than me, with a vice-grip grasp of history, multicultural literature, drama, film, a host of languages, psychology, philosophy, gender studies—you name it. I can feel the paradox of his detached lyricism confronting the abysses of his soul. I’m attracted to that Shadowland his poems take their shape from. We are the mutual soundboard and spatiality of the ambiguous and paradoxic emptiness that we confront individually. MG: Are you still working on the work/poetry book entitled The One Great Poem? Is this like Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass or Snyder's Mountains and Rivers without End, a truly long-term evolving work? If so, what pattern or patterns do you see emerging? When do you think it will be done?JC: Yeah, but it’s not something outside what I continue to do. It’s just the final presentation of my work in poetry as an entity, a big beautiful treasure house that does nothing. I’ve always thought one of the great difficulties with writing is to see "growth" in the work—it’s more like rings in a tree, made up of many small expanding circles. My poem "Contributing To The One Great Poem" crystallized for me that in the end, my physical end, all my poetic journey would come together under one roof. The One Great Poem would be the long house of my bardo. Because I follow a "mind is shapely" approach to the making of the order of poems in my books, it will be chronological in arrangement, and as time goes by I can see the direction, the arc, the span that will assist that process in its completion.

MG: What does writing do for your awareness, your consciousness that no other art form can?

JC: That’s an interesting note to leave this on. The short answer is everything. For me, what most people refer to as "thinking" is something I cannot see having any ability to do without writing. I just wouldn’t know what it was I thought if I couldn’t some way organize it as a physical entity. What people call "revision" I consider consciousness. The shifting of a pronoun or a preposition, the finding of the exact word, seeing that a "not" or a "no" was unnecessary, sentimental verbiage, an expression of a blockage, a clinging, an attachment—these are the things that might save the planet. It’s the difference between "I have a dream" and "I had a dream." In my study of Disability I’ve come to understand that punctuation was originally thought of as a literal way to puncture memory, to get the vividness inside by means of these little corkscrew lacerations. Americans like telecommunicative portability, but I live in a world where the poem and its writing is still the switchboard to a transhistoric present where the dead and living and unborn are all available for those big conference calls of essential nature.