What Got Me Into The Museum Biz:

What Got Me Into The Museum Biz:

The most important museum I ever went to, where I had an epiphany, was the Walt Whitman cabin on Long Island. It gave me a sincere awe for the things a poet is surrounded by. The whole crazy idea of starting a museum 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, but it wasn't until around April of 1997 when I first visited the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame that anything concrete began to happen.

The feeling of seeing Woody Guthrie's hand-written lyric sheet to "This Land Is Your Land" behind glass on a crumpled piece of paper or Neil Young's black felt tip pen on a file folder of "Keep On Rockin' In The Free World" or a first draft on yellow legal pad of "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix just thrilled me. Seeing John Lennon's psychedelic-painted Rolls Royce and the helmet of Barbara Lee Gilbert–a field nurse in Vietnam or a room full of radios from the 50's gave me a feel for exhibits that were both personal & historic. I was driving down Euclid Avenue back from the rock hall when I heard on the top-of-the-hour ABC radio news at 1:00 p.m. that Allen Ginsberg was dead.

The night Allen died, I had a nightmare the world would quickly forget that poetry was as true an American art form as jazz–which it could cop because it's revolution was easier to contain. To paraphrase William Carlos Williams in The Embodiment of Knowledge, information is the submission form of language; poetry, in its experimental, candor phase–explored from Whitman and Dickinson, through the Objectivists, Stein, Harlem Renaissance, Beats, and New York School–its liberation. In the summer of 1997, Randy Roark, Joe Richey, Tom Peters & I got together at the West End Tavern in Boulder to discuss how to go about creating a "living museum." Tom said it was "the poetry of the future opening its doors." Joe suggested that the museum could be a kind of Corn Palace of the mind.

Since 1998, I have been collaborating with a series of eclectic webmasters to improve the Museum of American Poetics website. Viewable in all its phases on the sites link to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, I added Napalm Health Spa, an annual poetry mag and its online archival editions; Transmissions-a virtual poetics handbook; Best Minds downloadable performance series; Links to useful archives and various tools of the trade, and Exhibits showcasing well-designed, memorable web galleries devoted to poets who make it new.

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. Over the years, MAP has also expanded its curated exhibits to 17 distinct showcases highlighting the diversity of American Poetry. MAP has created specific webpages on Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Andy Clausen, David Cope, Eliot Katz, Stephen Miles, poetic forms (for children) with Jack Collom, and a page on Hank Williams's alter ego, Luke the Drifter.

[ 8 November 2000, addendum 28 October 2006 ]

Originally published as "How I got into the museum business," in The Arts Paper, 2/1, Feb/Mar 2001, 1,5.