Biography

J I M C O H N

biography

Jim Cohn has lead a life chronicling his times and the landscapes of his generation. His is a diamond hard language--brief, concise, fast, pictorial. "Jim's poetry cuts back and forth between the human heart and home, and the spaces and surprises of the wild," wrote Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder.

Born in Highland Park, Illinois, in 1953, he received a BA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in English, and a Certificate of Poetics in 1980 from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where he was teaching assistant to Allen Ginsberg. In 1986 he received his M.S. Ed. in English and Deaf Education from the University of Rochester and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. In 1987, he coordinated the first, historic National Deaf Poetry Conference.

Jim is the author of five collections of poetry: Green Sky (1980), Prairie Falcon (North Atlantic Books, 1989), Grasslands (Writers & Books Publications, 1994), The Dance Of Yellow Lightning Over The Ridge (Writers & Books Publications, 1998) and Quien Sabe Mountain (Museum of American Poetics Publications, 2004). Anne Waldman, co-founder of the Kerouac School, described Prairie Falcon as "a strong, shapely collection with intelligence, heart, and love of the breadth of life." Grasslands won praise from Allen Ginsberg for its "inventive, profuse, concise, improvisational, playful and expansive Whitmanic quality." Anselm Hollo said of Quien Sabe Mountain that "one follows this poet on his journeys to places both distant and familiar, trusting him, trusting his words."

Jim began his recording career in The Abolitionists, a North Bay Area collective that featured his long-time musical collaborator Mooka Rennick and guitarist Steve Kimock. Together, they made a now cult classic: The Road (Rudy's Steakhouse, 1995). Inspired by the classic improvisational vocal performances of Jack Kerouac on the 1959 Steve Allen Plymouth Show , Jim then established himself as a powerful spoken word performing artist in his own right with the release of five recordings: The Road (Rudy's Steakhouse, 1995), Walking Thru Hell Gazing At Flowers (Rudy's Steakhouse, 1996), Unspoken Words (MusEx Records, 1998), Antenna (MusEx Records, 1999), Emergency Juke Joint (MusEx Records, 2002), Trashtalking Country (MusEx Records, 2006), and Homage (MusEx Records, 2007). Combining an inimitable mix of American roots music & original spoken word, Jim's recordings air on radio stations in-the-know.

After the death of Allen Ginsberg in April 1996, Jim began planning for an online poetry project that would explore affects of Beat Generation poetics activities after the poets that created the best works of the period were gone. He envisioned a site that would serve as an expression of Ginsberg's idea of a "benevolent sentient center to the whole Creation." During the summer of 1997, Jim founded the on-line Museum of American Poetics (MAP) at www.poetspath.com. MAP is an expression of his ongoing commitment to American experimental poetics, community service, postbeat era documentation, and democratic internet free speech. In 1999, the Museum of American Poetics became the first online poetry site to be mentioned in the New York Times.

That same year, Jim published his first collection of prose: Sign Mind: Studies in American Sign Language Poetics (Museum of American Poetics Publications, 1999). Sign Mind has received critical acclaim from deaf language arts scholars and hearing poets alike for providing aesthetic and cultural insight to the inclusion of signing space poetries and poets within the context of the greater American literary canon. After further contemplation on issues of identity and suffering by way of his professional involvement with people with disabilities and his personal examination of Buddhist texts, Jim published a second volume of poetics prose: The Golden Body: Meditations on the Essence of Disability (Museum of American Poetics Publications, 2003).

Jim was first introduced to video production by poet Randy Roark and began an interest in public television as a result. His American Poet Greats series won the Best Multimedia Award from Community Television of Boulder for three year in a row (2001-2003). In 2003, Jim produced his first film, a 55 minute profile on the life and poetic contributions of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics co-founder Anne Waldman, entitled Anne Waldman: Makeup on Empty Space (Poetspath Productions).

As an alternative publisher and editor of poetry for three decades, Jim mimeo-produced ACTION Magazine in the 1980s while living in Rochester, NY. In 1990, he began the annual poetics journal Napalm Health Spa, the first several issues of which were handbound with handmade paper covers. In December, 2004, he completed work on a manuscript referred to as the “Chinabeat” Anthology. The “Chinabeat” Anthology was to be a collaboration with Wen Chu-an, Professor of English in the Department of Foreign Languages, West China-Sichuan University of Medical Sciences, Sichuan province, China, and translator of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as well as a bilingual, Chinese/English edition of Allen Ginsberg: Selected Poems (1947-1997). Sadly, Wen Chu-an died while the project was under consideration. In the summer of 2006, Jim began work with traditional Tibetan prayer flag makers living in exile to establish a poetry prayer flag project. The first effort of this alternative publishing project was a 50th anniversary limited edition prayer flag set of Allen Ginsberg’s "Howl". Simultaneously, a second limited edition prayer flag set featured Jim's long tantri poem "When Skeletons Make Love". In 2007, with the assistance of the Allen Ginsberg Trust, as well as poets David Cope, Eliot Katz, Marc Olmsted and Randy Roark, Jim began research on the poetry of younger poets directly linked with Allen Ginsberg. In January of 2008, this scholarship resulted in the publications of an article entitled “Postbeat Poets” for Wikipedia.