JIM COHN

THE MUSEUM OF AMERICAN POETICS: AN ORAL HISTORY

The museum that most inspired my founding the Museum of American Poetics is the Walt Whitman State Historic Site on Long Island. The poet Chris Ide once wrote a poem about visiting the West Hills farmhouse where Whitman was born. He was so drunk he fell asleep in Whitman's bed. Seeing Whitman’s little bed made me feel like I was looking at the rocket ship that carried Superbaby to earth. It was a revelation, of sorts. Around the mid 1970s, I also became interested in the poet Frank O'Hara’s work at the Museum of Modern Art as a curator and as a reviewer for Art News. He was someone whose life as a poet and curator gave me confidence. Frank made everything look easy.

On April 5, 1997, I visited The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum while in Cleveland to be with my mother on her 66^th birthday the next day. The feeling I got at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame from seeing Woody Guthrie's hand-written lyric sheet of "This Land Is Your Land" behind glass on a crumpled piece of paper, Neil Young's "Rockin' In The Free World" in black Sharpie felt tip pen on both sides of a file folder, and a draft on yellow legal pad of "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix thrilled me. Seeing John Lennon's psychedelic-painted Rolls Royce, the flower-painted military-issue green helmet of Vietnam War field nurse Barbara Lee Gilbert, and a room full of radios from the 1950s gave me a feel for exhibits that were both personal & historic. I also liked that these things weren’t locked up in special collection libraries, but open to the general public. The display of all this de minimis was also a contemplative work-in-progress right up my alley. That April 1997 visit turned out to have occurred on the day Allen died.

I was driving down Euclid Avenue, back from the rock museum, 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, April 5, 1997, I had a dream that involved a road crew coming in with big machines and paving over what had been a field of sunflowers. Then, like in Time’s Square after the ball drops on New Year’s Eve and the people disperse to their respective merriments, I saw Sanitation Workers in bright yellow jumpsuits come out and sweep away tons of paper and books. I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep. The dream seemed prophetic. I felt that the tracks of liberation contained in the poetry of the Beats would soon be wiped out, erased, as if they had never been. So, it was the specific details of a dream that led to my starting an online museum. The next day I had a vision in which the words “Museum of American Poetics” appeared in my head.

In the summer of 1997, Kerouac School alumni Randy Roark, Joe Richey, Thom Peters, and I got together at the West End Tavern in Boulder to discuss how to go about creating a "living museum." None of us was web savvy. With the country in the throws of a speculative frenzy and an internet boom, there was a certain inevitability about the shift. There were 313,000 computers on the net in 1990. By 1996, there were ten million. Once Al Gore started talking “Information Superhighway,” the rest was history. In a nod to a line from “Last Month,” a poem by John Ashbery, Tom Peters suggested that the museum’s rallying cry should be "The poetry of the future is opening its doors.” Joe suggested that the museum could be a kind of digital Corn Palace. Randy was already interested in video work and he offered to help me learn.

I opted for the virtual real estate of poetspath.com, the uniform resource locator for the Museum of American Poetics (MAP). One of the first things I did, at the suggestion of Kerouac School friend, poet Sue Rhynhart, was to begin coordinating a lecture series. The idea behind hosting the “American Poet Greats Lecture Series” at the Boulder Book Store, an early site of the Kerouac School, was to have poets talk about poets who had influenced them. Since the store’s second floor was once the Performance Art Center of Naropa where Sue, Randy, Joe, and I met as students, it felt like an appropriate space to hold the series. I coordinated and produced sixteen lectures from 1997-2002. Tom Peters gave the first lecture, on Jack Kerouac, November 18, 1997.

The first season also featured talks by Randy on Philip Whalen, Sue on Frank O'Hara, Joe on Emily Dickinson, and I talked on Paul Blackburn. Other seasons included Lisa Jarnot on Robert Duncan, Akilah Oliver on Anne Waldman's Iovis I and II, Patrick Pritchett on Alice Notley, Reed Bye on Charles Olson, Richard Wilmarth on Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Greene on Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley, Kay Campbell on Gertrude Stein, Mark DuCharme on Jack Spicer, Mary Angeline on Lorine Niedecker, Kayanne Pitkin on Patti Smith, and Anselm Hollo on Ted Berrigan. I videotaped each lecture and then produced individual shows at Community Access Television of Boulder, where they aired on CATV’s cable channel 54, always opening with an Ornette Coleman tune. Then I’d run the tapes to Free Speech TV for digital streaming and upload to MAP. The standout lecture of the entire series was on April 16, 2002 when revered Boulder experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage gave what amounted to a farewell talk entitled “How poetry helped me to make films.”

In its first few years, MAP was creating new content and new forms, making it up as we went along. The code was a Tower of Babel. If it wasn’t totally clear that hard copy book making and distribution was on the way out, it was clear that the web provided a distribution network that hard copy and emailing could not equal. I decided to bring my annual poetry journal, Napalm Health Spa (NHS), and its archives, online. I had produced NHS since 1990 in very limited hard copy runs. I kept each issue to around 25-50 copies because I was making handmade paper covers and hand binding each copy with needle and thread. As elegant and individualized as that process was, the web offered far greater potential for readership and formats impossible to integrate into a physical magazine. Napalm Health Spa went digital in 1998.

Many years later, MAP became the context for one of the strangest convention-bending experiences I’ve ever had. A poet asked me to temporarily delete poems from the Napalm Health Spa online archive. This person was seeking employment. As soon as the person landed a job, the correct name could be reinstated. I was amazed by the whole idea that people believed public records, including literary records, could be changed as a matter of convenience. In 2010, Google chief Eric Schmidt issued a statement saying that young people might need to “change their names upon entering adulthood to escape their youthful indiscretions.” I wasn’t shocked by how ludicrous that statement was in the least.

Another early feature of MAP was Transmissions––poetics epiphany in prose. I had learned a lot about being a poet from such readings. Donald Allen’s and Warren Tallman’s The Poetics of The New American Poetry (1973) had only recently come out when I began my studies at Naropa in 1976. I wanted MAP to be a reading room. In 2009, I added a second transmission section on the subject of Postbeat Poets. I collaborated with Michael Rothenberg in order to reprint several essays from his online Jacket webzine. My work-in-progress timeline and bibliography of poets and their works, “A Postbeat Poets Chronology: 1962-2010,” came out of compiling poetics statements for what became the Postbeat Poets Activist Scholarship Project at MAP.

There were other memorable collaborations. Once I was putting together a “Hank Williams as Luke The Drifter” exhibit and a perfect stranger, Robert McGill Palmer, sent me a disc with the contents of two Luke The Drifter 45s and pictures of the records themselves. Photographer Steve Miles, fresh from having to extricate himself from accusations of involvement in the still unsolved Christmas 1996 murder of 6 year old JonBenét Ramsey, offered up meticulously prepared 60s era photographs from his vaults. Beat collector Walt Smith and I collaborated in putting together an exhibit of Ginsberg inscriptions and doodles. Kenny Lerner, of Flying Words Project, sent me videos of American Sign Language poet Peter Cook and him voicing for uploading. Steve Silberman, contributing editor of Wired, let me add his “Our Allen” photo collection.

Each webmaster I have worked with has also been a co-creator in how MAP evolved. When you consider I had no talent in web production––code––I was blessed to have worked with only a few different people. I worked with each person until the arrangement changed. Giving MAP its look did not follow any institutional chain of command. Consultants found the site and the internal organization incomprehensible. I couldn’t care less, as long as it worked. My webmasters were really angels. I wanted them to be somewhat undecipherable, ambiguously so, to reflect that this is poetry. Julio Edwards produced the first pages of MAP, its logo, and navigation icons. Chris Healer was a true web design genius. Tim Williams was strong on production and design. Ron Akin and I worked together the longest.

I loved working on MAP from the moment the first homepage appeared. It seemed like a later day manifestation of Brion Gysin’s 1961 stroboscopic dreamachine invention. I have no formal education in either Museum Science or Web Mastering, but that always seemed more fortuitous than not. Something else was carrying poetry in a way that brought people together. This is what museums have traditionally done with art. The feeling of wanting to do this probably began as a teenager in Cleveland. There, I often went to the Dali Museum. For hours I would study paintings like Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra or The Hallucinogenic Toreador.

MAP exists in two-dimensional space modeled after literary centers I had known––Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, and Writers and Books in Rochester. Besides having library-like materials on poetics and an annual journal, I wanted to have a reading series, a virtual reading series. By the late 90s, video cameras and production became affordable. More poets were being documented on tape and film than in any previous time in history. I was fortunate to have friends such as Detroit poet M.L. Liebler send me video clips of poets reading their work live. The result was I began a section of MAP for poetry performance called “Best Minds.” Only a few years later, with the advent of broad band internet, this kind of project became obsolete and MAP downloaded its entire video collection onto YouTube and thereafter, through the MAP Channel, began selecting poetry readings already available online.

In the early days, there were numerous decisions regarding MAP’s mission. One of the decisions was to have exhibits showcasing poets arranged by genre. I decided that MAP would focus on certain lineages associated with, but not dominated by the Beats. Over time, I developed over twenty distinct exhibits. I curated MAP exhibits to celebrate American poetics diversity. After September 11, 2001, when Islamophobia was rampant and the Occupation of Iraq well underway, MAP unveiled a “Middle Eastern American Poets” exhibit to provide a greater sense of cultural solidarity for a vast region that in general Americans preferred to demonize, even though our own government gave long standing support to the autocrats of the major anti-American populations.

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, I found MAP’s Americentric orientation not simply limiting, but grossly inaccurate. I kept returning to the PEN International site to learn more about human rights abuses against writers, and ways to promote and defend freedom of expression around the world. In 2007, I began curating exhibits with individual poets outside the United States. First, I looked into the history of poetry and came up with an exhibit titled “Old Globe Masterminds” that began with 15,000 B.C.E. cave painting and runs through the nineteenth century, showing how poetry is the result of no particular nation or time. I opened a second planetary exhibit called “20^th Century International Bards” that focused on poets outside the United States and the contributions they made. In 2008, MAP opened a third international exhibit called “Today’s World Voices.”

Beginning in 2000, I would on occasion––say, the death of a poet––develop individual author web pages specifically for MAP exhibits. Sometimes these pages were done in collaboration with the author, other times not. MAP pages were created for Gwendolyn Brooks, Andy Clausen, Gregory Corso, Luke the Drifter, Allen Ginsberg, Eliot Katz, and Anne Waldman. I also designed and continue to redesign my own author page. There are problems with author pages. Most are not structured to showcase the poetry. They tend to prioritize biography over the work. I didn’t notice that painters had this problem. With painter and artist sites, the work often seems to be right there in front of you. With poets, you generally have to drill. This led to my experimenting with how to design pages that bring the poems, poetics, prose, interviews, videos, galleries, and such front and center. In 2010, I would design web pages for and with Michigan poet Dave Cope that would do just that.

Over the years, I’ve seen the Museum of American Poetics as avant-garde or irrelevant––as a matter of perception. Anyone who has created something online knows cyberspace is a mirror of human experience. No website can substitute for the basic groundlessness of a conditioned or unconditioned life, but it serves as a symbol of emptiness, all the same. In order for something to exist, there must also be a sense of nonexistence, a sense of absence. Before there can be presence, before words are spoken or thoughts arise, there must be a space where they are unspoken, unthought. A web site does not mean only words, sounds, and images. A web site can be a reflection of the emotional energy that fuels all forms of expression. It might also, in some cases, return the viewer to the breath. Inherently, speech and vision are emptiness, the openness from which poetry arises. William Blake said “Energy Is Eternal Delight.”

8 November 2000, Revised 11-17 September 2010

[Jim Cohn. From Sutras & Bardos: Essays & Interviews on Allen Ginsberg, The Kerouac School, Anne Waldman, Postbeat Poets & the New Demotics. Museum of American Poetics Publications, 2011]