H
e a r t S o n s & H e a r t
D a u g h t e r s
of A l l e n G i n s b e r g
N
a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 :
A r c h i v e s E d i
t i o n
JIM COHN
Interview with Jim Cohn by Randy Roark,
February-March 2009
Randy Roark: Can you tell us a bit about what you consider to be your
poetic
lineage?
Jim Cohn: I've always felt myself to be part of a cosmology of some
kind or
another.
As part of that it was evident early on that I wouldn't totally understand
what
it was and that it would offer little or no affirmation for my being a part of
it.
Nevertheless,
poetic lineage became a manifestation, a living mythos, for me.
Through
circumstances beyond my control, I plugged into the poetry that
randomly
came my way and the poetry that I purposefully sought out. I was
influenced
by individual poets associated with the Beat Generation, not so much
from
their books, but from knowing them at the height of their pedagogic powers
at
the then newly founded Naropa Institute. By “teachers” I mean of poetry as a
practice
in dharma. The transmitters that touched me most were Allen Ginsberg,
William
Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, and the first generation Postbeat poets Ted
Berrigan,
Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer and Anne Waldman. I never met the
Persian-by-way-of-Canada
American prose poet Jack Kerouac. In the process of
absorbing
what was meaningful to me from many schools of poetry, and art in
general,
I thought that the idea of "lineage" was interesting only as a kind
of
bourgeois
parlor game or a kind of intellectual cliche. I had read Norm
Chomsky’s
ideas about transactional grammar while still in high school and went
on
throughout my undergraduate years at the University of Colorado at Boulder to
receive
training in critical analysis that succeeded in almost killing my passion for
literature.
So, there's a vaudeville sense of lineage to contend with in my own
personal
cosmos––either you have something to say that nobody is talking about
or
you have something to say that everybody is talking about and can do that both
in
a way that resonates with the past and the future or it doesn’t. And you have
moments
of lucidity and moments of utter darkness––a series of dreams and
nightmares––maybe
one dream about Crazy Horse riding through a hail of bullets
and
two nightmares about the people that broke your heart and the suffering you
cannot
escape. In my library I have the works of a few of my contemporaries:
people
like Basho, Antler, Thoreau, Eileen Myles, Robert Desnos, Mary Shelley,
Andy
Clausen, Wanda Coleman, Federico Garcia Lorca, Else von Freytag-
Loringhoven,
Paul Blackburn, Thomas R. Peters, Jr., Mina Loy, John Cage, Maria
Tsvetaeva,
Nanao Sakaki, the Baal Shem Tov, Joanne Kyger, Bob Kaufman,
Gertrude
Stein, Hunter S. Thompson, Wang Wei, bell hooks, Marc Olmsted,
Abraham
Lincoln, Shakespeare, videos by the American Sign Language poet
Peter
Cook, Han Shan, David Cope. I don't belong to any lineage and I don't think
any
lineage belongs to me. You can’t exactly audition. Still, in Valparaiso, Chile,
seeing
the large photograph of Whitman in the Chilean poet Neruda's study I had
an
out-of-body experience. I should say my sense of lineage does not go in only
one
direction. That is, I sense that I'm as much a part of the invisible lineages
of
the
future if not more than I am those of the past. I remember the future.
RR:
Can you remember when you first became aware of poetry? Can you
remember
the first poem you wrote and why?
JC:
Poetry came first through mass media, mass entertainment––
Faster than a speeding bullet...
More powerful than a locomotive...
Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound...
Crazy
metaphoric autochthonic language like that from TV shows and Sunday
matinees
made language something to attend to, something of interest. After all,
early
cognition is all a poem. The first book I read where I got the idea of the
excitement
of reading was Howard Pyle’s The Merry
Adventures of Robin Hood. I
remember
finding it on the library shelves in my elementary school and reading it
until
I fell asleep for about a month. The first poem that I wrote that made me feel
like
I was connecting with the big time poets was "George Washington Bridge,
Lower
Level, Clear Day." GWB was something I'd written while living at
Birdsfoot
Farm, an organic farming commune in St. Lawrence County. I wrote
that
piece in January 1989, when I was thirty-five years old. The poem came in a
flash
as I drove across the bridge carrying a truckload of firewood into Manhattan
on
a beautiful winter's day. I wrote it in a cabin with no ninety degree walls, a
woodburning
stove for heat, no running water, on a Royal manual typewriter with
correcto-tape.
Although I had been writing poems since my days as a student at
Naropa,
lots of them, this poem convinced me that I was a poet when there was
nobody
around to affirm or deny that for me:
GEORGE
WASHINGTON BRIDGE, LOWER LEVEL, CLEAR DAY
Who
would want to take
the
lower level of the
GW
on a crystal clear
day?
If I put a fake
ice
cube with a cock-
roach
in their drink
Would
they say any-
thing
about it to me?
Would
they feel a need
to
discuss their right
to
choose when faced
with
duality? Would their
license
plate have sig-
nificance?
Would the letters
&
numbers undulate like
a
snake down the arm of
the
Statue of Liberty
at
Equinox? Do they like
Jackie
Gleason more than
Pee
Wee Herman? Have they
written
books in Arabic
denouncing
Mickey Mouse?
Do
they own a string of
zipper
factories? Do they
wash
each blade of grass
in
their yard with a damp
cloth?
Do they have dreams
of
their parents killing each
other?
Are they afraid to
have
children? Have they
ever
fallen thru ice?
Been
stuck in an electric
car
between terminals at
the
airport in Houston?
Were
they children who
had
run hotels in Mexico?
Were
they child assassins
in
Pol Pot's army? Are they
a
child with memories of
helicopters
exploding stuffed
inside
the body-bag of an
adult
driving over the Hudson
River,
clear day, on the
George
Washington Bridge.
Just
someone looking for
a
place to rent. Just some-
one
on the way to a nursery
to
water geraniums &
Easter
lilies. Just
someone
who uses a Spell
Check.
An Image scientist.
just
someone doing a little
Inside
trade. Had they seen
Yellowstone
burn? Did they
carry
a pair of Chicago
roller
skates in the trunk?
Are
there used condoms
in
their ashtray? Does
their
left rear tire
need
a little air? Have
they
been to the Panama
Canal?
Do they horde toilet
paper
in their basement?
Do
they sleep with their
students?
Had they been
ordered
to kill their teacher?
Were
there baby shoes
hanging
from the rear-view
mirror?
How old is their
hairdo?
How long are they
planning
to wear those
socks?
Do they keep the
Christmas
lights on their
house
up all year? Do they
pray
to St. Anthony when
they've
lost something &
then
find it! Are their
headlights
on? Do they think
golf
would be more inter-
esting
if the fairways were
different
colors? Do they
believe
in Pro Wrestling?
Would
they rather see
Llamas
than dogs in the subway?
Is
it someone related to
George
Washington himself!
Could
it be! Is it someone
who
thinks the Tooth
Fairy
real? A policy
strategist?
A media wizard?
Maybe
you grow ginseng root.
You
were the Emperor's Physician.
A
Department of Corrections
officer.
A security guard. Just
someone
who lives the
house
they were born in. The
Mayor--—putting
homeless
people
in a cheap hotel.
Was
that a Laundry Worker
on
strike driving down onto
the
Lower Level? A painter
who
saw only Anti-Space? Someone
good
with structure? Someone
who
didn't need any.
Were
they eating Melba
Toast?
Do they know UPS
leases
ships to the Navy?
When
they shit, do they "Shit
from
the heart?" Do they think
water-polo
is played with rackets?
Had
they learned to react
calmly
to the death of strangers?
Do
their windshield wipers
work?
Do they consider the Cross-
Bronx
Expressway "The Drop
Ceiling
of Hell?" Are all
their
brothers cops? Did
they
know Mingus? Do they
live
in an apartment full
of
writers? When the President
left
Washington, did they snap
off
a parting salute? Just somebody
behind
the wheel, thinking it's
better
to live our lives than
put
a price upon them. Just
composing
Verse—as in Universe.
As
in the Future going on
foot
thru a Crowd. Had their
fathers
died of nightmares?
Do
their sisters have exaggerated
&
self-conscious attachments
to
the Great Blank Spaces of
American
Culture that seem to
reduce
them to a tiny yet inextinguish-
able
song? Is their greatest vanity
Hairdressing
the Hero? Do they see
the
bridge as a Rainbow? Do they
think
of rainbows as the Ever-Present
Unity
Connecting Two Camps? Are
they
72-Hour-Awake-Truckdrivers on
Speed
listening to Emmylou Harris
CDs?
Does the Bridge remind them of
George
Washington, cutting down the
cherry
tree? Mother, I cannot tell
a
lie. I cut down the Sacred Hoop
today.
I cut down the great Tree
of
Peace today Mother. Are they
en
route to a Ta'i Chi Ballroom
for
an evening of Slam Waltzing?
Is
this Noise that I hear pieces of
Silence
breaking off from the
enormous
& dumb & incorrigible
mass
inside them? Do they shriek
&
squeal—those Tires—or is
that
Sound the pressing of human
Energy
& Existence upon us, without
there
ever being a taking account
of
the Destruction? Do the poets
of
the Poolhalls dream blue
pizzas
thinking of Rilke in Munich
bleeding
like the Sun to say "It
lies
in the nature of every finally
perfect
love that sooner or later
it
may no longer reach the loved one
save
in the Infinite." Do they
take
this Lower Level for to glimpse
Swans
below? Are their Hearts as
tender
as the inside of red roses?
Let
me tell you why I like that number. It impressed me. The idea of it
came all
at
once and with it the assignment to write it. And then I did it. In doing it, I
found
it
contained energy that was my energy and vision that was my vision. It was my
construction
and it was my own counterbalance to various other ephemera. And it
was
also a product of my own ephemera. Other poets one admires for the miracle
of
how they get the language to do things that can liberate your mind. If you
cannot
admire yourself for the miracle of how you get things across in your own
language,
you should read about the life of Christine de Pizan or watch something
like
Jet Li in Twin Warriors. "George
Washington Bridge" is not a difficult object
to
comprehend and I liked that very much. Still, nobody much noticed. I might as
well
as written it with invisible ink. But I did it because I had to. It was a 40-
degree
below freezing. Northern lights all green in the sky and there I was,
writing
by kerosene lantern light. Other poets far better known than I ever care to
be
probably aren’t the wood shed type. I had different ambitions. I wanted to let
the
people of the future know that I had been to my own mountaintop, which in
that
case, was the lower level of the George Washington Bridge. So, I see
cultivated
in this early poem a sense of fearlessness and fleetingness. I think the
poem
stands today as a clear expression of certain laws of culture and the
incessant
movement around those laws just by giving voice to my own ragged
thought
forms one night while removed in a little wooden hut with nothing to do
but
watch the snow blow in under the door.
RR: How did you become a piano tuner? Whose pianos have you
tuned?
JC: I
had a serious jones for the piano since I was a kid. We had a blind piano
tuner
come work on the family piano, a Steinway console. I have that piano
today.
I was enamored with players from Otis Spann to Thelonius Monk, Art
Tatum
to Professor Longhair, Nicky Hopkins to Keith Godchaux. When I
graduated
from college in 1976, I made the decision to go to a piano tuning and
rebuilding
school––The Simms School of Piano Technology. James Simms was
the
proprietor. He drove a Cadillac and had thick oily black hair. The Simms
School
of Piano Technology was an interesting scene with a lot of southern
intrigue
on the banks of the Chattahoochee River. Work gangs in black and white
striped
prison clothes cleaned up the park in front of the nearby Piggly Wiggly
chained
to each other at the ankles. The Tastee Freeze girl was blackmailing one
of
the Simms’ students, accusing him of getting her pregnant. The owner had a
few
of his own less than discreet trysts. The technical trainers would bring us
beefsteak
tomatoes and we would eat them over by the loading dock. I was there
six
months. I must have listened to Neil Young’s Tonight's the Night a thousand
times
while living in Columbus, Georgia. I lived next door to a single woman
commandeering
a family of five kids. On the road opposite us was a Fort
Bennington
bombing range. I used to take long walks there. One night my house
burned
down. I’d started a fire and gotten into the shower to warm up when I saw
flames
shooting through the walls. I attended Simms's school regularly, learned
how
to set a proper equal tempered scale by ear, run beats, clear the octaves,
rebuild
and regulate an action, restring and hammer, drill a new pinblock, shim a
Eastern
White Spruce soundboard. I opened my first piano rebuilding shop in
Glen
Elen, California, near Jack London Park where Jack London’s dream house
burned
in 1913. I think I read Martin Eden
in Glen Elen. Jack London had some
pretty
strange views on life, but that book was good advice for not getting too
disheartened
if the world did not stand up on its hind legs and throw you a bag of
loot
for your troubles. I had a few accounts going. My friend and musical
collaborator,
Mark “Mooka” Rennick, had moved out to Cotati and was about to
start
what would become his Prairie Sun Recordings. I moved my shop out of
Glen
Elen and into a single room on Madrone Avenue, just of Highway 116 near
one
of the best Sonoma County dives around, Red’s Recovery Room. I did a lot
of
thinking in that shop and some work when I could get it. I began to apprentice
with
the Grateful Dead's keyboard tech down in Marin County. His name was
Robert
Yambert. I'd stay overnight at Robert’s little compound in Lagunitas.
Later,
after Mooka establish Prairie Sun Recordings and I had packed up my tools
and
moved to Montana, Tom Waits recorded his two Grammies by using the
room
that'd been my piano repair shop and I think there was a movie made there
in
that room as well. I then opened a third shop in Missoula. That was in the fall
on
1979. The winter I lived there my water pipes froze. The sink fell off the
wall.
I
wrote a letter to Allen Ginsberg at Naropa explaining why, for some reason, I
thought
I would make a good teaching assistant. I think you were the person that
encouraged
me to do it. I’d been working on the railroad all that fall before
moving
to Missoula, trying to make enough money to enroll in Naropa. In 1980 I
became
Allen’s teaching assistant at the Kerouac School. That winter Allen
secured
a piano in his apartment at 2141 Bluff Street in Boulder. It was a large
yellow
upright. It was in pretty bad shape. He asked me to tune it. When I
finished
Gregory Corso came into the living room very quiet and respectful.
When
I was done he sat down and played Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine."
After
he finished playing he just sits there for a while, a long while really, and
then
he gets up and he gives me a kiss on the cheek. Once I borrowed the traps
from
the square grand piano in the lobby of a hotel in the center of Boulder in
broad
daylight. I needed to duplicate the design for a job. After I did that I had to
replace
them in the middle of the hotel lobby right in the open again. Nobody
seemed
to notice one way or another.
RR:
I've seen you play the guitar many times but I can only remember seeing you
play
the piano once. There is some piano on your CDs, but it's mostly guitar
music.
Do you have a piano in your house now? Do you mostly compose on the
piano
or the guitar? Do you find your write different kinds of music on each?
JC:
Instruments are like fortune tellers. You go to them for alchemical purposes. I
had
a singer songwriter phase as a younger man and I'm studying that archive
now,
but I moved into something else after my first solo record, Unspoken Words,
and
began a whole new process, something that feels more appropriate for the feel
and
the sound I’m after. Unspoken Words
was a transitional phase from the
songwriter
I’d been to the spoken word poet I had become. There were songs like
I
had written early on such as "Rewrote The Book" and "Palm
Reader" but there
were
also experimental things in which I was putting my poems to the musical
soundtrack
in my head such as "When Robots Cry" and "Meditation At A
Stoplight
In The Rain" which were improvisational. Rhyme just doesn't get me far
enough
to anything that touches me. I needed to yield to other forces than myself
musically.
Say what you will about musicians, the ones worth any salt are able to
listen,
especially when there's tape running. I'd stopped feeling that about the
people
who came to my poetry readings. I might as well have been talking to
myself.
I recently remixed about two hours of selected material I've recorded
between
1995 and 2008 into a two CD compilation called Impermanence. You
can
hear an example of my keyboard playing on “Ghost Dance” and my guitar
playing
on “Rewrote The Book.” "Ghost Dance" is an intense little something I
wrote
a day or two after the fall of the World Trade Center Towers which Bob
Holman
published at his aboutpoetry.com website. It begins with the historic
literal
Ghost Dance Chant contributed by David Young and I did the organ work
on
that. “Rewrote The Book” is a song that came to me all at once. The opening
lines––“You
went into a trance to live. / Chose a one room flat when you had a
mansion.”––came
to me one day out of nowhere and the song just rolled itself off
the
line in nothing flat. Thanks to my friendship with Mooka, I've recorded with
some
pretty fascinating characters: guitarist Steve Kimock on "Padre
Trail,"
Arabaic
surf music king Dick Dale on "Years Of The Light Highway" and
keyboardist
John Alaire on "Undivided Attention." Mooka has carried me over
the
years like Leonard Chess did Muddy Waters. In my own solo recording
career,
I have had some interesting chapters. I played with Allen's musical
collaborator,
Steven Taylor, on a punk version of Tom Campion's "Follow Thy
Faire
Sun Unhappy Shadow." The only other cover I've ever done is that greatest
personal
ad of all time, "My Funny Valentine," which I embedded in the middle
of
a thing called "Odessa (The Mime)." With Boulder keyboardist and
arranger
Bob
Schlesinger we did a 40 minute improve to a long poem of mine "Treasures
For
Heaven." That piece sort of fulfilled an ambition begun when as a teenager
I
first
heard The Doors “The End.” The piece "Dragon Tracks" was composed
live
with
an all-girls band and that had a feel unlike anything in my repertoire. The
success
of that session made me wonder why there are no terrific girl jam bands
with
huge cult-like followings. Is it that girls don’t like to jam? Isn’t the world
ready
for that yet? Do you have to be Iranian? One of the greatest sessions I ever
had
was for a piece called "Where The Road Disappears" because that night
was
nearly
cancelled when the guitar player showed up without his guitar. Joey the
guitar
player had no money for strings. Another time the session players got stuck
in
a blizzard and couldn’t make it. I’d invited a friend, Michael Matheny, over
that
night and Michael stopped by with his guitar. On the spot we did “Because,”
this
little poem I’d written for my daughter. There are very few social situations
where
the mood makes any sense to my nervous system. I need to insert myself
where
forces can be engaged, to paraphrase Trungpa Rinpoche, in a First Take
Best
Take manner. On the other hand, sometimes I would be hearing something in
the
session only later and I'd add it myself instrumentally after everybody left.
The
way I create my vocals can also involve a totally opposite process than the
speed
of the actual session work, but I’m after a very elusive thing––a kind of
Prajna
Paramita oral hat trick of form and emptiness. It sometimes takes a while
to
feel what had happened so quickly instrumentally and to find a way to phrase
what
I had said that was a particular poem in an instrumental space that arose
without
thought. Ultimately, for me, music is space. Not the space of a canvas,
but
more like the space in Stan Brakhage's Dog
Star Man. So, I do write
differently
on different instruments, but my primary instrument is my heart as
seen
through my mind in a kind of vivid soundtrack of and to the moment I wrote
the
poem.
RR:
What is your vision for the Museum of American Poetics?
JC:
The initial image of the Museum of American Poetics (MAP) early on was
that
of a literary center. Its mission was codified by Boulder poet Tom Peters,
Thomas
R. Peters, Jr., owner of the Beat Book Shop and long running master of
ceremonies
for the "So, You're A Poet!" reading series. Alluding to a line by
the
New
York School poet John Ashbery, Tom gave MAP it's credo: "The poetry of
the
future is opening its doors." So there was an open-ended quality to my
initial
vision
of the Museum of American Poetics. It was part Corn Palace, part roadside
attraction,
but I also had intentions to make it in and of itself not only of and about
great
art, but great art itself. My vision
of MAP has changed over the years. It
began
with a dream the night Allen Ginsberg died that the literary works of the
Beat
Generation would be forgotten. I don't now think that will happen any time
soon,
but it drove me into a preservationist state of mind. After about the first 5
years
things got a little more expansive and I began documenting and curating
more
and more poet web pages and creating exhibits reflecting the diversity of
American
Poesy. Things started happening as I was fortunate to work with a
series
of webmasters as out of their gourds as myself. The experimentation with
design
and iconicity and arrangement on the front side, not to mention the behind
the
curtain organization out back, began to give the Museum of American Poetics
an
aura that we were seriously engaging both the medium and the message.
Around
MAP's first decade online, I began to critically explore the relationship
between
the Beat and the Postbeat because that was my experience and I wasn't
seeing
it reflected anywhere else. There are many roads leading beyond the Beat
Generation,
but none of them was the road I was on. There were a couple
anthologies
that came close to bringing together the Postbeats, but no coherent
theory
about them. In that way, I’m like Stephen Hawkins. I may not be able to
explain
the nature of black holes, but I’m after a unifying theory. These people
that
put together these collections didn’t seem to have any ability to describe what
was
right before their eyes. I saw myself and others that had known and worked
and
traveled with Allen and been directly influenced by him faced with the reality
that
no one was interested in because no one was being told they should be and
really
we were quite fortunate that they weren’t. For me, I just got to a point
where
I needed to restructure MAP as a sanctum sanctorum, a holy of holies, an
inspiration
to those that write and those that depend on the what poets do. As for
the
Postbeats––I was very interested in knowing who they were because really in
the
aftermath of the Beat Generation, they were everywhere. So, MAP's first
decade
curatorial period is marked with an effort to establish lines of Postbeat
poets.
There was a certain art to doing that. Around 2008 I began to feel both
restricted
and somewhat shallow for the "American" part of the name of the
enterprise.
I began a series of new exhibits to push beyond borders, both in time
and
space. I wanted any poet anywhere that may access MAP's pages to know that
it
may not be about us, but those to come shall compose even greater works of art.
This
probably caught the attention of places like the Library of Congress, the
Academy
of American Poets, The Electronic Poetry Center, and the Allen
Ginsberg
Trust and who knows what nefarious other dark forces. I don't know
what
Enheduanna, Homer, Sappho, Ovid, Lalya al-Akhyaliyyah, Li Bai, Lady Ise,
Milarepa,
Rumi, Dogen and Petrarch, Villon and du Bellay, John Donne,
Geronimo
and Black Elk would be into today, but it’s what I got into. Working
long
term on a website is it's own form of looking into the mirror. You can want
from
it more or less, but you still end up with nothing.
RR:
I'm curious about how your work with disability services, and specifically
your
experience with American Sign Language has affected you as a poet.
JC:
Right Livelihood has to link to one's sense of calling, what you came to this
life
to do. It also involves making of yourself a path of service to align who you
are
and the human condition. I have been graced with many lives, but the one
associated
with American Sign Language (ASL) poetics and the one consumed by
disability
services left their own particular imprints on me as a poet. My interest
in
ASL poetics began with Allen, but it was equally influenced by the
ethnographic
writings of Gary Snyder, particularly the book Earth Household. In
2008,
the filmmaker Miriam Nathan Lerner completed an extensive documentary,
two
years in the making, on the 20th century history of ASL poetry. The film is
titled
The Heart of the Hydrogen Jukebox
after “Howl.” I was quite surprised to
see
myself honored for the role I played in introducing Ginsberg to a deaf
audience
of poets in 1984 and in coordinating the first national Deaf poetry
conference
in 1987 because the last major contact I had with a Deaf literary arts
audience,
around 1990 was a debacle. I was literally booed off stage. Deaf people
do
not want to have a hearing person anywhere near something as revered to them
as
their language. I didn’t blame them. The experience was instrumental in my
moving
forward. Accolades aside, what affected me most during the period of my
Deaf
cultural immersion was my primary informant, Robert Panara, the single-
most
learned Deaf poet-scholar of the 20th century. I did a lot of coordinating of
bicultural
and bilingual poetry readings between 1984 and 1987 in Rochester. I
was
guided by an invisible hand that whole time and the poets I met were equally
guided
by their own fates. I met a young poet during that time named Peter Cook
who
went on to revolutionize poetic signing in a way that just blew everyone who
saw
him perform, hearing or deaf, away. We became quite good friends. Peter
collaborated
with spoken word artist Kenny Lerner and together they formed a
performance
poetry show called the Flying Words Project that has toured the
world.
A biography of those guys would be pretty shocking. They were as
paradigm
shifting as Chuck Berry and Boris Karloff. There’s a lot of superstition,
since
Beethoven, about Ninth Symphonies, because people would die trying to
finish
them. Flying Words Project began with that and took off from there. I was
married
to a woman named Donna Kachites at the time, a gifted sign language
interpreter.
Donna interpreted for a deaf poet named Debbie Rennie, who's poetry
took
off where Dorothy Miles, perhaps the most empassioned Deaf poetess of the
20th
century, left off. With Rochester poet and painter J. Todd Beers, I did a
reading
series at a club called Jazzberries that featured poets such as Bernadette
Mayer,
Andy Clausen, and Antler. Everyone was interpreted, either with voicing
or
signing. Allen had articulated that phanopoeia,
the image aspect of poetry, was
the
only thing he found that would translate into other languages. Wit or lyricism
would
not. It was Allen who told the ASL poets in Rochester that the visual
aspect
of ASL could make the Deaf poet quite relevant to any global poetry. I did
come
away from it with a more immediate understanding of the nature of the
signing
space. I took the Pound-Fenollosa model of the Chinese written character
as
a medium for poetry and transposed that theory to ASL. So, a lot of reading
and
talking at Naropa found an interesting application with ASL that fueled my
own
willingness to ransom myself to the skillfulness poetry requires. The
skillfulness
poetry requires is to see your self as completely out-to-lunch and also
to
develop a total fondness for that. That's Right Livelihood. I didn't have to
take
anything
because it was all right there given to me. I'm speaking of the rapture of
all
night talking in silence, the feeling that I was being transported. My mouth
transposed
to my hands and ears transposed to my eyes. It could get quite surreal
and
I wrote about it in my first book of prose essay, Sign Mind: Studies in
American Sign Language Poetics. I found in ASL a complimentary prosody to
English,
but with distinct parameters from the oral language tradition and older,
more
embodied with vividness than words, more of The Origins. From 1988 to
1992
I opened and ran a disability services office at St. Lawrence University in
Canton,
NY. One of my friends on the faculty of SLU was Thomas Coburn who
taught
in Religious Studies. Later, Tom would take a stab at being president of
Naropa
University. I went on to develop an intense personal interest in combining
the
fields of Disability Studies and Disability Services while working at the
University
of Colorado at Boulder, which I did full time from 1997 to 2009. That
interest
put me at odds with the Disability Studies community who saw service
providers
as necessary evils. Who can blame them, I suppose. I was heavily
influenced
by my second wife, a student of the Connecticut American Buddhist
teacher
and scholar, Reginald Ray. A gifted Chinese herbal healer and
acupuncturist
in her own right, Susannah Carleton turned me on to a book called
Masters of Mahamudra: Songs and Histories of the Eighty-four
Buddhist
Siddhas by Keith Dowman. That book, about the lives of the siddhas,
more than
any
other source, gave me insight into working with people with disabilities that I
practiced
for nearly two decades, including a long run at the University of
Colorado
at Boulder’s Disability Services unit. It was the way Buddhist
psychology
approaches the human condition that I found so useful in my own life
and
in my relationships with people with disabilities that led me in 2003 to write
a
book
called The Golden Body: Meditations on
the Essence of Disability.
Beyond
the
desire to mark or stereotype or produce composites of beauty and giftedness
or
anomaly and deficit based on the creation of an superior-inferior polarity, I
came
to the awareness that the essential nature of all beings lies within a higher
norm.
The yearning for this awareness was reinforced daily and took my poetry to
places
I don’t think it would have gone if I had taken a different direction.
RR: I
know you became a father for the first time at the age of 50. I’ve known
one
of my best friends—Zoe—since she was three and she’s about your
daughter’s
age. We play a lot of games and I’ve watched her learn how to reason,
and
now she’s old enough to read, so as we walk down the street she reads all the
signs
in the windows and bumper stickers on passing cars. Watching her grow in
this
way has been a very powerful experience to me. Are you aware of any ways
that
raising a child has affected your writing or your writing practice?
JC:
Bringing up my daughter adds another kind of intention to my own writing
practice.
She at least quadruples it. When I was a student at Naropa we would be
assigned
walking poems, walking meditation poems. Notice everything. Notice
what
you notice. My daughter is an Aries and I am an Aries and my mother was
an
Aries and her mother was an Aries. Aries have a fucking impossible time with
it
all. We are a very energetic people, very loving, very independent,
revolutionary,
creative people, very emotional, very alone. I feel bookended by
my
mother on one side, behind, and my daughter on the other side, ahead, and the
three
of us together. My mother always told me that she gained great inner
strength
from her children when she struck out as a single parent. I feel that as
well,
raising my daughter on my own. Many times I wish I could call my mother,
who
is dead. We may be lying in bed, as we were last night, reading Oh, The
Places You’ll Go, a book-length poem by Dr. Seuss, a very heavy poem, a Beat
homage
of sorts, a paean to Allen in a way, very surprising actually, and I’ll hear
my
voice saying the words “Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the
best./Wherever
you go you will top all the rest./Except when you don’t./Because,
sometimes,
you won’t.” I’ll be thinking between
the words, between the sounds
the
words are making as I hear what they say, about how that went for me when I
was
a child at her age and how that went for me till I got to where I am now, and
how
here we are and how she’s hearing it, like it’s some kind of admonition, a
wise
admonition, and a strikingly well executed verse and a very adult message to
be
laying on a child and we’ll just keep on reading it through the darkness around
us
and in the pictures and in there I’ll be wondering about Dr. Seuss’s intention
too,
and how the drawings of the abyss he drew don’t quite register for a child as
an
abyss at all, as suffering, as despair, as depression. They just register like
a
funny
looking cake or something. I’ll think about teaching a child about ego, as
Allen
once told me, how it’s something to proclaim and renounce. And I’ll begin
to
wonder why my daughter chose me as her parent and why she chose to return
to
this world when she did and who she was before and what she’s come here to
do.
And then I’ll look over at her in my other arm, the one not holding the book,
and
I’ll see she has fallen asleep and I’ve been having all these thoughts reading
a
children’s
story to myself. Having a child might have influenced my writing, but
the
current state of civilization had ruptured my poetry pretty thoroughly even
before
she came into my life. Nothing my teachers had written seemed close to
the
kind of world that virtuality was creating. Maybe Kerouac’s Dr. Sax. Maybe
some
of Burroughs. For all I know, my daughter will have a brain implant––
something
you can buy at Target or Best Buy, something right out of The Matrix.
Her
cognition may be enhanced by uploading as well as her crystallized
knowledge.
I mean, she may think nothing of internal operating systems
hybridizing
her existence. She was not even a year and a half when I wrote “Notes
To
A Young P-borg” in my book Quien Sabe
Mountain. That was a poem I wrote
not
so much for her, but for poet-cyborgs of the future to take in their flash
drives
to
read upon the junkyard ruins when their hardware goes bad. I did write a book-
length
poem to her––The Ongoing Saga I Told My
Daughter. That book describes
everything
I felt as a father, all the joy of it, and more. Some people aspire to
leave
a zero-carbon footprint. Knowing that I probably won’t be around to see
many
if not all of the milestones of my daughter’s adulthood, I wrote Saga as a
kind
of zero-regret footprint model for and to her because that’s really the
message
I got from everything growing up in the family I came from. My
mother’s
father, Isadore Lewis, was one of thirteen children. He loved cash and he
loved
food. Nobody in the Lewis family knows where they came from. They were
gypsy
peddlers somewhere in Eastern Europe. It was such a miserable existence,
nobody
wanted to remember. My own father, Jimmy Heimann, vanished when I
was
young. He adhered to a perverse interpretation of patriarchy, the kind where
you
expect your woman and children to put up with anything. He didn’t get
kicked
out of the armed services like Arlo Guthrie portrayed in Alice’s
Restaurant.”
He was dropped for disorderly conduct; a supercilious
attitude
compounded by a lack of originality.
My paternal grandfather, Emanuel, was a
painter
and his wife, Cora, my father’s mother, was a poet. Everything was God’s
will
to her. They lived in a building on Lake Shore Drive without a thirteenth
floor.
The elevator went from twelve to fourteen as if bad luck could be done
away
with just like that. I was adopted by a kohanim
or cohanim, a direct male
descendant
of the Biblical Aaron, brother of Moses, the Kohan Godal or high
priest––Marvin
M. Cohn, a gentle, spiritual Jew who celebrated the Jewish
Shabbat
every Friday night. A diabetic from the age of twelve, who died in 1972
when
his ambulance ran out of gas in a below zero Cleveland night en route to the
hospital
after a heart attack at home, he was related to my birth father’s family.
His
two daughters were distant cousins. His death left my step-sisters in the
unenviable
position of having lost their own mother to polio, a likeable step-
mother
to divorce, and then their father to someone that couldn’t read a gas gauge.
They
were like orphans in my mother’s house. Even if their second step-parent
had
been Teresa of Avila, they were already so through the mill with the
powerlessness
and hopelessness who could blame them for how they felt about
anything.
My mother, Lois Lewis, skipped two grades and graduated high school
at
sixteen. She died when my daughter was only three. The poet Lew Welch said
you
have to know your tribe and you have to know how your mother speaks. I
recognized
my own mother’s loneliness from the constant entertaining she did
and
by her marrying men for reasons that went clearly outside the romantic.
Scholarship
and education are in my blood, but not exactly academic scholarship
or
academic learning. My mother would dress up in her nightgown every year for
the
Oscars and put on a tiara and sit at the edge of her bed––she was from that
American
female generation where the silver screen was the key to learning how
to
adapt one’s femininity to male power and subvert it. I respected that in her
from
an early age and am the result of her intermingling of male and female
energies
in some fashion. Her energy was somewhat grotesque to me as a child
and
yet totally reasonable. For me, my mother was very much a prototype, a
living
proof, of the feminist writings Anne Waldman would produce decades
later.
She had the discipline and the willfulness to succeed in a man’s world. I
probably
channel that in Saga as an invocation
to my daughter’s guides and
guardian
angels, including her grandmothers who both left her early. And as a
kind
of cautionary tale against viewing people as consumer products, acquisitions,
regardless
of their gender(s), as she will be led to believe. There’s a kind of
softness
to that poem, even though it is extremely hard-edged in parts, that I had
not
found words for until I wrote it. It’s probably the only time I openly share my
feminine
side so completely in my work. You can feel it. I didn’t do that because I
had
some vague notion or desire to live vicariously or even numenally through
my
daughter––have her be the person I could not be. She is her own person with
her
own karma. I understand that much. I mean, being a parent is a nonstop poetry
reading
tour. Sometimes your audience is wrapped with attention, sometimes
there’s
utter disinterest and other times they’re throwing bottles like you were
working
behind chicken wire at Bob’s Country Bunker. Every day affects
everything
you’ve written––the dynamics, the flow, the rhythm, the music. The
single
father-daughter thing is pretzels turned to flutes in a kind of Pippi
Longstocking
surrealism. Until my daughter Isabella Grace was born, I was like
that
Steve Martin character in Father of the
Bride Part II. I was a poet, but my life
was
just one massive emotional cave-in after another that I kept exploring deeper,
sometimes
squeezing through insanely narrow cracks, sometimes crawling
headfirst
at indecipherable angles only to have to crawl backwards out of the dead
ends,
sometimes discovering vast underground rooms. I could knock myself out
trying
to show my daughter Little Walter or Istanbul only to discover that what
really
turned her on was the night we spent a snowstorm stranded at a hotel and
the
power went off and left us in complete utter darkness on the bed. That was far
out
to her. I wanted to leave her a place where she could return to as she grew up,
where
she could find solace, if she ever needed that, from me. I just wanted to
leave
her with something of my consciousness.
RR: What do you believe poetry's place is in the current
culture?
JC: William Carlos Williams, in his book The Embodiment of Knowledge, wrote
that poetry is the Skeleton pointing out again and again to
Intelligence the
“special plea” of sentience––“the attacks upon it and their
unreasonableness,”
including the drawing of “false conclusions… of that general nature” This was
and is still very much poetry’s place in the current culture. For
me, poetry is a
manifestation that there is no authority other than one’s self.
This is not to say that
there is a “self” or that there is an “authority” or that one’s
self or one’s authority
is greater or lesser than anyone else’s self or authority or that
either your self or
your authority is not ruled by the same falsities as those selves
or authorities that
wish to silence you or that you wish to silence or that anything
created as “poetry”
in this current culture is interesting as poetry to any other self
or authority in this
or any current culture. You may be able to interface your
breakthrough internet
multimedia device to your online social networking web pages and
we may be
able to instantaneously view and hear your latest intellectual
property production
with gapless playback, but will that be a place for poetry in any
formulation of
“current culture?” You may be highly organized, highly efficient
in the craft and
tools of your times. You may be a spiritual or political
leader––with many people
willing to follow you to the ends of the earth. You may be a young
idol, fully
engaged in popular art or low art burlesque, with the adoration of
millions from
around the globe. You may be a magician of chaos, always one step
beyond the
law and the censors, able to create sensational spectacles, challenging
governments, uncovering infinite incompetencies in managing
responses,
bringing forth a full accounting. You may have founded a new
criticism or healed
yourself from some theoretical disease. You may be
self-deprecating in a totally
arrogant way, the last existentialist on some kind of poetic quest
for language, but
if you do not mainline the whole,
that is not poetry’s place in the current culture.
Somewhere in Talking in
Tranquility, around the 1970s, the late poet Ted
Berrigan, with whom I studied at Naropa and interviewed and
appreciated for
what he wrote and what he could put into words, said that it’s
obvious that the
poet means nothing in contemporary society. The entire apparatus
of
manufactured reputation-identity and position is pretty much gone.
I understand
that perfectly. You write poems, you want to get them publish, you
want people to
read them, you especially want them to like them. In the past,
there were poets
whose work was good because they wrote it, their name was under
it. It would
take a real discerning eye to be able to tell which poems they’d
written with the
intention of making a major poetical statement and which poems
they’d made just
because the moment brought everything that person knew about
making poems to
bear on some little experience and the writing of some beautiful
little poem. Ted
was talking about Frank O’Hara, and how Frank survived that, could
bring an
enormous amount of feeling to the most ordinary incident and give
it “terrific
significance.” That was in contrast to someone like Milton or
Eliot, or even
Whitman or Ginsberg whose work I would read just to hear what they
thought
about anything. Those poets were writing out of a place where they
were the most
important man in their society. That’s sort of their starting
point. Today you have
six billion average beings speaking the truth via their blogs,
their digital journals,
their self-produced on-demand limited book runs, selling their own
books on
Amazon or eBay. You have eBooks––and you have Google with its
megalomanic
attempt to digitize every single book ever store housed in any
major library. So,
trying to get somebody to take your work to bed with them or out
to a
mountaintop or on the bus or laundromat or wherever people are when
they read
is on a lot of people’s minds. And, of course, besides all that,
the hundreds of
years of the poet as the archtypic white man shrouded in some kind
of book
industry mystique in any particular society is out the window.
Poetry’s place in
this global field is a
matter of a universal demotic spirit.
Some exhibitionist or
well-connected or Olympian-attitude jackoff’s always going to get
more or her or
his share of the limelight. People are going to be pissed off or
think you’re dead
wrong or that your poetry is unpure or ugly or asymmetric or too
symmetric.
redundant, too political, not political enough. For me, it was and
remains an
incredible achievement to write a poem. I mean I will never know
why I wrote
“When Skeletons Make Love” or “Coyote Steals The 2000 Presidential
Election”
or “The Rabbi Poems”––only that these poems came to me and through
me at the
particular moments of time that they did. I can pull myself out of
wherever I am
and whoever I’m with and still be there in that place with
everything else going
on as if nothing happened to me at all because for me, poetry
requires equal
treatment. My job is to create that kind of extradimensional space, as Ted
described it, right out of the ordinary realm. Most of the people
I meet have no
idea what that means. They may accept ESPN instant replays or CNN
footage
replays or shoot off their guns listening to Rush Limbaugh just to
relieve
themselves of their own ordinary mad burdens, hallucinations,
debts or loss or
power. They may repel their own simple common repressions that
makes them
seek the ordinary feelings and views of others to relate to, but
they will not have
any idea what it is like for a person, a poet, to actually conduct
their lives in such
a manner.
RR: Who and what do you find has sustained you and
your work as a poet?
JC: Some people make deals with the devil. Mine was
with poetry. It’s what I
came here to do. That was very clear to me. I had little choice in
it. When the
writing came I was there, even if didn’t matter. I didn’t come
here to make lima
bean omelets or to remove myself from equality. Poetry is not speculation to me.
Although it makes judgments on what other people are
thinking––where people
are at, where their collective social acts are headed, their
pretensions––it is more
than a description or an compression of social thinking. Poetry is
Vimalakirti
telling Manjusri “My sickness…will last as long as do the
sicknesses of all living
beings.” A body does crazy things. It causes and transcends
bubbles and busts. I
was sustained by a hairdresser from Florida I met years ago in a
youth hostel that
knew of no poetry, never even finished high school, except he knew
all of
Whitman, by heart. Michigan poet David Cope was the janitor in the
college
where later he would teach Shakespeare and that as well as his
long
correspondence with me, with knowing me, was sustaining. That the
Milwaukee
poet Antler wrote Factory
sustained me and that he and his partner, the ecopoet
Jeff Poniewaz, remained devoted to one another was a gesture I
found a model of
sustainability. The west coast post-punk Buddhist poet Marc
Olmsted with his
three-year meditation retreat and his shrine room in Oakland with
its tankas and
giant movie horror film posters sustained me. The integrity of the
poet Andy
Clausen sustained me, in his poesy and person. That Lesléa Newman
wrote about
Harvey Milk years before Sean Penn thought about playing him
sustained me.
That you wrote LIT was
sustaining to me––the way you kind of recharged the
entire Norton Anthology of
Poetry as though you were driving an automobile that
stop at refueling stations in order to give back energy to the
grid. There are
hundreds of examples of sanity, compassion, candor, vivid
invention,
groundlessness, inclusivity, service, wakefulness that gave me a
kind of entry to
off-limit useless procedures that were accidentally left there and
accidentally
mislabeled but not pretend. It wasn’t just that the poets I knew
continued writing.
It was that their poetry and their presence increasingly become a
magnet, a store-
house, of proof where one always changes and one never does. There
may be an
ATM in the lobby, but poetry is a more exact and closer form of
economy for me.
It’s bigger than the book industry, more charming than the United
States
Treasury. Inside a line, a line I was lost in writing, I was
completely at peace with
impermanence––the vastness of impermanence that makes the
trillions of dollars
leveraged against Depression but a speck of dust. Poetry is not
something that you
leave at the jeweler to be cleaned. It is the Gold Scale––the
emptiness of all the
Buddha-fields, wilderness, civilization. As such, I was also
sustained by things
that did not sustain me at all––those things you love in passing
or that you never
see in passing or care for correctly in passing or recognize
correctly in passing or
never get over in passing. And regardless of the tempo these
things have over
you––the unsustaining things––they are also sustaining. You don’t
even have to
know how you will be sustained or if you will be sustained or if
there’s a portion
of the federal bail-out waiting with your name and address on it
for you or if you
will have convictions or if you will advocate those convictions or
renounce them
or if you will simply be troubled by your convictions or see the
signs, marks and
ornaments that underlie all convictions.
[Originally
published in NHS 2009, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs09/Jim_Cohn.htm.]