"Emotional intelligence work was key to whether I was living life well as a human being, in respect to specifically doing no harm to others, or to myself. So, from my perspective, a “life well lived” isn’t a matter of amassing wealth, fame, notoriety, power, 40 acres and a mule, a carbon-negative energy producing self-driving car or smart home, or having a few shelves, an entire library, devoted to your archives. A life well lived is one paying down negative karma; learning to treat yourself and others with compassion, joy and respect."

Jim Cohn: Treasures for Heaven

Treasures for Heaven: Collected Poems 1976-2021 is a new book by author, poet, and spoken word activist, Jim Cohn. In his forty-five year masterwork, Cohn’s poetry reflects a unique compendium of lineages: Black Mountain, Beat Generation, New York School, Black Arts, Feminist Poetry Movement, Environmental Justice poets, and countercultural luminaries which he identified with since his days as a student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Cohn’s poetry exemplifies Beat and Postbeat cultural and social effects: wilderness protection for a sustainable Earth, retrieval of Old Ways customs and rituals, love of travel and Kerouac’s notion that “there was nowhere to go but everywhere,” East-West spiritual practices and teachings for achieving peace, sanity, liberation from suffering in one's lifetime, and support of democratically elected governments that uplift communities with histories of institutional oppression and disenfranchisement.

Poet, writer, recording artist, editor, publisher, and poetics curator Jim Cohn was born in Highland Park, Illinois, in 1953. After his family moved to Cleveland in 1966, he graduated from Shaker Heights High School in 1971. With a year’s study at Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1974-1975), Cohn received a B.A. in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1976. After taking a poetics class with Anne Waldman that spring, Jim later received a Certifcate of Poetics from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1980 where he studied with renowned Black Mountain, Beat Generation, New York School, Black Arts, Feminist, and Environmental Justice poets. As a teaching assistant to Allen Ginsberg, he was introduced to a circle of Postbeat poets he would associate with for the rest of his life. It was also during this period that Jim began to investigate the poetics of sign language.

(Jim Cohn, 2018 / Photo by Danny Shot)

From 1982-1984, he studied American Sign Language in the Interpreter Training Program at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID). In February 1984, Cohn arranged a “Deaf-Beat Summit” with Ginsberg and famed Deaf poet Robert Panara at NTID. In 1986, he completed his M.S.E. in English and Deaf Education from NTID and the University of Rochester. In 1987, Jim coordinated the frst National Deaf Poetry Conference in the United States. From 1988-1992, Cohn was a member of Birdsfoot Farm, an organic farming intentional community outside Canton, New York, near where he worked as a Disability Specialist at St. Lawrence University. He continued his vocation as a Disability Specialist at the University of Colorado in Boulder from 1997-2009, working with students with non-visible disabilities, and becoming an advocate for Disability Studies.

In 1998, Cohn founded the online Museum of American Poetics, a virtual museum dedicated to poetics diversity and documented in its evolution by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Besides books of poetry and poetics, nonfction, spoken word recordings, and curating the vast MAP website, Cohn was a small press publisher and editor of poetry and poetics for three decades. He mimeo-produced ACTION Magazine in the mid-1980s while living in Rochester, NY. From 1990-2015, he edited and published the annual poetics journal Napalm Health Spa (NHS). The final three issues of NHS were special editions: Long Poems Of The Postbeats (2013), Heart Sons And Heart Daughters Of Allen Ginsberg (2014) and Anne Waldman: Keeping The World Safe For Poetry (2015). Cohn’s literary papers are archived at the University of Michigan Special Collections Library. He resides in Boulder County, Colorado, where his daughter, Isabella Grace Cohn, was born.

Interview by Michael Limnios                              Archive: Jim Cohn, 2012 interview @ blues.gr

How has Beat Generation, Black Arts, Feminist Poetry Movement, Environmental Justice poets, and countercultural luminaries influenced your views of the world and the life's journeys you’ve taken?

Jim Cohn: Immensely. Imagine yourself only listening to one kind of music. Ignoring all the rest. Like you know all the bluesmen and blueswomen backwards and forwards. Or you know everything Robert Johnson ever did, but nobody else. Or Buddy Guy. Or Victoria Spivey. You have all their records. Maybe you even store them in alphabetical order. Some even consider you an expert on the genre. But you never listen to Charley Parker or John Coltrane, Sun Ra or Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan or Billie Holiday. You only listen to Kurt Elling. You only listen to rock and roll, but never listen to hip hop. Never heard of Lauren Hill. Don’t know the import of Motown, Atlantic, Stax or Chess Records. Don’t know Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Tina Turner, James Brown, Whitney Houston, Smokey Robinson, Etta James, Sam Cooke, Roberta Flack or Otis Redding. No B.B. King Blues Band. No Temptations. No Sly and the Family Stone. No Prince and the Revolution. No Michael Jackson. Or the other way around. You only listen to Public Enemy, to Tupac Shakur, to Jay-Z. You’re a devotee of Questlove, but no Buffalo Springfield, no Rolling Stones, no Joni Mitchell, no Grateful Dead, no Santana, no Los Lobos, no Jimi Hendrix––because, well, that’s not your music. Or you only listen to standards. You only listen to Sinatra. You only listen to Little Feat. You only listen to Beyoncé. You only listen to female doo wop bands of the 50s and 60s. You only listen to Nina Simone. You only listen to Ma Rainey. You only listen to Leadbelly. You only listen to Woody Guthrie. You only listen to Ray Charles. You only listen to Bach. You only listen to Ali Akbar Khan. You only listen to George Clinton. You only listen to Outlaw country. You only listen to Mariachi. You only listen to K-pop. I’m in agreement with Willie Dixon and Bo Diddley on the subject of what you can’t know before you open my lifetime’s collection of poems. There’s no way you can judge a book by looking at the cover.

The opportunity for any poet within the United States to create an expansive, intersectional and intertextual universe in poetry has likely never been greater in the history of the art. My experience as a young poet wasn’t just looking-through-the-knothole in the boundary fence between and separating diverse schools of poetry. It was an aggregation for the benefit of the multitude. To paraphrase Amiri Baraka, we make art so the future knows we humans weren’t all just raging idiots spending our time warring and killing one another. Through my work building and curating the Museum of American Poetics website (poetspath.com) since the late 1990s, I tracked the expansion of these poetics communities into the full-fledged and built-out traditions they are with lineages all their own. In doing this curating, I realized that every school, movement or identity-centric poetry community has its similarities and differences with those of others. Each collective body has its rebels and traditionalists, its dreamers and empiricists, its provincials and far-off wanderers, its mystics and skeptics, its famous and anonymous, its mainstream and underground, its extroverts and introverts, its schooled and unschooled, its futurists and historians, its academics and dharma bums.

Each school or movement you mentioned, in its own ways and on its own terms, influenced my poetry and my life, as I wished to be influenced by poetics communities outside my own. Communities of poetry other than you mentioned have influenced me as well. I’m influenced by ancestor poets of China and Japan for the way they release the reader from the narcissism of the “I” as the central axis of the poem and instead offer a more universal set of human emotions in relation to our interconnectivity with the natural world upon which all humanity depends. I also have a deep connection with the liberational Hundred Thousand Songs of the Tibetan Buddhist poet Milarepa who shows up decisively in Treasures for Heaven. For over two decades, I worked in various Disability communities and met poets from these communities who blew my normative mind. One example would be the American Sign Language poet Peter Cook who’s performed his Beat-influenced ASL poetry around the world under the name “Flying Words Project” with his hearing collaborator and voice interpreter, Kenny Lerner. Another example of world-class poetry from the Disability community would be the truly remarkable Deaf-Blind poet, activist and editor John Lee Clark whose book, How to Communicate: Poems, offers revelations related to Deaf-Blind culture, history, community and poetics that defy seemingly impossible sensorineural and retinitis pigmentosa obstacles. A third example would be post-beat (sic) poet, musician, multimedia artist and editor Vernon Frazer who lives with Tourette’s Syndrome, one of the most stigmatized disabilities on Earth. Having lived, camped and wandered most of my adult life in the western U.S., nurturing my love of wilderness, especially rock art and cliff dwelling ruins, I have had long standing interests in Native poetics communities. I was moved by work Muscogee Nation poet and musician Joy Harjo did during her three-year run as U.S. Poet Laureate (2019-2022) which included her signature “Living Nations, Living Words” online project. I also felt a deep connection to the spoken word music, political activism and life of Santee Dakota poet John Trudell.

Any time a poet today familiarizes herself or himself or themself with the actual communities at work in poetry outside of one’s own “home” community, they’ll have better insight into their own work and how it contributes to the efforts of all. The nexus of these social, cultural and literary influences and intersections lies in one’s own sense of self and otherness. A sense of self and otherness not ruled by racism and prejudice, gender-chauvinism and homophobia, sectarianism and religious bigotry, conservative bias and intolerance, insularity and fanaticism, xenophobia and narrow-mindedness. From a Buddhist perspective, I’m talking about a sense of self and otherness not ruled by fear and demonization, by dualistic derangement or by the obscurification of prejudice within the mind against non-duality.

Each collective poetic body is a mountain. You’re not going to be able to know what everyone is doing as you climb that mountain because others are taking different routes to the summit. And each of these collective mountains are a piece of the singular mountain range that is the whole of all the generations of humanity that were, are, and will be. A “walking mountain,” as the 13th century Zen master Dogen wrote in his “Mountains and Rivers Sutra.” Every mountain, as a collective poetic body, has its own particular environment: its own drainages, its own waters. Life-blood vernacular waters. Vernacular street-talk of the everyday world, as well as the history of the people of that world which each community lays claim to as the source of its own unique poetry. Every community engages the intergenerational yearnings for freedom, and not just freedom of expression, but the dignity and righteousness of truthful expression. Today, I see the fuller range that is poetry now, not just the long-indoctrinated mountain of exclusive Western poetics tradition focused on white men. This is a sign of poetry’s purposefulness and good medicine continuing into the future.

(Jim Cohn / Photo by Heath Antonio)

Where does your creative drive come from? How do you want your poetry to affect people?

JC: I can tell you where my creative drive doesn’t come from. It’s outside the realm of commerce. I can’t purchase it off the shelf at Amazon.com when the last quart runs dry. It has no substance. Nobody decreed it to me in their will. To me, “creative drive” is an ideal I’ve no interest in at all. I’m no prisoner of “creative drive.” I’m not stuck in any ideal, especially those against changing facts. To paraphrase the Beat and New York School poet Ted Berrigan, a poet is always working on The Poems, 24/7, whether or not they are laying the words down spontaneously at the mic or on the page. In our polarized and disinformationalized political, social media and climate changing world, where any one of us could instantly be turned into a climate or political refugee or taken hostage or be the victim of gun violence or war, I could only admit that “creative drive” exists along with such statements as “The gasoline-powered motor car is not the answer to mankind’s problems.”

Before you can ask a question like “How do you want your poetry to affect people,” it’s crucial that you ask a more essential question: “How do you want your own poetry to affect you.” This is a question I continue to ask myself. It’s like the statement Kennedy posed to youth in the early 1960s. It’s not what poetry can do for me. It’s about what can I do for poetry. To do that, my poetry asks me to contemplate what is it about the making of The Poems that is liberational in nature? And what isn’t? Clearly, most people prefer affecting others more than themselves. But I was never a member of the influencer class. In fact, I see the role of influencers being to get you stuck in somebody else’s dream, trapped in outmoded and outdated ideas. You realize that there are way too many people who are willing to make themselves over into a spokesperson for the generation role or a spokesperson for a political constituency role or the environment’s spokesperson or a spokesperson for the spirit world, the world of faith and all that’s unknown, without ever looking at what needs changing most about their own thinking and actions.

While still a teenager, I was fortunate to have found Arthur Rimbaud whose 1871 poetics proclamation, “Je est un autre” (“I is another”), made sense of the desegregation mandate based on the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) at work in American cities, including where I attended public school. I felt a grounding sense of awareness that all the students at my high school were engaged in a civil rights project put in place to inspire all youth. The insight Rimbaud conveyed by “I is another,” as I understand it today, is that the act of introspection objectifies the self. Today, we know that the primary psychological outcome of an objectified sense of self is a fragments consciousness from which one experiences disrupted mental capacity. Bad moods. Depression. Anxiety. Lack of focus. Traumatic memories. Violence. Chronic comparison engendered by self-objectification leads to polarized thinking of all kinds. What Rimbaud was simply, but profoundly, pointing out is that the “I” itself is nothing but a social construct, an objectification construct not of the body. The Buddha noticed this as well, talking about the woes of papanca (objectification) and the uselessness of perception from this divided “thinker within” as the cause of all inner and outer conflict; especially, those verbalizations that ensnare the mind in craving derived from the linguistic mental label “I am.” When I was in my teens, Rimbaud’s Illuminations had a huge impact on me. He gave me my first real consideration of poetry and a sense of poetics lineage and poetics history. Illuminations was also my first exposure to literary surrealism. So, here I was, in 1971, my last year of high school, and I’ve made a 100-year-old connection to poet Rimbaud’s most famous words, and that did something to me. It’s a numerological factoid that stays with me. It’s also a temporal and spatial opening in my mind, expanding an evolving sense of the here and now into something much broader in scope than I’d ever imagined. You can see surrealism throughout Treasures for Heaven. You can see timelines melting, rushing backward, racing forward. You can see far-off spaces draw near and nearby spaces grow distant. I was drawn to the genre, its imagery and eye-popping juxtapositions, which I would later on see as extensions of Keats’ notion of negative capability: the capacity to lose one’s sense of illusory self-identity in order to achieve a unity with life in its totality, a closer bond with essence, like a satori breakthrough experience into the character of the real.

The heart of the matter of Rimbaud’s “I is another” is presence. Are you present with others? Are you even present at your own poetic inventions? Standing at the microphone, reading to others––are you even there? Are you so caught up in some form of language-based ego-delirium that you simply refuse to acknowledge that you neither see yourself nor others with right mind? It takes real presence, openness, and vulnerability to work through one’s own identity-based sense of self and others, and to begin to live and work with those of other cultures, regardless of their race, ethnicity, sex, gender, religious belief, or disability. To leave the palace, as was the Buddha’s journey. To go deeper into the vast otherness of identities and cultures at work in society, in poetry, around the world today, even if that otherness is largely based on distortions and delusions that give false credence to ideas of exceptionalism, privilege and supremacy; to policies of enslavement: physical, environmental, institutional and economic; or genocide of one people by an oppressive hate-deluded minority. There’s no better treatment for an evolving multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious, and multi-ability society than considering Rimbaud’s mantra.

What I can say about Treasures for Heaven, in terms of its affect on others, is that I won’t know. I’ve never known and I’m not about to find out. And nothing really can change that. There’s no Billboard Top 100 for poetry. And even if there was, and a poem of mine was rising up the charts with a bullet, I wouldn’t know how my poetry impacted them. Even if they wrote about it, I’d still not know. So, having an impact on others was of no interest to me at all. Unlike many Shakespeare plays, my poems reflect no formal apostasy. My poems do not trace any kind of tragic conversion from youthful idealism to elder egotism and despotism. Or vice-versa. I’ve not compiled a book that turns out to be no different than a lawyer campaigning against the rule of law. But I did compile a book that turns out to be something where others may see and hear themselves. As they deserve to be seen and heard. And a lot of people turn up in its pages, between its covers. People you will know. What I produced does have aspects of the transcendental insofar as I have experienced transformations that have led me away from the yearning that is suffering. That is, unlike hate-mongers, dictators, autocrats and know-it-alls––or the people who believe in them, in conspiracy theories, in fake news––my underlying poetics principle is not based on fear of the other. I didn’t make ignorance into a virtue. I don’t raise questions without making specific factual allegations. There’s no reward for fealty. My work is not part of a countercultural propaganda movement against democratically run nations or free and fair elections.

(Treasures for Heaven: Collected Poems 1976-2021 / Jim Cohn & David Cope / Photo by Danny Shot)

What life-changing moments stand out for you in the context of Treasures for Heaven? Do any of these moments provide a key to a life well lived?

JC: As one of global poet Allen Ginsberg’s teaching assistants at Naropa in 1980, I was in proximity to prepublication work on the 1984 first edition of his Collected Poems: 1947-1980. I still have vivid memories over how much work Ginsberg accomplished on a daily basis. There was no keeping up with him. For a bird’s eye view of Ginsberg on the topic of work, I recommend Bob Rosenthal’s excellent Straight Around Allen: On the Business of Being Allen Ginsberg (2018). Once, Allen welcomed me with news that he’d been up all night proofreading his collected poems manuscript. The entire 820-page manuscript. Something that I could likely spend a month of daily work on and still not see all the corrections needed to be made. What I remember best about that period was not only the vast historical trajectory of Allen’s poetry, but also feeling so conscious of A.G.’s skillful means as a comparative analyst, the breadth of poetry and lines of poesy he carried around in his head, the tremendous production of his own work and just how well he communicated the contextual nature of his poetry. Like Whitman before him, Ginsberg was absolutely the best assessor of his own work, and that was something I aspired to after working with him. And I did do that when the time came to do that. That desire stayed with me and played a central role in how I conceived and worked on Treasures for Heaven.

Like all the poets I know who were close to Allen when he was alive, he lives on in those who knew him. Perhaps that’s because in many ways, as a public figure, he was larger than life. As a student, I was so fascinated by his classes. His course on Blake, for example, was so animated and so insightful compared to my Lit classes at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Ginsberg would break down all the rich character symbolism and mysticism and creativity that Blake’s work radiates. I feel fortunate to have been a student of his as nobody I ever studied with could relate classical and middle-ages poetry to current events and trends better than Allen. And, really, that’s a very good way to teach the process of reading and comprehending poetry because most poems are not transparent in their meaning to novice readers or writers of poetry. In large part, Ginsberg’s skill in deconstructing poetry was based, at least in my head, on the fact that he himself was a very informed and social individual with a deep and clear understanding of human desire based upon the awareness of his own desires. As a student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Allen also knew that the craving of pleasure was also at the root of suffering. For younger poets interested in Ginsberg as a human being, poet and/or as a teacher of poetry and poetics, I recommend Gordon Ball’s in-depth biographical study East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg (2011), Eliot Katz’s seminal opus The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg (2015), and Andy Clausen’s unfiltered chronicle BEAT: The Latter Days of the Beat Generation: A First-Hand Account by Andy Clausen (2018). For those intrigued about how Ginsberg supported poets of my generation through letter and postcard hand-written missives, there’s The Correspondence of David Cope and Allen Ginsberg 1976-1996 (2021).

And yeah, naturally, there were “life-changing moments” before, during and after the making of Treasures. Those moments, be they of trauma, loss and grief; or dreams, visions, and revelations, led to a more balanced sense of self-sufficiency and to embracing my own freedom. But my own life is not the general focus of what my poetry documents. Providing a model of fearlessness around welcoming the other into my poems and in approaching one’s own life, one’s own mind, is. We are a species that struggles with our own suffering and ruin as well as with the potential of liberation in this lifetime. That is the reality of the Anthropocene era we find ourselves in. Which way will we choose collectively? It was only through making poems that I could make sense of any of that. There were poems that came through that told me I was moving in the direction I came here for my poetry to take. Poems that include “Prairie Falcon,” which compares the AIDS epidemic with the ecologically and economically devastating Dust Bowl of the 1930s; “Contributing to the One Great Poem,” in which I found my voice paying tribute to the worldwide, multimillennial, multigenerational project that is poetry itself; the title long poem “Treasures for Heaven,” created as an angelic illumination on self-loving compassion; and “If 45 was 16 & 16 was 45,” an achronological ballad and historical fantasy poem written during covid pandemic solitude and completed before the infamous “Big Lie” 2020 presidential election and the near fatal end to American democracy. Each of these longer poems was a sign from the muse to persevere. You’re fortunate if you have a clear notion of what great poetry is that good poetry is not. For me, what I found intriguing was how I could work the traditions into new and relevant art. Creating new poetics spaces. Not the other way around.

As for the key to a life well lived, that key is not in the material world. It’s not in winning a Pulitzer Prize or a Presidential Medal of Honor. It’s not through competition. You won’t win it with a lottery ticket. You can pull off more complex heists than Danny Ocean and never find it. It can’t be bought or sold. A literary agent won’t get it into a contract rider for you. You won’t find it walking down the red carpet or walking on stage to accept an award. It can’t be accessed like members of the current United States Supreme Court. The key to a life well lived starts elsewhere. For me, it began almost exactly 35 years ago, that midway point in life Dante speaks of in the first section of the Inferno: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita” (“Midway upon the journey of our life”). At that very moment, I was facing the transitory reality of my youth and life. I was also facing the reality that some emotional issues don’t just vanish on their own. They keep on reoccurring and they keep on repeating until you get the message. It’s through such awareness that we learn about karma. Not other people’s karma, which is so easy to cast aspersions on in the realm of gossip and social media. What poetry taught me about karma is this. Change a word, a line in a work-in-progress, and your entire negative emotional state may shift. That is, I found out that my emotional states could be altered from their general default setting of suffering to liberation by paying attention to my thoughts as I put them out there on the page. I also continued the slow and painful process of building emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence work was key to whether I was living life well as a human being, in respect to specifically doing no harm to others, or to myself. So, from my perspective, a “life well lived” isn’t a matter of amassing wealth, fame, notoriety, power, 40 acres and a mule, a carbon-negative energy producing self-driving car or smart home, or having a few shelves, an entire library, devoted to your archives. A life well lived is one paying down negative karma; learning to treat yourself and others with compassion, joy and respect.

(Left: Jim Cohn / Photo by Danny Shot - Right: Jim Cohn, Kip Webster, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Panara)

As someone who has identified himself as a “Postbeat” poet, what do you see as the socio-cultural implications between "Beat Generation" and "Postbeat" era?

JC: The Beat Generation amassed an immense amount of experimental and inventive poetry, prose and poetics work and analysis that spoke vividly and candidly to youth, including myself, who were largely unimpressed by the standards of conformity, hypocrisy, and bigotry, as well as the dullness and shallowness of the “square” or “straight” world. Several of the poets––Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso and Burroughs––had international followings, including people who resided in Communist countries; particularly, the former Soviet Union and China, where to say the things they wrote and performed aloud could easily get one jailed, disappeared, killed, or deported. They were unofficial ambassadors and provocateurs of a new social and cultural order that intersected with the Civil Rights Movement. They planned and participated in Anti-War and nascent Environmental movements, and under the umbrella of the Beat name, we have learned over time that there was great diversity among its adherents and practitioners. These traits and characteristics of the Beats were on full display at the Kerouac School and I, along with many others in its first decade, were witnesses and recipients of these artists’ talents and their poetries while they, our teachers and guides, were at their peak artistic achievement.

While the influence of the Beat Generation has waned in the twenty-first century, I can’t help but point out that Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1955) remains a profound influence on American society and culture for reshaping the discussion on LGBTQIA+ politics and LGBTQIA+ rights. I continue to see “Howl,” as a bias-shattering historic work, a twentieth century folk poem for the ages and for LGBTQIA+ civil rights as a whole. Would the Stonewall Riots of 1969 have even happened if not for Ginsberg’s legendary Six Gallery premiere public reading of “Howl” in 1955? This is a lasting impact of the Beats, and Allen Ginsberg specifically, on issues of sex, sexual orientation and gender identity politics today. I also see Ginsberg’s progressive political views resonating in all forms of identity, social justice and climate change politics. In addition, women of the Beat Generation poets Diane di Prima and Anne Waldman developed their own exploratory feminist poetries––perhaps best exemplified in di Prima’s cosmogonic Revolutionary Letters (1971) and Waldman’s epic The Iovis Trilogy––that enhanced and emboldened both feminism and Women’s Poetry Movements here in the U.S. and abroad. Women of the Beat Generation aided and abetted in the release of Pandora from her prison cell of patriarchy. The women of the Beat Generation were modern-day suffragists dedicated to bringing down all the misogyny that stacked the patriarchal deck against women. They were agents of matriarchy. They wrote Feminafestos. They and their poetry embodied the energy of the Matriot. I also see Gary Snyder’s long-life poetics and prose testimonies on the import of the natural world, Native old ways and customs, ethnography and land stewardship, exemplified in his Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996), as having been critical to the growing fight against climate change, environmental destruction and ecological death. In terms of being allies to other identity politic poetries, the space created by Beat Generation fervor engaged exciting and truth-to-power talking poets of color including Amiri Baraka, Sonya Sanchez, Ted Joans, Wanda Coleman, Bob Kaufman and Jayne Cortez among many others. I do think that both Ginsberg and Waldman were exemplary in embracing otherness, establishing long-term friendships with poets not among the Beats, and in raising the critical discourse around poetics to an art form. The proof is in the Naropa Archives Project at InternetArchive which Anne Waldman has diligently and lovingly overseen for posterity.

Then, there’s Jack Kerouac. Beat Ground Zero. Think what you will today about Jack Kerouac’s shortcomings and flaws as a person and as a writer. For many years, I wondered, “What happened to Kerouac?” who makes several appearances throughout Treasures for Heaven. Nobody can deny Kerouac’s cultural and social impact on my generation, both at home and around the world. He made a major contribution to American letters with his manifesto, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” which illuminates how his written improvisational technique was discovered in jazz and blues. His On the Road inspired millions of young people from sea to shining sea, and then, inspired millions more abroad in translation. Other identity-focused poetics communities may minimize or disregard Kerouac’s impact on spoken word poetry, song or literature, but Kerouac played a crucial role in bringing Black culture to white kids through his jazz and blues-oriented prose and poesy, including Mexico City Blues (1959), which was so influential to a young Bob Dylan. But Kerouac’s books include descriptions of characters that are laced with misogynistic, racist and antisemitic notes, as well as a lack of agency, that I myself find disturbing, and likely did not read well to some when they were originally published either. It would be unconscionable for me to say that Kerouac’s work carries no unconscious bias and bigotry. After all, I’m no Beat apologist. And then there’s Jack’s politics, which was so out of step with his peers as well as with young people who were being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, and the numerous times he staggered from one bar fight to another in his antagonistic final decade when he felt himself going mad from fame stalking him and he found himself on the wrong side of many verbal drunken arguments.

And then there’s Kerouac’s Dharma Bums (1958). The novel that marked the beginning of the 1960s “rucksack revolution” with young people going solo into the backcountry for vision quests, spiritual insight, and communion with the wild. It’s quite fair to say that Dharma Bums provides a contextual footing to the many travel, backcountry and mountain poems that appear mostly in the first half of Treasures for Heaven. But I should add that I never read the book until the fall of 2022, so it’s only with hindsight that I consider the context it may have provided me had I read it as a kid. Dharma Bums––cobbled together in 11 days and published as a follow up to the breakthrough success of On the Road (1957) and the elevation of Neal Cassady as the wild and reckless, fast-talking symbol of Beat energy––is the novel in which Kerouac elevated Gary Snyder as the model for what would become the multi-pronged, wilderness-bound, progressive, Buddhist-oriented largely white hippy youth movement of the 60s. Looking back on Dharma Bums, this was a period of extreme highs and lows in Kerouac’s life, figuratively and literally. Here was Jack, climbing mountains for the first time, experiencing wilderness survival first-hand, and processing it all through his own homegrown version of Buddhist philosophy while his own addictions were spinning out of control. This is the period of the 1950s when Kerouac produced his key Buddhist writings: Some of the Dharma (1953-1956; published 1997), The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1955; published 1971), and Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha (1955; published 2008). These were each works that proved influential to many young people once they were eventually published and onward in terms of throwing off the institutional chains of theocracy that externalize the divine outside one’s self and seem to obstruct people from seeing their own innate holiness and sacred, pure nature. One of the best books on this period of the 1950s to shed light on Kerouac’s implosion is John Suiter’s remarkable Poets on the Peaks (2002). Set in and around the Cascade Mountain Range, Suiter weaves the biographies of Kerouac, Snyder and Philip Whalen’s time as high country fire lookouts into one remarkable story that suggests what Kerouac struggled with most in the late 1950s––just as he was at the pinnacle of success, and despite all his travels, writing bravado and appearances otherwise––was his withering overindulgence in substance abuse.

Reading Kerouac’s Complete Poetry, Dharma Bums and Poets on the Peaks was the way I found to debrief myself after Treasures was published. And I think that reading gets at a core question for a poet like myself: What’s the Postbeat era about? For me, some of what the Postbeat era has been about is custodial. I think of the heroic work by Ginsberg biographer Michael Schumacher in editing and bringing forth three unpublished Ginsberg journals: Iron Curtain Journals: January-May 1965 (2018), South American Journals: January-July 1960 (2019), and Fall of America Journals: 1965-1971 (2020). Some of what the Postbeat era has been about is due diligence. For me, that’s included investigative projects into the lives of the poets central to the Beats, as well as those poets whose literary blessings they sought. For example, in the early 1990s, I visited the National Archives twice to investigate Ezra Pound’s disturbing white supremacist views expressed on his radio show out of Italy during World War II. In the first decade of the 2000s, I went to the Stanford University archives to answer the question of whether or not Allen Ginsberg established viable and diverse intersections between the Beats and poetry communities of color while teaching at Brooklyn College, after he left Naropa in the mid-1980s. Then, in 2022, after the release of Treasures, I wanted to clarify for myself if Kerouac’s demise was encouraged by other Beat writers jealous of his sudden fame and recognition or angry with how he portrayed them or Buddhism in his fiction. What’s most important, what is central to the Postbeat era, has been a furthering and an expansion of new work for these times with a keen eye for a poetry and prose that reaches a more multicultural audience than the original largely white, male and young Beat audience.

The goal of any Postbeat “effect” on culture and society that I had in mind over the decades began in seeing my own white identity with greater clarity and in the creation of poems that work out pathways to a future without any oppressive and privileged majority or minority rule. One of the only real silver linings Donald Trump left many white males with, including myself––before, during, and after his time as president––was the degree of his own pathological sense of white male privilege. That above-the-law sense of his own white male privilege. And with that, he exposed better than any white man in my lifetime the white male privilege spectrum, from unconscious bias to flat-out white supremacy, for all to see. If one thing became clear to this white male Postbeat poet and person, Trump’s megalomanic, hyper-narcissistic sense of self had a backlash effect that made me more sensitive to the lives of others and made for a poetics space where it was time to listen, to ask questions, to take notes, to study, to compare and contrast, to contemplate, to write and, whenever possible, to create in poetry a more just and equitable way of being that reflects the actual demographic make-up of the society we all live in right now. That’s the poetry of the future.

Viewing myself as a Postbeat poet came about from the perception that I was a part of a group of young novices in direct contact with the Beats as a student, too young to be part of the Beat Generation itself, but befriended by Beat writers. Coming up after the Beats, I was directly influenced by the effects they had on society and culture as outlined by Ginsberg’s “Essential Effects of the Beat Generation” which included catalyzing spiritual, sexual, gay, Black and feminist liberation; freedom from censorship; decriminalization of cannabis and other drugs; evolution of jazz, rhythm and blues and rock music into high art forms; spread of ecological consciousness, respect for land and indigenous peoples; and opposition to the military-industrial complex war machine. There were several poets whom I considered intergenerational allies between the Beats and the Postbeat era. These poets include Andy Clausen, Ed Sanders and Anne Waldman from my own individual poetics constellation. These are the poets that best informed me after leaving Naropa and taking on the journeyman outrider poet’s life. Through the work of these poets and many others in this Postbeat era, including the Chinese Beat Studies scholars and translators Wen Chu-an and Zhang Ziqing, it’s clear that the Beat effects Allen outlined continue to reverberate throughout present-day progressive political poetries. They’re multigenerational projects. Seven Generation projects. Congress’s Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, known as the January 6 hearings, brought to light the manifold plots within plots to overthrow American democracy and seize power from within the Oval. The hearings, taken together over the latter half of 2022, were designed as epic political performance art. It was a lingering effect of the kind of informed public discourse-as-spectacle for which the Beat Generation was known and is remembered.

(Jim Cohn at Jack Kerouac's home, St. Petersburg FL, 2010 / Photo by Big Al Koch)

If you could change some things in the world and it would become "Treasures for Heaven", what would those be?

JC: You know, I left some clues about your question on the front cover art that graces Treasures’ first edition. In the cover art, you have the insurrectionists from 6 January 2021 on the lower half of the collage subdued by a very large and prototypic Wonder Woman-looking comic book action figure, the goddess Freedom, with her sidekick Bald Eagle, both above the fray. Freedom and her trusty Bald Eagle hold prestigious positions in the Apotheosis of Washington mural painted beneath the U.S. Capitol Rotunda dome by Constantino Brumidi in 1865. The duo appears only in Brumidi’s third and final sketch, so that suggested to me that it took him a while to come up with the iconography he wanted. It’s my impression that the Freedom goddess embodies the indivisible quality that so inspired Lincoln to impress upon the nation the import of a Union without slavery, a Union of free people.

While watching the events of 6 January 2021 unfold live on CNN, and months later, looking at photographs of the day, I was struck by one image of these MAGA Americans, fellow citizens, in violent overthrow of this nation’s prime directive for the peaceful transfer of power based on free and fair elections. I was also aware of the fact that the art on the U.S. Capitol’s Rotunda dome was 180 feet directly above the insurrectionists that day. Now, the Goddess Freedom is by far the largest figure in Brumidi’s mural. So, she was obviously a crucial character in the artist’s mythos of George Washington’s assumption to heaven, an arising based on the fact that he willingly gave up the power of the presidency and thus gave a degree of sanity and humility to the ongoing peaceful transfer of power between elections based on real voting outcomes. Freedom’s purpose, with Bald Eagle at her side, has been described in quite stark terms by Frank V. O’Connor in an essay “Symbolism in the Rotunda.” According to O’Connor, the Freedom goddess “wreaks havoc among the forces of war, tyranny, and discord.” This was the feeling I was after in the juxtaposition I made by placing Freedom and Bald Eagle directly above the insurrectionists in the collage. In my mind’s eye, I envisioned American Democracy saved on January 6 by the energetic forces this truly American symbolism represents. And I assume that in the future, Freedom and Bald Eagle may come down from the Rotunda dome again, across time once more to defend the nation from itself. In my mind and in my poetry, I feel at one with the march of freedom across history and into the future that Freedom/Wonder Woman represents. 

You’ll also notice that I didn’t name my book Treasures from Heaven. Compassion does not work that way. One line from the Beatles has always stayed with me. It’s from their last album, Abbey Road (1969), and it’s called “The End.” This is the Paul McCartney bit near the conclusion of the suite-long second half of the record where he sings, “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” Those words were, essentially, the Beatles closing statement. Their farewell message. McCartney, who was later a musical collaborator with Allen Ginsberg, wrote in his 2021 book The Lyrics about how the couplet came to him: “I was particularly fascinated by how Shakespeare used the couplet to close out a scene, or an entire play. […] This was Shakespeare's way of saying, ‘That's it, folks,’ and ‘The End’ was our way of saying the same. (Ours) is one of those couplets that can keep you thinking for a long time. It may be about good karma.” John Lennon agreed, stating in his 1980 Playboy interview, shortly before he was murdered outside his New York City home, “‘The love you take is equal to the love you make.’ It was a very cosmic, philosophical line.” I’d add that it’s also a pretty good working definition of karma. One of the best you’ll ever find. What goes around, comes around. If you don’t treat others as you’d like to be treated, you’ll not be able to escape the consequences. And those consequences will continue to haunt you until you do. For example, one consequence of inaction by governmental and community leaders to pass real gun control laws in order to prevent further school shootings, or feet-dragging on climate change that I think would be very healthy and empowering is to give young people of school age the right to vote on such issues critical to their immediate and long term survival. Here’s a poem from Treasures on the subject:

Low The Vote

 

Today’s youth deserves the vote.

In all federal, state and local elections.

 

Not only all high schoolers, but all

Middle schoolers deserve the vote.

 

Kids do not deserve to die by gunfire

In their classrooms, libraries, hallways

 

While the NRA’s board of directors

Exists to serve the gun industry.

 

All Americans need to hear children

When they say, “Boycott any brand that

 

Invests or has holdings in the NRA.”

Middle schoolers deserve the vote

 

On Climate Change. After all,

There is no greater stakeholder

 

Of the future than the young. We

Have left them a deeply despoiled

 

& degraded planet. Middle schoolers

Deserve the right to vote against war,

 

Matters of nuclear war, cyberwarfare,

Immigration law & policy, detention

 

Of illegal immigrants, ICE sweeps.

Ask any middle schooler. They’ll tell you

 

What the Secretary of Education did to

Them, how the Department of Energy

 

Shafted them, what the Secretaries of

Housing, Treasury, Defense, State,

 

Homeland Security, Health & Human

Services, Agriculture and Commerce

 

Have done to them, how the EPA is

Killing them... And then there’s the

 

Country, savaged by its executive & his

Cabinet, as if humans were mimicking

 

Malware, running the nation like they

Were the embodiment of ransomware.

 

Louisville, Colorado

20 April 2018

(Anne Waldman and Jim Cohn, Naropa University, 2009 / Photo by Jack Greene)

What are your hopes and fears for the future of poetry?

JC: Many believe we are in end times. During the worldwide pandemic, thousands and thousands of young people have taken their own lives rather than to carry on. They have left us bereft. I wonder how many terrific poets were lost among them? Jack Kerouac didn’t have to worry about fentanyl showing up in the drugs he purchased. The Beats wrote poems about the big crises of their times, but that was when the only major threat to humanity was from nuclear war. Consider Gregory Corso’s “Bomb” (1958) and Allen Ginsberg’s “Plutonian Ode” (1978) as just two examples. Or

“Apocalypse prophesied–

The Fall of America

Signaled from Heaven–”

 

–Allen Ginsberg, “Iron Horse”

This excerpt from Ginsberg’s poem “Iron Horse” is from The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1973). In late 2019, Michigan poet David Cope asked me for editing assistance on a poem by Ginsberg called “Denver to Montana Beginning 27 May 1972” which Allen had written to be the final poem in The Fall of America. The poem ended up being left out of the book because Lawrence Ferlinghetti, his City Lights publisher, decided he couldn’t fit it in. Spending a good deal of time with this remarkable poem, the poem that was the real conclusion of Fall of America, it got me thinking about the fall of America as a prophecy. I first met Allen only a year or two after Fall of America came out, and one of the things Ginsberg would say regularly was there’s “No escape” from suffering, the first noble truth of Buddhism, and what he meant by that was there’s no easy way out. As a kid of the nuclear age, I’d seen myself as a teenager thinking, “What’s the use, why bother trying to figure out anything about the journey of life if it’s going to end any day now thanks to the recklessness of political leaders who value no one but themselves?” It was a way to cop out on trying to organize any kind of life. And eventually, still among the living, there was a reckoning to face where I just had to assume that planetary life may not end. And it was art that showed me the way. It was poetry that was there, and the muse, that brought the alchemical and shamanic, the mystical and the magical, the sense of adventure, invention, experimentation, creativity and freedom both out of me and to me. It was the actual making of poems that turned my life from yearning for suffering to yearning for liberation.

Somehow, I had to stop just neurotically going along, waiting for mass oblivion. And then, decades later, during the pandemic, I felt like I was revisiting all of my teenage feelings along these lines in today’s youth. All the depression and anxiety, the lack of hope. The intensity and pervasiveness of feeling isolated. The intensity and pervasiveness of loneliness with no way to stop or control those feelings. The erosion of safe spaces at our schools and more and more children murdered in the endless series of mass shootings. How many future American poets have been lost due to school shootings? The sickening repetition of police shootings that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. How many future Black male poets have we lost to inhumane policing? The feeling of nausea that came with the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision and its impact on young women trying to make their own way in the world. How many women poets will be lost to that puritanical, invasive ruling so utterly out of step with the world of today? And then there’s climate change, leading our fears of some kind of devastating future that could have been averted, but instead, will make human beings living today pay for all the carbon industry foot-dragging and all the political kicking the can down the road over and over again while glaciers melt and sea levels rise, while super wildfires, 100-year snow storms, 500-year hurricanes, 1000-year floods, enormous property damage, increasing aridity of the West, reservoirs and rivers going bone dry leave us with more difficult and stark options and choices. All the human beings without homes and all the millions of asylum-seeking refugees without countries. How many poets of the future grow up in refugee camps, risk high seas, cross borders illegally just to find peace? The rise of 21st century authoritarians and the weakening of democracies. How many future poets have been destroyed by Putin’s senseless egomaniacal invasion of Ukraine? How many way too young Ukrainian poets gone? How many Palestinian poets lost in their youth? How many young Rohingya poets, Uyghur poets lost? How many indigenous poets cut down in their prime in Argentina, in El Salvador, in Venezuela, here in the United States? How many young Kurds mowed down in Turkey, Syria and Iraq? How many young Kashmiri and Bengali Muslim young poets silenced by India? How many thousands of Houthi children in Yemen will never have their voices heard? How many Yazidi young poets snuffed out by ISIS? If you are coming up today with poetry as your calling, wherever you are, you have the ghosts of all of these future poets we’ll never hear, read or see, watching over you. 

It's not difficult to see why anyone coming up in this kind of social and environmental dystopia would be worried about the future. If there will be a future. To me, the speculation regarding end times drawing near, especially among Christians, Jews and Muslims, has gone on for centuries. But there are distinct drawbacks to living a speculative religious or nonreligious life with regards to end times. After all, people have been predicting the apocalyptic final days as long as humans have been cognizant of the unavoidability of their own death and the death of every person they have known, hated or loved. Buddhism considers such human preoccupations useless. Take the great 9th century Chinese Zen master Lin-ji Yixuan (Jap. Rinzai Gigen) who, in The Record of Lin-ji, said, “Never ever engage in random speculation—whether you understand or don’t understand, either way you’re mistaken” (VI). Lin-ji went on to say, “As for me, what I want to make clear to you is that you must not accept the deluded views of others. If you want to act, then act. Don’t hesitate” (X). So, there are all these different kinds of speculative background noises any young poet anywhere faces today. But just as my own generation has largely survived to grow old, even though that was never assured, Treasures for Heaven attests to the honor of living the life of a human being and all that potential for good works that we carry within us. All the light and compassion. The unblemished purity of our essential nature. Having had the opportunity to gain wisdom and to follow a path of truth and liberation in poetry, despite all the background chatter, all the suffering, I’d tell any young poet today, no matter their identity, do what only you can know what you came into your body to do.

The arc of my own poetry is not toward the apocalyptic. What’s the difference between media news conjecture taking over factual news and religious leaders focused on end times instead of messages of compassion for self, others and a common sense of the divine? Conspiracy theories also seem shameful to me. That these are adults spouting them. Were they raised on the anything goes mind-set of a National Enquirer tabloid? When I die, I won’t be taking humanity with me. Maybe that’s because I have raised a daughter and I’m destined to be hopeful for her future, a promising future for her and all young people around the world, and in that world a new universe of art, the future of poetry. I could have dedicated Treasures for Heaven to my teachers. I could have dedicated it to poets I have known for decades. Instead, I chose to dedicate it to my daughter. That’s how much I believe in the future of poets. I believe there’s a place for you in the future of poetry. We all have a witness role to play in one another’s life. We all need to bear witness to injustice and inequality when we see it. We all have the ability to trust ourselves, our own creative decisions. It’s a crucial role, poet, and it will be what you make of it.

Jim Cohn @ MAP - Home

(Jim Cohn / Photo by Heath Antonio)