Treasures for Heaven: Collected Poems, 1976-2021 by Jim Cohn (Giant Steps Press, 2022)
By Marc Zegans
IN SWING Changes: Big Band Jazz in the New Deal Era the historian David Stowe, following on Ralph Ellison’s characterization of America as a ‘jazz shaped’ culture, introduces the notion that it is fruitful to view the decade in American life from the mid-1930s through 1945 as a ‘swing shaped’ age. Stowe notes: ‘Swing was part catalyst, part product, of the electronic mass culture industry coalescing during those years.’
Ginsberg’s arrival at Columbia University in 1943 and his meeting Kerouac the following year coincided with the end of this era, the ascendence of bebop, and the emergence of jump blues, popular music’s most direct precursor to rock‘n’roll. Post-Beat poet and essayist Jim Cohn, student and colleague of Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, by contrast, was born into what we might call a rock-conditioned culture.
Rooted in and parasitic on jazz and blues, rock fed an unprecedented explosion of mass youth culture characterized in the January 1965 issue of Vogue as a ‘Youth Quake’. White, male and American, Cohn inhabited from birth the pervasive rock‘n’roll bubble but, though influenced, he has not been contained by it.
In his travels, studies, poems and efforts to contribute to post-Beat ideas and communities, Cohn has reckoned with his whiteness, recounted his rock‘n’roll stories and influences and embraced and situated these in a far more diverse gathering of songs, stories, poetries, identities and cultures.
Rock-inflected, yet far more extensive than rock culture, Cohn’s intensely individual and situationally specific verse, gathered here in Treasures for Heaven, is a liberation poetry that offers up everything and bows to nothing.
Cohn’s work, drawing on Beat roots, flows from the sharing of direct experience set to page unmarred by calculation. It brings his readers a poetry planted in the principle of self-emancipation as a mode of Individual and communal development, accompanied by a sustained commitment to the encounters generated by the voices, the identities, the communities of poetry, and the intersectionalities that inevitably emerge from the human condition.
The poet’s honoring of the human voice, human difference and their varied modes of expression both define his post-Beat poetic statements and motivate the vast soulful expanse found in this decades-spanning collection.
Western Christian culture invites us to imagine the treasures to be found in the afterlife encouraging us to live righteous lives in the hope of later reward. Cohn finds such glistening treasure in this life and holds his findings up to the sky as epiphany and as gracious offering, bathing this reader, poem by poem, in awe and appreciation.
Pair of blue herons Late afternoon. Rain—
a woman letting down her black hair. A moment
as ‘S’ curve in Big Sandy River…(67)
The virtue of this collection is the opportunity it lends readers to follow the development of Cohn’s offerings from the startlingly open receptivity of his youth through successive evolutions in craft, scope, perspective, compassion, and wisdom. He writes in ‘My Video Game’:
In my video game, Allen Ginsberg calms police
Into putting away nightsticks.
Chickadees peck at the windows of Muslim bakeries.
Truth bound monk sits for years on end.
A woman opens up an orphanage.
Andy Clausen is president.
In my video game, the leaves are sixty colors.
We free ourselves from these lifetimes
Of search and destroy, of shock and awe,
Locking down cities, locking down the populace
With sacrilege and blasphemy
Though the gods are everywhere. (203)
We see in Treasures’ chronologically organized, poetic progression a loving, intentional life, both wild and cultivated, whose growing presence, contact with nature, ripening nuance, loving disposition, experience of loss and unbound generosity express the self-liberating spirit and the urge to embrace and nurture life in all its variety that arise from the essence of this quite remarkable poet. Yet, as the book unfolds, we find far more.
In ‘Girdled with Chains’, Cohn lays bare the stark truth of the false but comforting beliefs we use to buffer our psyches from the raw exposure that attends the daily precarity of our situation.
Nobody owed you nothing, no matter what was taken,
No matter that everything that possibly could go wrong does,
Knowing up front that letting go means that there’s going to be
More to let go of,
Including all you have experienced, but will,
And that you can’t even depend on that,
Or to be left alone,
Falling through loneliness—
Filled with vagrants playing insane instruments,
Each disguised as machines playing shamans,
Also on your chains. (225)
Neither the poem, nor the poet rest on this revelation. Instead, poem and poet effect a crucial transition from the observational to the transformative, converting the chains born of the illusions that bind us into a charm bracelet festooned with musical vagrants and shamans, these chains no longer restrictive but instead incantatory, invoking and revealing the mad and vibrant cosmos within which we are all dancers and to whose whorls and sparks we become more fully present as, layer-by-layer, we let go.
The great joy in entering the currents of this massive creative overview, 584 pages in scope, is that it is not a stilted volume of collected works but a vast upsurging river emptying into the sky. Sequentially ordered and sectioned by his discrete bodies of work, Treasures has form and structure. Absent is the reductive overlay and privileging of individual pieces often found in such collections.
In its fullness, Treasures for Heaven gives us, unself-consciously, the man, his work, and their co-evolution over the course of close to 50 years. In this, Cohn has graced his readers with a marvelous endowment, offering to heaven treasures drawn from this life that will furnish our houses for generations to come and bestowing on us a music in verse that lovingly transcends the conditions of its origin.
Editor’s note: Marc Zegans has penned seven collections of poems, most recently Lyon Street (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022) and The Snow Dead (Cervena Barva Press, 2020); two spoken word albums; several immersive theatrical productions, including Sirens, Dreams and a Cat (co-written with D. Lowell Wilder, 2020); and many poetry films. Ghost Book (Kite String Press, 2024), a limited-edition collaboration with fine art photographer Tsar Fedorsky, was released in April of this year. Zegans’ work can also be found in a variety of anthologies including, Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack (2018), edited by Simon Warner and Jim Sampas.
To the question, "Above us only sky?," one might imagine the author, following Hendrix, responding obliquely, "Scuze me while I kiss the sky."