The correspondence series is made up of letters Cohn sent and received throughout his career. Cohn sorted the correspondence according to the person he was corresponding with, making special room for his two primary correspondents, fellow poets David Cope and Randy Roark.
The ASL Poetry and Poetics, Beat and Postbeat Studies, and Disability series contain records of Cohn's research, writings, and work related to each subject. Similarly, the Research Notebooks contain materials related to Cohn's archival research about poets Paul Blackburn and Ezra Pound.
The Audio Files and Books in Print files series are papers relating to Cohn's recordings and publications, respectively. Related A/V materials were placed in the A/V series, while published books were separated for cataloging.
The Education, Juvenilia, and Photographs series contain papers, photography, and artifacts from Cohn's personal life from childhood through the 2000s.
The Editor/Co-editor and Publisher series consist of magazines that Cohn helped edit or publish, as well as files related to the same.
The Manuscripts series contains Cohn's manuscripts, organized by genre.
Fine Arts includes two of Cohn's art projects, making paper and printing poetry on Tibetan prayer flags.
The Promotional Materials series includes papers relating to Cohn's public career and self-promotion, as well as performance reviews from a former job. The Interviews series contains both interviews of Cohn and interviews with other poets conducted by Cohn.
The Teaching Guides series are papers related to poetry workshops Cohn has taught.
The Museum of American Poetics series consists of printouts of various sections and updates to the website over the years.
Finally, the A/V materials series largely consists of CD and tape recordings of Cohn's spoken word music poetry. Also included are CD backups of the MAP website, recordings of Allen Ginsberg, and Ann Waldman's 2003 film, "Makeup on Empty Space." Please reach out to the Special Collections Research Center for information about accessing these materials.
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. He received a Certificate 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, including Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and Diane di Prima.
As a teaching assistant to Allen Ginsberg, Cohn 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. 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 first National Deaf Poetry Conference in the United States. From 1988-1992, he 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 at the University of Colorado in Boulder from 1997-2009, working with students with non-visible disabilities, and becoming an advocate for Disability Studies.
During the 1990s, Cohn began recording spoken word music poetry with long-time friend Mark "Mooka" Rennick. In 1998, Cohn founded the online Museum of American Poetics (MAP, poetspath.com), a virtual museum dedicated to poetics diversity and documented in its evolution by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. In the 2000s, Cohn helped fellow poets David Cope and Professor Zhang Ziqing on a project to translate Beat and Postbeat writings into Mandarin.
Besides books of poetry and poetics nonfiction, 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). Cohn's most recent workmasterwork, Treasures for Heaven: Collected Poems 1976-2021 (Giant Steps Press), was published in 2022.
