Author Description

Treasures for Heaven: Collected Poems 1976-2021 gathers together poet, recording artist, editor, publisher and poetics curator Jim Cohn's best works over the last four and a half decades. Assembled with current and future multiethnic and multiracial poetics communities of all orientations and abilities in mind, Cohn's collected poems masterwork is a reflection of the unique compendium of lineages: Black Mountain, Beat Generation, New York School, Black Arts, Feminist Poetry Movement, Environmental Justice poets, political activists, and countercultural luminaries he identified with since his days as a student of Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.Cohn's poetry exemplifies the most enduring Beat, Postbeat and Outrider 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 and liberation from suffering in one's lifetime, and support of democratically elected governments that uplift communities with histories of institutional oppression and disenfranchisement.These collected poems, offering a grand and mystical panorama, are anchored by major works of invention and experimentation, including the title poem, "Treasures for Heaven," as well as excerpts from Cohn's two book-length poems: the fem-action Ongoing Saga I Told My Daughter and the wheel-of-time Birthday News: A Poemoscope. Also included in its entirety is his achrono-fictional-history poem "If 45 was 16 & 16 was 45." The collection comes packed with contextual, idiosyncratic and thoroughly annotated, vetted and fact checked end notes written by the author.Poems for Treasures for Heaven were gathered from Cohn's previously published books of poetry: Green Sky (Chapbook, 1980), Mangrove (Chapbook, 1980), Gandy (Chapbook, 1980, 1981, 1982), Divine April