Ira Cohen

Ira Cohen at the age of 72 (2007)

Ira Cohen ( February 3, 1935 in the Bronx , New York City - April 25, 2011 ) was an American poet, photographer, and filmmaker, mail artist, and editor. Cohen lived in Morocco and New York City in the 1960s , worked in Kathmandu , Nepal in the 1970s , toured the world in the 1980s before returning to New York City, where he lived until his death. Cohen died of kidney failure on April 25, 2011. Ira Cohen's literary estate resides in the Beincke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University , New Haven , Connecticut .

The years of the beginning

Cohen was born to deaf Jewish parents. He graduated from Horace Mann School at the age of 16 and enrolled at Cornell University , where he took lessons from Vladimir Nabokov . Cohen flew out of Cornell University and enrolled at Columbia University , New York City. In 1957 he married Arlene Bond, a Barnard student. They had two children, David Schleifer and Rafiqa el Shenawi.

Morocco

In 1961, Cohen took a Yugoslav freighter to Morocco, where he lived for four years. He settled in Tangier , where he put together GNAOUA , a literary magazine devoted to exorcism and beat literature ; it contained works by William S. Burroughs , Allen Ginsberg , Brion Gysin , Michael McClure , Harold Norse , Irving Rosenthal, Rosalind Schwartz, Jack Smith , Ian Sommerville and by Alfred Jarry in George Andrews' translation. Cohen also produced the LP Jilala in 1965 , recordings of Moroccan trance music made by Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin; In 1998 the LP was reissued as a CD by Baraka Foundation / Mystic Fire.

Return to New York

Cohen returned to New York City in the mid-1960s. There he published The Hashish Cookbook (Gnaoua Press) in 1966 , which, at Brion Gysin's suggestion, was written by Cohen's girlfriend Rosalind under the pseudonym “Panama Rose” in Tangier; several editions followed, and the book became an underground bestseller. In his apartment on the Lower East Side , Cohen discovered mylar photography, a distorting mirror technique with which he developed his own kind of mythography and created numerous futuristic icons . Among the personalities he mirrored are William S. Burroughs , Ching Ho Cheng, Bill Laswell , John McLaughlin , Pharoah Sanders, and Jimi Hendrix , who upon seeing Cohen's photos said it was like "looking through the wings of a butterfly" . Probably Cohen's most widely used Mylar photographs are the cover images of the album Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus from rock group Spirit , released in 1970 and gold record awarded in 1976 . In his Mylar photographs, Cohen explored the whole spectrum from infrared to black light. In 1968 he directed the “fantasmaglorial” film Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda and produced Marty Topps Paradise Now , a film about the Living Theater's historic American tour . Cohen was inspired by Kenneth Anger and Sergei Parajanov and set up his Mylar chamber to expand his photographic work. On May 31, 1970 Cohen's son Raphael Aladdin Cohen was born to Jhil McEntyre; Raphael Aladdin Cohen currently lives in Harlem with his wife, the dancer and choreographer Kristina Berger .

Travel in the 1970s

Accompanied by previous Living Theater member Petra Vogt, Cohen moved to Kathmandu in the 1970s, where he started the Starstreams poetry series under the label Bardo Matrix on a rice paper hand press in the shadow of the Himalayan mountains. He published u. a. Poems by Paul Bowles, Gregory Corso , Jane Falk, Charles Henri Ford , Iris M. Gaynor, Angus MacLise , Roberto Francisco Valenza and himself. In collaboration with local artisans and the adventurous hippie community, he developed a unique book art , integrated different types of paper , Photographs , stamps , woodcuts , drawings in the text design ; he sold the delicate volumes, the circulation of which barely exceeded 500 copies each, for 5 dollars - today some of them are available for hundreds of dollars as valuable treasures in antiquarian bookshops. According to Cohen, the following verses best reflect the spirit of the Kathmandu years; they are said to go back to a certain Katie McDonald and appeared on an undated, nameless rice paper in the 1970s:

on dreamers!

waken or die

only the SKY

is open to you now

UNITE

or you may

never know

In 1972, Ira Cohen spent a year in San Francisco reading and performing and exhibited in New York. In 1974 Cohen visited the filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky in Paris with the intention of getting his then partner Petra Vogt a role in Jodorowsky's film Dune . But they were not welcome and so they moved on to Amsterdam . Cohen had already visited this city ten years ago, in the spring of 1964, on the same trip on which, coming from Tangier , in Antwerp , Belgium , he had printed his magazine GNAOUA ; At that time he had also met the writer Simon Vinkenoog in Holland , who would remain a lifelong friend and who would later translate many of Cohen's writings into Dutch. In Holland he was accompanied by Simon Vinkenoog, the poet, musician and Sanskrit translator Louise Landes Levi and Gerard Bellaart, the publisher of the Cold Turkey Press in Rotterdam, the Bukowski, Burroughs, Beiles, Ginsberg, Pound, Carl Weissner , Heathcote Williams and others. a. m. had published. Bellaart became Ira Cohen's first publisher in the West with From the Divan of Petra Vogt (1976); the volume contains several photographs and facsimile handwritten poems by Ira Cohen. Cohen had a lifelong, productive friendship with Gerard Bellaart and Louise Landes Levi. In 1978 Cohen moved to Amsterdam, where he met Caroline Gosselin, a young French woman who made live masks and sold them on Melkweg (“Milky Way” in Dutch). Together with her, Cohen expanded this concept into the Bandaged Poets - a photo series of paper-mâché masks by dozens of well-known poets. He also hooked up with Eddie Woods, whom he met in Kathmandu in 1976. Woods founded the Ins & Outs Press with Jane Harvey, of which Cohen contributed regularly to the magazine of the same name; The Ins & Outs Press also published a series of postcards by the Bandaged Poets and a limited edition of Kirke Wilson screen prints of the same. Ira Cohen and Caroline Gosselin lived together for three years in Amsterdam, from where Cohen also maintained a lively exchange with the artists' colony in Ruigoord, a village ten kilometers west of Amsterdam. In 1979 the death of ex-Velvet Underground member and poet Angus MacLise, who had come to Kathmandu with his wife Hetty, due to excessive drug use and malnutrition, definitely marked the end of Cohen's “Shangri-La” epoch in distant Nepal; the work of Angus MacLise, with whom Cohen had already worked closely in New York, was always referred to by him as one of his central sources of inspiration, and Cohen, as editor, contributed significantly to the memory of it.

Second return to New York

In 1981 Cohen returned to New York and moved into an apartment on the Upper West Side with his widowed mother . Even if the center of his orbit remained New York City from then on, the poet photographer continued to make many trips over the next few decades, traveling through the USA and Europe, but also to Ethiopia , Japan , North Africa , Cambodia and India . In 1982, Ira Cohen married Caroline Gosselin; she gave birth to daughter Lakshmi Cohen before the two divorced in 1989.

In 1986 the Synergetic Press in London published On Feet of Gold , an extensive collection of poems, which also contained material from earlier poetry volumes Gilded Splinters , Poems from the Cosmic Crypt and The Stauffenberg Cycle . In the 1990s, Cohen's poetry gained increasing international recognition after his poems were published in 1991 by the Temple Press, London, together with texts by Angus MacLise and Gerard Malanga , under the title Ratio 3: Media Shamans . He exhibited there in the October Gallery and took part in 1992, alongside Joe Ambrose, Antony Balch, Hakim Bey , William S. Burroughs, Terry Wilson and the Master Musicians of Jajouka and Bill Laswell , Musicians of Jajouka at the Here To Go Show in Dublin , Ireland , dedicated to the painter, calligrapher and writer Brion Gysin , the discoverer of the cut-up method and one of Cohen's most important inspirers.

In 1991 Cohen published Gustav Meyrink's story Petroleum! As Akashic Bulletin No. 1 . Petroleum! out. According to Cohen, “Akash”, from Sanskrit, means something like “lightward, ethereal, heavenly tongues, the hidden meaning of the hidden meaning, the maintenance of the soul, the unwritten history of mankind - past, present & future, God's memory book, the continuous one Radio, the subliminal cassette, the cloud doctrine, radar diaries ”; “Akash” is a key term for Cohen's work as editor and preserver, guardian of hidden evidence and fleeting traces of the human spirit.

In 1994 Sub Rosa released the first CD under the title The Majoon Traveler / The Poetry of Ira Cohen to capture Cohen's charismatic, mesmerizing voice. Cohen edited it in collaboration with DJ Cheb i Sabbah ; it also features sound material from Don Cherry , Ornette Coleman , Angus MacLise, Lights In A Fat City and Jilala musicians.

In the 1990s a fruitful collaboration began with the musicians and composers Sylvie Degiez and Wayne Lopes, which led to the founding of Cosmic Legends, a group for improvised musical theater. At The Kitchen in New York City, based on a text by Angus MacLise, ORFEO: The $ 500 Opera was performed, the title alluding to the low production budget. With Judith Malina , Hanon Reznikov , Rashied Ali , Taylor Mead , Louise Landes Levi and others. a. m. Cohen took part in the legendary performances of Cosmic Legends, which Sylvie Degiez designed, including Let the Beast Scream and The Moody Moon .

In 1995, Ira Cohen (Phyllis Segura did the design) published a magazine on a t-shirt: Akashic Issue for Broadshirt ; The more than 20 contributors included Paul Bowles, Louise Landes Levi, Gerard Malanga, Judith Malina and others. a. m.

Cohen worked with the Nadine Ganase Dance Group on the multimedia show Crossing the Border ; the show was performed many times between 1996 and 1999 in Amiens , Brussels , Glasgow , Hamburg, Hanover , Paris etc.

In 1998, in collaboration with Ira Landgarten on camera, the film Kings with Straw Mats came out on Mystic Fire , Cohen's strip, which has meanwhile been clicked over two million times on YouTube, about the world's largest religious meeting, the Indian Kumbh Mela (German: “Krugfest”) ), which only takes place every twelve years on the Ganges and lasts for three months - it is the only gathering of people that is visible from the moon; Cohen visited the Kumbh Mela twice in his life, both times filming. The film, which shows the unheard-of achievements of Indian fakiria, also reflects the flow of time, the transience of everything, when in the end a boat with a photograph of for the deceased friend Julian Beck, who founded the Living Theater with Judith Malina to the deceased and a burning candle to the river Ganges.

1998 appeared in Philippe Franck's French translation of Cohen's collected Morocco texts under the title Minbad Sinbad (Didier Devillez, Brussels).

1999 appeared in the AltaQuito-Presse, Göttingen, in Florian Vetsch's German translation, Cohen's selection of poems Letter to Kaliban & Other Poems . In the same year Romy Ashby edited Goodie at Foxy Kidd in New York City , a long telephone conversation with Ira Cohen, an impressive testimony to his inexhaustible spontaneous speech.

In 2000, Ira Cohen came to Switzerland and Germany for a reading tour . In Munich he read in the Lyrik Kabinett, in Zurich he performed Xenix Kings with Straw Mats in the cinema and gave a brilliant reading. A Night in Zurich (Der Kollaboratör, Lucerne 2012; Gonzo, Mainz 2018), a posthumously published collaboration with the German , tells of this trip, which also led to a re-encounter with Cohen's old friend, the artist and alien inventor HR Giger Cut-up author Jürgen Ploog and the Swiss poet, editor and translator Florian Vetsch. A Night in Zurich also shows Ira Cohen's great mail art in facsimiles ; Cohen originally wrote all of his poems by hand and mailed them to his friends.

Ira Cohen's photographs and texts have appeared in numerous magazines around the world, including Third Rail Magazine , Wire , The Butcher's Block , Drafts , Härter , Kozmik Blues , Playboy , Gay Sunshine , Rolling Stone , Nexus , Elderground , Rude Look , Rude Look Oriental , Friction , Tangerine , The London Sunday Times , Avant Garde , Life Magazine , Facade , Ins and Outs , Nieuwe Revue , Caliban , Ignite , XPress , Tingpa , 15 Minutes , Growing Hand , Big Bridge , PhoBi etc. pp.

Cohen's artistic work showed u. a. these galleries: Wildfire (Amsterdam), Photo Boutique (New York), ART (New York), October Gallery (London), Visionary Gallery (New York), Deer Gallery (New York), Susan Cooper (Woodstock, NY), TAM TAM (Prague), Caravan of Dreams (Fort Worth, Texas), Varia Theater (Brussels), Nul Gallery (Amsterdam), Merlin Theater (Budapest), TB Institute (Tokyo), Anya Gosselin (Dublin), Gallery of Photography (Dublin ), Plateau (Akashic Weekend, Brussels), Widmer + Theodoridis (Zurich).

Ira Cohen, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2005.

In 2004, after years of preparation, Shamanic Warriors Now Poets , an extensive anthology that Cohen had put together with the Scottish poet and translator JN Reilly (R&R Publishing, Glasgow); Mati Klarwein, Vali Myers, Paul Grillo, Robert LaVigne and Ira Cohen themselves contributed illustrations, and texts can be found in it. a. by Kazuko Shiraishi (the Japanese poet to whom Cohen once dedicated his long poem Tokyo Birdhouse ), Mohamed Choukri , Nina Zivancevic, Charles Plymell , Ian MacFadyen, Patti Smith , Michael McClure, Mohammed Mrabet, Philip Whalen, Janine Pommy Vega, Jack Hirschman - to name just a few previously unseen names from the wide network in which the multimedia shaman Ira Cohen moved.

In 2006 Cohen exhibited “Day for Night” at the Whitney Biennale, and in 2007 he was featured in Georg Gatsa's exhibition The Process VI - Final at the Swiss Institute in New York City , where he read poems on projected Mylar photographs with the music group Mahasiddhisee .

In Cohen's last decade, the poems Poems from the Akashic Record (Panther Books, New York 2001), Where the Heart Lies / Wo das Herz rests (Rohstoff, Herdecke 2001; Stadtlichterpresse, Wenzendorf 2010; with the German translation by Florian Vetsch) appeared, Chaos & Glory (Elik Press, Salt Lake City, Utah 2004), Whatever You Say May Be Held Against You (Shivastan Press, Woodstock, NY 2004), Cornucopion - Bőségszaru (Új Mandátum / IAT Press, Budapest 2007, with the Hungarian translation by Gabor G. Gyukics) and God's Bounty (Elik Press, Salt Lake City, Utah 2008).

Ira Cohen's hands and handwriting at a reading in St. Gallen, 2005.

Ira Cohen's work is assigned to the beat or post-beat generation. Dadaism , surrealism and esoteric-alchemical things are no less of its roots. He introduces himself in a poem like this:

I AM NOT A BEAT

I am not a beat

though I have performed

with them all etc.

I am an Electronic

Multimedia Shaman,

a Naga hipster

to Akashic Agent

an Outlaw of the Spirit

I am the one out of

a Hundred

I am the Bearded Iris,

the flower of chivalry

with a sword for a leaf

& a lily for a heart,

I am the Rainbow - -

a hybrid of celestial hues

blue in the end,

a message between Gods.

I am your shadow in the darkness,

your reflection in the mirror

I am the jack in your box.

I AM NOT A BEAT

I am not a beat

although I am with everyone

of them

stood on stage etc.

I am an electronic

Multimedia shaman,

a Naga hipster

an agent of the Akashic Records

an outlaw of the spirit

I am the one

from a hundred

I am the bearded iris

the flower of chivalry

with a sword as a petal

& a lily as a heart,

I am the rainbow - -

a mixture of essential hues

blue last,

a message between gods.

I am your shadow in the dark

your reflection in the mirror

I am your box devil.

bibliography

• Seven Marvels (Kathmandu 1975)
• Poems from the Cosmic Crypt (Kathmandu 1976)
• From the Divan of Petra Vogt (Rotterdam 1976)
• Gilded Splinters (Kathmandu 1977)
• The Stauffenberg Cycle and Other Poems (Heerlen, Holland 1981)
• Ratio 3: Media Shamans (with Gerard Malanga and Angus MacLise, London 1991)
• On Feet of Gold (London 1986).
• Minbad Sinbad (Brussels 1998; French translation by Philippe Franck)
• Letter to Kaliban and Other Poems (Göttingen 1999; German translation by Florian Vetsch)
• Goodie (New York City 1999; edited by Romy Ashby)
• Where the heart rests (Herdecke 2001; bilingual, German translation by Florian Vetsch)
• Poems from the Akashic Record (New York City 2001)
• Tokyo Birdhouse / Tokio Vogelhaus (Frauenfeld 2001, Bodoni Poesie Sheet No. 66; bilingual, German translation by Florian Vetsch)
• Shamanic Warriors Now Poets (Glasgow, Scotland 2004; anthology, edited by JN Reilly and Ira Cohen)
• Chaos and Glory (Salt Lake City, Utah 2004)
• Whatever You Say May Be Held Against You (Woodstock, NY 2004)
• Cornucopion - Bőségszaru (Budapest 2007; bilingual, Hungarian translation by Gabor G. Gyukics)
• God's Bounty (Salt Lake City, Utah 2008)
• Where the heart rests (Wenzendorf 2010; extended second edition, bilingual, German translation by Florian Vetsch)
• Ira Cohen - in Memory of (Zurich, June 2011, factory newspaper no.272; published by Etrit Hasler & Florian Vetsch)
• The great rice paper adventure of Kathmandu (Munich 2011; German translation by Florian Vetsch)
• Ira Cohen, Jürgen Ploog, Florian Vetsch: A Night in Zurich (Lucerne 2012)
• Ira Cohen, Jürgen Ploog, Florian Vetsch: A Night in Zurich (Mainz 2018; second extended edition)