Jim Cohn is a poet, poetry activist, and spoken word artist in the United States.
Cohn was born in Highland Park, Illinois, in 1953. He received a BA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in English (1976) and a Certificate of Poetics (1980) from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where he was a teaching assistant to Allen Ginsberg. He received his M.S. Ed. in English and Deaf Education from the University of Rochester and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) in 1986. For over two decades, he worked in the field of disability services, taking a siddha approach as a model of Disability Services and Studies practice and scholarship. He believed that the social sciences should be redefined thematically within the United States into a form of American Karmic Studies.
In 1980, Cohn published his first collection of poems, Green Sky. In 1989 Prairie Falcon was published by North Atlantic Books. He has published five more books of poetry and two works of poetics nonfiction.
He introduced Allen Ginsberg to Deaf poets at NTID in 1984. In 1986, he published an essay entitled "The New Deaf Poetics: Visible Poetry" in Sign Language Studies (52).[1] In 1987, he coordinated the first National Deaf Poetry Conference, in Rochester, NY.[2] His role in the history of American Sign Language (ASL) poetics was documented in a 2009 film by Miriam Nathan Lerner entitled The Heart of the Hydrogen Jukebox.[3]
In 1990, he became editor to an annual poetry magazine, Napalm Health Spa.[4] In 2013 the magazine released an anthologic special edition of Napalm Health Spa, "Long Poem Masterpieces of the Postbeats".[5] His entry was "Treasures For Heaven" [6]
In 1995, Cohn began recording with The Abolitionists,[7] a North Bay Area band that featured Mooka Rennick and guitarist Steve Kimock. He began a solo recording artist career beginning with Unspoken Words in 1998. From 2006-2008, he worked on homage, a spoken word and music recording made upon the death of his mother. In 2009, he released Impermanence, a double CD compilation.
In 1996, Cohn began planning for an online poetry project that would explore Beat Generation influences on the Postbeat Poets. In 1997, he founded the on-line Museum of American Poetics. In 1999, MAP became the first online poetry site to be mentioned in the New York Times. Cohn published his first collection of prose the same year, exploring the theoretical parallels between ASL and modernist poetries in a book entitled Sign Mind: Studies in American Sign Language Poetics.[8]
Cohn's first video production, the American Poet Greats series, won the Best Multimedia Award from Community Television in Boulder, Colorado three years in a row (2001-2003). In 2003, Cohn produced his first film, a 55 minute profile on the life and poetic contributions of the Jack Kerouac School co-founder Anne Waldman, entitled Anne Waldman: Makeup on Empty Space.
In a 2011 review of Cohn's Sutras & Bardos: Essays & Interviews on Allen Ginsberg, the Kerouac School, Anne Waldman, The Postbeat Poets & the New Demotics, Beat Studies scholar Jonah Raskin wrote "Perhaps no one in the United States today understands and appreciates the poetic durability and the cultural elasticity of the Beats better than Jim Cohn."[9]