Ira Cohen is now officially my favourite modern poet and for someone who likes to read a lot of poetry, that's saying something. If you haven't read Ira Cohen before (and this was my first time to read his work at length), then this is a good place to start as this is, more or less, a Selected Poems of Ira Cohen, featuring highlights from some of his most well-known poetry books such as Poems from the Cosmic Crypt, Gilded Splinters and The Stauffenberg Cycle and Other Poems. His publications were often made on delicate rice paper (soft to the touch). In the 1970s, Ira Cohen went to Kathmandu to start up his own publishing house called Bardo Matrix of which I am currently trying to research the origins. His dedications to his very close friends Angus Maclise and Brion Gysin are both haunting and touching at the same time. But his poetry is very vivid and arousing - you get a lot of shining silver and black and gold and the fragrances of incense (possibly even frankincense) and hashish come off the page right at you. Inspired by many of the eastern poets and mystics such as Rumi, there is a certain alchemy to his poetry which I find missing in a lot of his contemporaries. the manuscript as carefully and sensitively as any writer could hope for. Many of his poems are celebrations of life, or to be more specific living fully in the moment and he captures that magical feeling on paper. Jonathan served as the technical reviewer for my book, The Complete Idiots. When Louise and I talked about why Ginsberg was so famous but someone as easily as talented as Allen wasn't she replied laconically but pithily, "no room for two bearded Jewish poets in New York City" - perhaps that is how Ira himself saw it.
We had proofread the designed manuscript over 6 times with at least 3. Ira was an extremely talented poet but sadly a bit of a rumour in his own time. While working in an archive, she recognized that the partial manuscript of a Jewish holiday prayer book that she was examining was the other half of a prayer. Paul shares the book that changed something profound within him, his forecast for.
She told me such a wealth of information on Ira, Angus Maclise, even some tidbits on Brion Gysin and Burroughs and Corso, whom she had all met at some point in her life. She was a good friend of Ira's and we sat down and talked for about 2-3 hours straight about this amazing man. While I was reading On Feet of Gold, I was very fortunate to be able to meet Louis Landes Levi, a great poet, Hindi translator and sarangi musician who is currently travelling around Japan.
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