Date: 06/04/2024
Location: London, United Kingdom
Attendees: Ian McFadyen (interviewee), Ana Collins (interviewer).
Ana: You knew Ira’s work before you met him.
Ian: I’d found a copy of Gnaoua, the magazine he’d edited and published in 1964, so I knew his connection with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin and other key figures in the counterculture. And I’d seen a number of his poems and photographs in the underground press and little magazines, including his poem ‘Ballad of the Gone MacLise’ which was in International Times, I think. That poem really struck me, a beautiful elegy for Ira’s close friend, the poet and musician Angus MacLise. And I’d seen a picture of Ira smoking a joint, and I knew about The Hashish Cookbook, so before I met Ira I knew that he was part of that whole Beat-Hippy nexus, taking in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Tangier, New York, San Francisco, Nepal.
AC: What were your impressions of Ira when you first met him?
IM: Well, right from the start I realised that he was a great talker, he was telling me everything he’d been doing in London while spiralling out into all these fabulous stories and talking about the books he was reading and the people he just had to see…He was a fearless talker without the usual inhibitions or conventional restraints.
AC: He was hyper-communicative.
IM: Absolutely. I also sensed his great warmth and I was struck by his eyes, those black irises like Miles Davis or Picasso. He had a very profound gaze which some could find fearsome or disconcerting, but I always thought there was something sorrowful and melancholy in that look. At the same time he could be very funny, and he was outward-going, always looking for the next encounter, the next meeting, like, what’s happening, we should be where the action is.
AC: Almost like a saturnine quality, that he recognised that he didn’t want to waste time.
IM: Long before the Internet, Ira knew the importance of making connections and keeping in touch, getting the word around. It was part of the counterculture, literally “making the scene,” making things happen and keeping connected by word of mouth. Ira’s talk, like his writing, was filled with encounters and you could compare it to Frank O’Hara’s diary poems, and Ted Berrigan’s, you know, “saw Gregory Corso, went to Gem Spa, bought a comic book,” and that’s very New York, I think, explaining who you’ve just met, what you had for lunch, everything that brought you to this moment in time.
AC: A form of free association.
IM: It was a way of tracking his own consciousness. We’re continually telling ourselves stories as we attempt to make sense of our lives. As we move through time, we try to create narratives from the flux of consciousness, including projecting future scenarios. Ira was mapping the psyche in just this way, but unlike most people he voiced his circulating narratives out loud, like Sheherazade who deferred her own death by spinning fabulous, fascinating tales. It was a form of poetic psychogeography.
AC: I feel this geographical quality in much of Ira’s work which is cohesive with the transient Beat ethos, with the influence of the landscapes through which he travelled, with his mind and poetic practice.
IM: Yes, negotiating and charting his life through different countries and cities, his travels through space and time, and through a lifetime of reading. His memories and his experiences in the present interweave as he discovers the significance of who he is and where he is at the time of writing, in the moment of inspiration. Which is why I think his poems often end with a one-liner, turning and stopping on a dime, mythic flights brought down to earth and an illuminating realisation. And it’s very Bronx, I think, like, “…behind every image, / behind every word there is something / I am trying to tell you…”
AC: “. . . something that really happened.”
IM: Yes, that’s it, exactly – something which really happened, something of great value which cannot be discounted or questioned. And it reminds me of the line by W.H. Auden which R.D. Laing adopted and which Ira knew well – “If I could tell you, I’d let you know.”
AC: There’s an urgency in Ira’s line.
IM: He’s addressing himself as well as the reader, he’s reminding himself that “it is not imagination but experience which makes poetry” – validating poetry as a lived vocation, poetry as an absolute necessity of his being in the world.
AC: How do you think having been brought up with deaf parents affected Ira’s relationship with language and his distinctive communication style? Did he ever describe any frustrations related to not being heard as a child, and how that may have impacted on his finding a voice as a poet?
IM: Well, he was not heard, but he communicated through sign language. Even late in his life, talking, or reading a poem in performance, Ira would sometimes sign with his hands, and this was an unconscious reflex, literally signifying on another, extra-linguistic level and signing his own words. Ira only got a record-player when he left home at sixteen and went to Cornell University because he was passionate about music, particularly jazz, but it was too upsetting to consider listening to music which his parents couldn’t hear.
AC: It would be excluding them.
IM: Yes, and he loved them, and he couldn’t do that. But, in other ways, his parents’ deafness was foundational for Ira’s desire to communicate, and his sense of poetry as a mission which he had to honour. At a very young age he was listening to the world around him and reporting back to his parents through sign language, transposing the spoken word and the acoustic realm into physical gesture, hearing transformed into a kind of fleeting writing in space. He communicated what people were saying and this would remain with him, and so, in his talk and in his poetry, he would often quote things he’d overheard and which he felt he had to pass on. It’s important to say that Ira did not treat deafness as an affliction, as ‘suffering in silence.’ He understood very well that those who are differently-abled do not need or want anyone’s pity. Ira would become an indefatigable talker, but his childhood also made him a great listener, and an observer and a reporter, and these abilities extended from the role of translator which he played in his parents’ lives. Ira would continue to listen and to be attentive, communicating what others couldn’t hear or hadn’t picked up on, through his speech and his poetry.
AC: As an interpreter.
IM: Yes, as an interpreter and a translator through language and through gesture. And this would become instrumental in his photography. His portraits show the physical, effervescent body in performance, stylised movements and hand gestures, the revealing expressive pose beyond language.
AC: Another form of literacy, in fact.
IM: Absolutely. He understood that the human face and body express feelings beyond words, physically and psychically incarnated. Ira wrote, “As the son of deaf-mutes, I cry out, demanding the right in the name of tongues quelled by history. Yet I would learn to be silent as if it were my prerogative, silent as the song of a man who cannot speak, songless as a man who cannot hear.” It’s an extraordinary, revealing statement, Ira aspiring to become his own silent, deaf parents. And yet Ira would never become songless, and he would continue to talk the world into existence, validating it. As it says in the Zohar: “Words do not fall into the Void.” And Ira would never stop talking.
AN: A torrent of words.
IM: Though, as a young man, he was quiet, he was shy, lacking in confidence, and very nervous, as Paul Bowles and others noted. He felt intimidated by some of the artists and writers he met in the 1950’s and early 1960’s and he knew he was a poet for a long time before he felt able to try and get his own work into print.
AN: Yes, even in Tangier, he promoted and published other writers before himself.
IM: When he edited Gnaoua he thought it axiomatic, as did his friend Irving Rosenthal, that an editor should never include his or her own work within a magazine or book, an ethical scruple that is often ignored today. He waited, he bided his time, and I think this was because he needed the recognition and support of other people, the writers he admired, who he showed his poems to, before he published. There were those who saw Ira as an egomaniac, a hustler, but they got it totally wrong. If ever there was a person who needed other people, who connected with others, maintaining a world-wide correspondence with those he felt to be kindred spirits and filling telephone answer-machine tapes, it was Ira. He recognised others, and hoped that they would recognise him.
AN: Yeah, he was highly collaborative.
IM: The counterculture itself was necesarily collaborative and communal. But, if relationships went awry, with collaborators as well as lovers, Ira’s sense of loss and grievance was immeasurable and he couldn’t help but show it. Losing a valued creative friendship wounded him deeply while the pain of mortal loss would become a major theme running through his poetry. “Can poetry bring it back?” he would ask, both of lost belongings and the precious people lost to him. . . He believed in poetry as restoration through remembrance and homage, but sometimes he doubted, he’d be overcome, he’d mourn the fading of youthful dreams, the loss of something within himself which he prematurely mourned. He needed to reconnect with the past, to preserve at all costs the magical feeling he’d had in the 1960’s and 1970’s. He told me that there was no point in living without a sense of brotherhood, of connection and belonging, but his celebrations of the past moved ineluctably from exuberance into lamentation, and his poems and photographs began to seem increasingly archival, a memorial to all the great writers, artists, musicians, and performers he’d known, many of whom were gone or would soon be leaving.
AN: He was no longer optimistic for anything.
IM: Towards the end, the Hudson was a flotilla of junk, the park a meth morgue, and everywhere he saw degradation and detritus, entropic fall-out. But at the same time, he could still somehow rise above it all, like, don’t be scared to be ridiculous and play the shamanic clown for real, dance with the nib of the pen, bring back the joy, defy all the stacked odds.
AC: The delightful absurdity of human experience.
IM: Before despondency set in again. Like in the poem he wrote with Louise Landes Levi, ‘January the 14th, 2009, NYC’ – “A plane crashed in the Hudson River today. / It landed in one piece, but I am in pieces. . . And where is the diamond I once held in my hand?”
AC: Yes, that sense of loss is very clearly expressed there. Ira was a prolific multidisciplinary artist. I came across a quote from him: “I have to search inside myself for something. I have to be a real pearl-diver to start working with a pen. I mean, it’s like pearl diving, photography is like throwing a net in the sea full of fish in a way. I mean, there’s a million images everywhere, and it’s just a question of click, click.” How do you perceive his approach to poetry and photography? Was it complementary?
IM: Apart from his Mylar pictures which are now seen as brilliant exemplars of 1960’s psychedelia, Ira’s portrait photography didn’t fit at all into what was happening in photography from the early 1970s onward. He liked the stylised, posed photographs of Philippe Halsman and Cecil Beaton and the surrealist set-ups of Angus McBean, the fun of Halsman’s famous sitters jumping in the air and Beaton’s glamorous, immaculate mirror creations. As a result, he risked being seen as frivolous, superficial, a kind of fashion photographer manqué. Photographing people in unguarded moments, taking the image while the sitter was seemingly unaware, or equating ‘truth’ with a code of objectivity, a documentary distance conferring significance at a remove, well, Ira’s work totally challenged all of that, his sitters knowingly posing and performing for his camera, dressing up and acting out personas and fooling around. But what comes through from this staging is profoundly revealing – the subjects forget themselves, they’re caught up in the performance and project alternate, deeper, archetypal versions of themselves. Actually, the word ‘staging’ gives the wrong idea, because the process, as in all Ira’s creations, was always one of divination. He never knew in advance what he would find, and that was the point – discovery, unexpected delight, the revealing of marvels. The sitters take their place in Ira’s Theatre of Revelation, acting out other possible lives.
AC: Yes, the Kabuki, for example. It’s like, the mask we choose to wear, the mask we choose to show to the world, is fascinating and revealing in itself. As Ira said in 1999, “I make my photographs in the tradition of the alchemist, and rely on the forms and rituals connected with the arts of divination and scrying (crystal gazing). Searching in a world of of reflections, I invoke the Spirits, both celestial and demonic.”
IM: That’s really important. Ira invoked “both celestial and demonic” reflections because cruelty and killing were omnipresent, irrefutable. He had many books in his library on Demonology, Black Magic, and the pathology of Evil, and this fascination combined the desire to understand with a relentless self-torment, confronting atrocities from serial killers to death camps, and never forgetting the suffering of the victims. So, he conjured the malevolent, gloating grimace, freezing the moron’s threatening mask, the theatrical projection of sadistic relish. He tracked and captured warped, recrudescent images of the inhuman as they materialised in Mylar reflections. But it was those celestial reflections which Ira truly loved, the divine liquid transports of floating female figures, underwater angels with streaming hair. He encouraged his sitters to adopt different masks, alternate personas, not the everyday social disguise of gendered identity and professional status. He wanted to uplift and enoble sitters, to allow them to discover and re-create themselves, bringing forth the true complexity of their natures and desires in unexpected guise. Ira played with appearances in order to abolish the fixity of identity, and paradoxically, he found that artifice and masquerade could reveal hidden truths while making aesthetically beautiful images.
AC: Yes, he had a very refined aesthetic sense, in fact.
IM: He was the beneficiary of a form of synaesthesia. As well as connecting certain letters with colours, he experienced associative correspondences between the senses, something which drugs like cannabis and opium highlighted and deepened. I think this explains his desire to publish the holographic manuscripts of his poems, showing the graphic traces made by hand and ink, because he was extraordinarily tactile, and physically, sensorially attached to his creations – writing was achieved through touch, and touch was not separate from vision and hearing for someone who was taught to spell on his fingers and use sign language at a very young age by his mother. The term he used for this signing was “sky speech,” communication drawn from the aether, homaging the Theosophists’ concept of the Akashic Records. The physical act of writing in ink was crucial to the creation of his poetry, and he loved his poems to be reproduced in that form.
AN: Yes, like From the Divan of Petra Vogt, for example.
IM: I have these photographs which show Ira writing the Divan, and you can see his concentration and immersion as he writes, the poet as the Scribe of the Tribe, the poem as loops and strokes of ink on handmade paper. And likewise, his air-mail letters, his ‘Ira Mail,’ the envelopes and pages covered in coloured ink stamps from Nepal and NY dime stores with messages in coloured crayons, and his collages transposing flower petals, trick cyclists, and movie stars. . . Everything was imbued with his aesthetics of personal touch and play. It was Homo Faber, Man the Maker, and Homo Ludens, Man the Player – mind and hand together, and the pleasures of discovery combining physical and mental creation.
AM: Ira loved to perform his poetry. He said, “For me the biggest pleasure is reading poems out loud. I started doing that with the poems of Dylan Thomas, before I had my own poems to read.” I know this whole idea of giving poetry readings is associated with something in our own time, connected to the Beat movement. How would you describe Ira’s unique approach to poetry readings?
IM: He was absolutely a wonderful reader, and often mesmerizing. It was the poet physically giving voice, and reporting back what he’d seen, heard and thought to the listeners, those who wanted to hear. He would read the poems he’d written in Tangier, Kathmandu and Amsterdam with their kaleidoscopic imagery, and the exuberance and the joie de vivre would shine through, and then he’d go into deep ecological laments, elegies to dead poets…What was most revealing was how often he’d give a five- or ten-minute build-up about the circumstances under which a poem had been written, the place and time, and what was happening and how he was feeling, and how all this was bound up with the poem’s creation, and then he’d start reading the poem but would stop after a few lines, unable to go on because he just couldn’t get into it.
AC: He’s not feeling it.
IM: Right, he’s not feeling it, and it’s like, if the actor can’t inhabit the part, then he can’t communicate the meaning of the words, he can’t transcend the written text and convey its essence through speech, because expression goes way deeper than simulation – and the audience knows the difference. So, a poetry reading for Ira was an occasion to reconnect with the original impulse, and each poem was a conduit to the time and place of its own creation. It wasn’t recitation, it was channeling the source, it was invocation. The poems he wrote in his notebooks were transcriptions of words heard in his mind, inner speech. To read his poems in performance was to restore and homage the inspired dictation of the Voice Inside. And this actually reverses his childhood process of turning sound into signing because, when he gave a reading, Ira returned the written text to its oracular origins. Writers need their readers, and Ira needed his listeners. And we can listen to him now, we have some great recordings of Ira reading, there’s The Majoon Traveler with the music of Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman, and great cassettes from Counter Culture Chronicles and the live performance CD’s recorded and produced by Ira Landgarten, from the Gershwin Hotel and elsewhere. Ira’s readings were communal events, and he enjoyed engaging with audiences, and he was very good with repartee, very sharp and amusing.
AC: Yes, establishing a rapport.
IM: He was a showman, he wanted to perform well, and he would rise to the occasion and really turn it on. This is something I wrote about Ira, one time when he was about to give a reading: “He’s sitting in a pool of late afternoon sunlight, surrounded by notebooks and scraps of paper and the box full of coloured pencils and ink stamps, his true treasures, the touchstones of his art. There’s the hum of London traffic through the open window, and another flake of kif is burned on the point of a pin with a turquoise head. His psychedelic fright wig, his shirt of gold Ankhs, are laid out on the bed, ready for this evening’s performance. He hangs his head, he seems suddenly dejected, but he rallies, he raises his head into the light, and tells me about the great turning prayer wheels in Kathmandu and the flying flags and the candles burning in the snow. It was a long time ago, but he can remember it so clearly, and everything goes so fast, and it lasts forever – the candles on doorsteps and roof ledges…it was beautiful, it was veneration, and every stone, carved or uncarved, had its own sacred history – and Angus and Petra were there too, and it was all a dream, and every single part of it was true…A sudden knock on the door breaks the reverie. It’s time for this evening’s performance. The show must go on. . . But the truth is that poetry is a Memory Theatre and it never stops.”
AC: Ira was close friends with Julian Beck of The Living Theatre and was involved with the production of the film Paradise Now, which was created during a time of significant cultural and political upheaval. How do you think this relationship influenced Ira’s artistic views and practices in terms of performance?
IM: Ira esteemed Julian Beck and Judith Malina and he adored The Living Theatre – he saw it as a breakthrough, incarnating the values of the counterculture, an erotic politics, revealing human desire and challenging oppression and censorship. It was explosive, it was theatre as realizations of the Collective Unconscious, the uncovering of archetypes, tearing apart the social fabric. Ira felt it was the great revolutionary art of his time, it was Crazy Wisdom in accord with his own Universal Mutant Repertory Company and his Mylar film, The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, and also with the tenets of the Beats – to act out for real “the unspeakable visions of the individual” within a liberated, communal space. It was the validation of the human body and it was psychic revelation – the breaking down of barriers, including those between stage and audience.
AN: The fourth wall.
IM: A radical way of healing division and separation. And a way of overthrowing and transcending the ideologies programmed into accepted discourses. And there were people in The Living Theatre who were deaf, who were differently abled, or challenged in different ways, and this inclusion of the marginalised and the perceived ‘alien’ was itself a social- political act, confronting prejudice.
AC: The anarchistic performance activism of The Living Theatre challenged the restraints and hypocrisy of society and condemned the Vietnam War. In the time that you knew him, was Ira committed to or engaged with, forms of political activism?
IM: Ira did not identify himself as a ‘Beat,’ despite his admiration for Beat writers. He would go along with the Devil’s helper in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, he would refuse to belong to any organisation. At the same time, he was clearly identifiable as a member of the anarchic counterculture, and the counterculture was inherently political, an inseparable part of what would become known as The Movement, a political revolution embracing sexual freedom, women’s liberation, gay rights, anti-Vietnam protests, anti-capitalism, ecology, Black Power . . . I would say that Ira lived a countercultural life, and his poetry and art were inescapably bound up with the political and social revolts of the 1960’s and 1970’s and beyond. It is always there in his work, a persistent, grounded refutation of power and autocracy and orthodoxy, and sometimes this takes the form of a very direct political address and visceral, poignant protest, as in his long poem, “The Time of the Werewolf,” written in October 1993: “Again man’s brutality to man, ethnic cleansing, / the Rape of Bosnia, and the children, always the children. . .” The poem begins, “Remember Jugoslavia” and ends with a call to arms – “Insurrectionaries Arise!”
AC: Yes, it’s a highly politically-charged text, indeed. “The Stauffenberg Cycle” was an important poem by Ira which perhaps deserved more attention. Could you describe your understanding of this poem and the context in which it was written?
IM: “The Stauffenberg Cycle” is a long, disturbing poem, written in 1977 in Germany and dedicated to Julian Beck of The Living Theatre. It was written in the December immediately following the crisis known as the “German Autumn.” The poem was published in book form, in English and Dutch, in 1981, translated by the poet Simon Vinkenoog, Ira’s close friend and a key figure in the Amsterdam counterculture. It deals with the Baader-Meinhof group and the Nazi past, and it’s an uncomfortable reminder of how Baader-Meinhof was approved of, and even venerated, within the counterculture, and how confused and contradictory countercultural politics could be, Ira writing, “I was moved / enough by the face of Friederike Krabbe / to make a crooked star shine above her head / on the WANTED poster….” Krabbe was one of the Red Army Faction members who kidnapped Hanns Martin Schleyer and murdered him. In 1979, Eddie Woods, an important writer and publisher in the Amsterdam counterculture, published “At Fascist Hands: In Memory of Andreas Baader,” a poem which refers to the terrorists as “martyrs,” and deems their graves to be “hallowed,” while Baader, we are told, was “murdered,” and the poem ends with a call for “anarchy now, the heartfelt sentiments becoming a war cry, very like Ira’s ending to “The Stauffenberg Cycle”: “Insurrectionaries Arise!” Ira’s poem is helplessly caught up in the kind of eulogising of terrorists that was current in the underground at that time.
AC: They were glorified.
IM: Photos of Germany’s “Most Wanted” laughing and smoking in cafés in their black leather jackets and coats, like stills from a 1960’s Godard movie. . . It was Rock and Roll glamour, radical gangster chic. I was in my twenties, and I was seduced by it too, for a short while. I think what happened was that Ira flew into Germany en route from Kathmandu and it was a moment of historic hysteria, and Ira was jet-lagged and in total culture shock-he felt himself plunged into this paranoid, violent, alien mindset, and the parallels with Nazi Germany seemed irrefutable – “the terror you left to your children.” Ira’s poem can be read as an apologia, justifying Baader-Meinhof’s actions as retribution for the abolition of Nazi history by a new form of the fascist captalist state. But it’s more complicated, because of Ira’s Jewish background, so The Merchant of Venice is on TV, a German Christmas Special.
AC: Mmhmm, Shylock.
IM: And another pound of flesh. And Ira hallucinates, seeing Hermann Göring as he passes through customs, and Wagner’s Valkyrie are riding again, and “I tell you Hitler is alive and feeding fish in the Ganga!”
AC: That’s a classic Ira Cohen final line.
IM: The poem weaves complex strands of history and myth and contemporary reportage while posing a provocative equation between Andreas Baader and Claus von Stauffenberg, who tried to blow up Hitler in 1944 and was executed, though Ira was in error because von Stauffenberg was lucky – he was shot, he wasn’t hung up on a butcher’s hook in an abattoir and filmed, dying for Hitler’s pleasure like his co-conspirators. Ira was always ethically close to the Amsterdam Provos and their crazy, madcap, crackerjack interventions, their Fool-for-a-Day philosophy, he would not have been in sympathy with their Marxist counterparts in Germany like the Berlin Commune, also known as the Horror Commune. The Amsterdam Provos practised what Hans Plomp called a “surrealist strategy of non-violent confusion” and he noted in his memoir of the 1970’s that, years before the Baader-Meinhof terror, certain members of the German counterculture wore a uniform of “black jeans, black shirts, black boots, black sunglasses” and travelled in old black Daimlers and Mercedes “which gave them that Chicago touch. Then came the needles. And the sex rackets…” Ira liked the Krautrock bands – Amon Düül, Neu!, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh – but there was this other part of the German counterculture that moved from damage to property and public provocations into bombs, bank robbery, kidnapping, and killing. Liberation from state oppression became sanctioned ‘psycho terror.’ If you view the state as an Infernal Machine, then you can justify absolutely anything, and act accordingly, though in the process you forfeit your own humanity. As Lennon sings, “But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out?” “The Stauffenberg Cycle” struggles to make sense of extremism, and it’s inchoate, but Ira was writing in present time, directly from the maelstrom, and for the first time he was writing as a poet who was Jewish by birth, in a Germany where the evils of Nazi history and the actions of Baader-Meinhof were now inextricably conjoined, though I don’t think he was aware at that time of how anti-Semitic particular members of the Baader-Meinhof were. Despite his Jewish heritage, Ira found himself sympathising with Baader-Meinhof whilst condemning the Nazis, their mirror image, and yet this seemingly impossible position was nevertheless understandable, and perhaps even inevitable, during that period of violence and discord. The poem makes Ira’s other engaged political poems seem rather simplistic in comparison – they’re humanistic and heartfelt, but essentially rhetorical, responses. But how are we ever to react significantly to fascism and mass murder, how to respond to what’s happening right now in Gaza and Ukraine and Syria and China?
AC: Or a myriad of other atrocities that are less reported.
IM: Ira experienced and witnessed suffering and death, he knew the burning ghats, and he read about the burning ghettos, and that would never leave him. When he visited the Golden Temple of Amritsar, he looked across the nectar-giving pool and saw the puffs of smoke and heard the gunfire – war was raging around the sacred site – and then in Ethiopia, during that awful famine, he saw the suffering and dying people, and he photographed the people, and he showed their beauty and their pride – but then some guy, a writer who’d never encountered pain and death and starvation in his entire life, claimed that that proved Ira’s indifference and heartlessness. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Ira was bearing witness, he was confronting the disaster, and, at the same time, revealing the perseverance of humanity, like the boy he gave a sweet to, and the boy sucked it and then passed it on to another boy, who sucked it and then passed it on in turn.
AC: He was aware of the tragedy of humanity.
IM: How can we be human and not be utterly distraught and pulverised every day, every waking hour, and in our dreams?
AC: How can we bear it?
IM: One day, preparing an exhibition of his photographs, Ira went through a number of images and said, “I can’t do it like this, all of these pictures are about death.” And among them were these photographs Ira gave me which you can see here, the funeral pyre of a young man who’d died of an overdose in Nepal, and Angus MacLise’s funeral pyre – with Hetty MacLise, eyes closed, her hands raised to her head in a gesture of heavenly direction. And there was an old Naga guy licking a skull “with his long, living tongue,” as I described it, and photos from Ethiopia, and a pile of water buffalo skulls in Kathmandu, and more. . . It was too much, Ira said. It was absolutely not a vicarious death trip, but it was unrelenting, the omnipresence of our mortality made visible.
AC: Yes, I must say I understand that, because I have also spent time in Africa, in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia, for example, working with humanitarian initiatives. And yes, it can be too much. It can be overwhelming, you know. I can relate to that. I remember leaving Bangladesh, leaving the Rohingya refugee camp during the pandemic and flying back to nice, safe little New Zealand, because I could, and feeling absolutely torn up inside, like a rat leaving a sinking ship, that sense of survivor guilt. And, at that time, we didn’t know what the pandemic would bring and what havoc it would wreak in a refugee camp of a million people. I felt like such a contemptible person, flying back because I could, you know?
IM: But you were torn up inside about leaving, you felt it deeply, and Ira felt likewise. He left Ethiopia with rolls of film, and he knew that images can make a difference, they can raise awareness as well as charitable donations, but he was haunted nevertheless. He’d flown in, he’d flown out, what could he do? What else might he have done?
AC: Many people encouraged me to write about it, and I tried to, but ultimately I found it very difficult to write about that feeling.
IM: Ira couldn’t know what effect his poems and photographs would have. In his work he recorded, he condemned, and he praised, but he also despaired. He venerated Vladimir Nabokov, his teacher at Cornell, a writer who scorned and skewered tyrants and torturers and philistines while celebrating courage, pride and kindness.
AC: He expresses it so exquisitely, in fact.
IM: Ira was a true Nabokovian, but he knew that pain and cruelty are inseparable from the beauty of life, that life, as they say in Greece, is both Ringdoves and Snakes – you can’t have one without the other.
AC: The duality, light and shadow, the yin yang of human experience.
IM: Ira couldn’t look away and ignore suffering, but he still aspired to the joyful, he wanted things to be beautiful, to lose himself in the wondrous, to be enraptured, to experience bliss. And his free-floating consciousness, his psychedelic Majoun consciousness, gave him access to transcendent states as well as inspiring his indefatigable raps, his spiralling Scheherazade stories-within-stories, his insatiable curiosity and sense of fun. Life was miraculous, not a prison sentence, but Ira knew the darkness – it went down deep, beyond melancholy. At the same time, Ira was about as far from being an existentialist as it’s possible to be.
AC: You greatly admire Ira’s 1966 film, The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, which he created with an ensemble he called The Universal Mutant Repertory Company, performers gathered from New York’s downtown arts scene, including filmmakers Sheldon and Diane Rochlin, Tony Conrad and Angus MacLise, who were members of The Theater of Eternal Music. Julian Beck would later describe Ira’s film as a combination of kabuki theatre and Doctor Strange, the Marvel Comics character, implying that Ira was at once exotically arcane and deeply Western and Pop.
Could you discuss The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda in terms of Ira’s aesthetic, as it relates to other underground filmmakers of the time, like Jack Smith?
IM: Jack Smith was a close friend of Ira’s, in and he helped Smith out on his film sets and appeared in Smith’s film Reefers of Technicolor Island. There was a shared aesthetic of outrageousness, provocation, fun, and sensual beauty, and they both enjoyed kitsch and camp and improvisation, and Ira adored Smith’s film Flaming Creatures. And there were a number of other alternative filmmakers whose work Ira appreciated, like Jordan Belson and Kenneth Anger, among others, which I’ve written about in the book, Into The Mylar Chamber, edited by Allan Graubard.
The later ‘60’s was a period of flourishing avant-garde film, with downtown theatres available for screenings, cheaper available camera equipment, and an increasingly interdisciplinary combination of music, readings, projections and theatre leading to mixed media happenings. And many of these film ventures benefited from the collaborative spirit and the self-help economy of the counterculture scene. In fact, without that communal context, many of the films would never have been made. But Ira’s film always seemed to me to be qualitatively different, even though it was quintessentially part of the renegade film ethos and the social and cultural situation of that period in New York. It’s not only the shooting of mirror reversal and distortion in sheets of Mylar which is so unique and striking. The film is a spiritual odyssey, a divine vision of Paradise Found, Lost, and Regained, and it’s also a work which surpassed enactment and incarnated a divine vision, and what is fascinating is that this only became apparent to Ira in 1999 when the film was restored and he was able to crucially re-edit it, changing the structure. Ira recognised that the film actually corresponded to the Three Worlds of Tibetan lore as transmitted to him by Angus MacLise, and he looked back at the end of the Jefferson Street scene in the later 1960’s, leaving New York for Nepal with MacLise to pursue their shamanic quest, and he saw that these events were perfectly mirrored in the film. In this sense, Ira only truly understood the film retrospectively.
AC: It was a prelude to what happened after.
IM: Yes. The film made in the Jefferson Street loft was a sublime message to himself, but it wasn’t until he had lived it out that he could look back and truly see and understand the work he’d created.
AC: It was utterly prophetic. As Ira noted in “Sensory Overload”: “I set sail dreaming of finding the magic lamp with which I would open the door of my life to come”… “When some of us, including Angus and Hetty, met a few years later in Shangri-la, I was hardly surprised since The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda had, in some way foretold our Himalayan experience.”
IM: And, recognising this, Ira transposed sections accordingly.
So, the final part of the film is now the first part, and it shows death and burial followed by resurrection, the creation of human life from clay, widespread through many cultures, as in Genesis, in which God created man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils – the Divine Breath of God. And there is a key moment in the film when Ira, stumbling, naked, covered in mud, looks directly into the camera lens, the apparatus of illusion, as if he had already entered the hallucination of film from a future time, the man-made world of technologically recorded image and perception. It’s a sequence which always makes me think of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, his 1968 film, with the apes confronting the mysterious, sleek black monolith. There were many sources for Ira’s film, including Jung’s writings on archetypes and the three sections of Dante’s Divine Comedy – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. There was also Michael Powell’s 1940 film, The Thief of Baghdad, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as F.W. Warwick’s 1939 book, Experiments in Psychics: Practical Studies in Direct Writing, Supernormal Photography, and Other Phenomena. You can see the correspondences both between Ira’s film and spirit photography and séances, and with his ideas about the inspired transmission of his poetry, guided and transcribed graphically by hand. And it was serendipity, because Ira came across my copy of Warwick’s book in my library and he had a copy in his own library. The second and longest part of the film takes us directly into the realm of filmic hallucination, the Mylar Chamber itself, which corresponds to the Middle World in Tibetan esotericism, the false paradise, a sensorium of seductive, narcissistic oblivion, a Palace of Destructive Energies which must be invaded and attacked in order for balance to be restored. Many viewers in the 1960’s and onward may have seen this sequence as essentially the simulation of a druggy hippy trip, but, beneath the seduction it’s a warning of retribution to come, and shows the fate of blind rapture and excess. The final-short-sequence of the film corresponds to the Tibetan Upper World, the level that shamans must travel through in order to heal, restore and enlighten. And here the Pagoda, the Palace of Pleasure, is torn apart, as MacLise’s music becomes frenetic and rises to a crescendo. Hands are raised to the blue sky and the silver Mylar is torn and shredded – the masque vanishes forever. Ira and Hetty MacLise would both wonder if Angus had taken a fast track to Nirvana, a “Strong Black Method,” a way of “Storming Heaven.” and the film may be read as prophetic of his dissolution. But, a single droplet of silver Mercury resists the attack – it trembles and vibrates in the blue. It’s the elixir vitae, Ira’s symbol of eternal mutability and enlightenment.
AC: And that’s interesting, given that, when they were travelling overland to India, Ira and Petra Vogt went to Rumi’s tomb in Konya, where they poured mercury over the tomb at dawn, at sunrise. And mercury’s quicksilver, so it has that slightly Marvel Comics pop element too.
IM: Yes, Ira’s symbology has that Silver Surfer pop culture aspect to it. Ira didn’t scorn so-called “low culture,” and he happily used it as a method of dealing with the metaphysical, recognising that Doctor Strange, Magneto and Green Lantern were themselves archetypal projections.
AC: In 1986, Ira attended the Hardwar Kumbha Mela Festival with Ira Landgarten, where they filmed Kings With Straw Mats – which was a very different kind of film from The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, much more a documentary, depicting a spiritual circus of high madness, and extreme masochism in the name of devotion. In your essay “Ira Cohen’s Photographs: A Living Theatre,” you observe that Ira is more passive here, recording the ritual as it plays out before him.
IM: I think Ira Landgarten’s filming of the Kumbha Mela is beautiful. But, what I wrote there is wrong, because Ira is a participant in the film – like when a couple of guys approach him, challenge him, maybe trying to take his camera, and Ira puts his dukes up, Sonny Liston style. And we see Ira smoking with Sadhus, and we have his voice, he reads his poems as we see the flowing river, Ganga. And I remember watching this with him in a studio on Wardour Street in Soho, and I found it incredibly moving. So, it’s a documentary, but it’s invested by his presence and his perceptions and his words and his own devotional homage. He loved the Kumbha Mela, it was true communal veneration, and he found it fascinating and beautiful and astonishing.
AC: I myself have been to four Kumbha Melas. So, obviously my own experience informed how I perceived the film, and I’ve also had other friends who’ve made documentaries about the Kumbha Mela, most recently with the 2001 Maha Kumbh, which I also attended.
IM: I like Ira’s film, and he did try to get the BBC to show it, but they really didn’t want to show guys picking up rocks with their cocks.
AC: That’s so funny, because my friend’s 2001 documentary was shown on the BBC and it included the same thing.
IM: Ira would have loved Kings With Straw Mats to have been shown on TV. In fact, as with most artists, there were many projects in Ira’s life – dream films and dream shows and books – which didn’t come to fruition, and so a lot of time wasted, a great deal of frustration and disappointment, though something would be gained and carried through into future works. I made a long tape with Ira in Battersea, in the ‘80’s, hours and hours of him talking in full flow, and it’s unique, I think – it captures like eight or nine hours or more of him telling all these captivating tales, spiralling into scholarly divigations and fascinating speculations…And it was funny, I’d recorded maybe four cassette tapes, and then I changed the tape and he said, “Ian, you’re not taping this, are you?” And I said, “Of course I’m taping you. I mean, that’s why the tape recorder is right next to you, that’s why I’ve been changing the tapes.” And he said, “Oh, but now it’s ruined, it’s spoiled, because now I won’t be able to just talk, I’ll be too self-conscious, I’ll just dry up….” As if! And he went right on talking, and forgot about the machine.
AC: And you haven’t had the tapes digitalised?
IM: No, though I transcribed some of it while Ira was alive. After his death, I found I couldn’t listen to the tapes any more. We were going to make them into a book, and had all kinds of ideas and dreams. I’ve got correspondence with Ira about it, and he kept saying, “Cut what I said about Leonard Cohen on Hydra, cut what I may have said about Piero Heliczer if it wasn’t too nice,” and so on, so I phoned him and said I couldn’t keep cutting like that and he said, “Well, keep what you can, but I just don’t want to be unkind about anybody.” There’s a funny bit on one of the tapes, to give you some idea, and you can hear Alison and Ira’s friend Gail – and our Siamese cats were crawling all over Ira, and Alison rolled a great multi-paper joint, a real grass bomb, and Ira immediately dubbed her “The Origami Queen of Smoke” and he said, “Oh, wow, that’s so beautiful, Alison, it’s so fabulous, we can’t possibly smoke it, that would be sacrilege, unthinkable, we’ll just have to keep it.” And Alison said –
AC: Spark it up, mate.
IM: Yes, she said, “Ira, you are going to smoke it, I know you’re going to smoke it, and you know you’re going to smoke it.” And Ira said, “I’m just saying that it would be nice to keep it.”
AC: Frame it!
IM: Save it for a rainy day. But no, of course, he lit the masterpiece and very good it was, too, as I recall. . . We were talking earlier about loss, everything from Ira losing bags in photocopy shops to the loss of that magical time in Kathmandu with Angus MacLise and Petra Vogt.
AC: Yes, I think both Ira and Petra left things behind in Kathmandu, and they intended to come back and neither of them did. I’m aware of trunks of photos, personal papers, drawings and journals that were left with friends and never recovered. In some ways Ira’s next chapter in Amsterdam was a creative renewal, his “Ins-and-Outs” collaboration with Eddie Woods, the One World Poetry Festival, and the “Bandaged Poets” project, which was in some ways an antidote to the wounding inflicted by how the sojourn in Shangri-la Kathmandu ended. Ira finally achieved with Caroline Gosselin the family life he craved, becoming a father to Lakshmi, having lost that opportunity with Petra. In “Can Writing Bring It Back”, Ira writes: “The miracle is in what one still has or in what / one has given away. . . / My father dreamed of losing something in the subway / as he was dying / And God, did he ever dream he could lose / a galaxy, could a universe be misplaced, forgotten / while standing in line at the Post Office?”
IM: Burroughs was known for flying off and just leaving everything behind. Brion Gysin packed up some of Burroughs’ papers in Tangier and put them in a trunk, and so, saved them. But abandoning things isn’t the same as losing them. You know Elizabeth Bishop’s poem – “One Art,” about “The art of losing”?
AC: Yes, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master…”
IM: Well, Ira liked Bishop’s poem, but nevertheless he was always losing things, and he never mastered Bishop’s “art of losing” which is to accept all losses – door keys, a watch, a country, a lover, life itself. Losing things caused Ira a lot of distress, and it got worse over the years, and losing bags and cameras and books seemed like compulsive rehearsals for greater losses to come. But something happened once which was quite extraordinary. It was the afternoon before he was to give a reading, and he had a notebook he was looking through, considering whether he might include something very recent, a new poem. This was in the room where he was staying, and then, suddenly, he said, “Hey, where’s my notebook?” And I said, “You must have it, you had it in your hands just a minute ago.” But he couldn’t find it, and he was going through everything in the room – his cloak, the cupboards, his bags – frustrated and baffled, saying “Where is it? Where’s it gone?” And he even opened the window and looked down at the street. Then there was a knock on the door, and someone came in and said, “Ira, I found your notebook downstairs, I thought you might need it.” Well, it was just totally unaccountable. Even Ira was lost for words, completely stunned. I couldn’t get my head around it. What had happened? I thought it was some kind of Orson Welles magic set-up, but Ira was clearly discomfited and perplexed, and I looked at the notebook and it was clearly the same one. I mean, we’d been smoking a fair bit, but this wasn’t a kif trip. And, at the reading that evening, Ira recounted what had happened, and the audience found it very amusing, but, of course, for them, this was just a story.
Later I’d think of this incident as a kind of psychic transport, as in Spiritualism, the moving of an object in a way that defies the laws of time and space – and it was necessarily inexplicable, beyond rationalization, which was why it was so unforgettable. It was uncanny, and it was a lesson: DON’T FORGET LOSS. REMEMBER RESTORATION.
AC: I mean, ultimately, we must learn to let go of everything before we leave our bodies.
IM: But Ira found it agonizing, to give up the self, to give up a lifetime of memories and desires, all those years of learning and creativity and love and the sheer beauty of the world. He couldn’t give it all up, and yet he knew he would have to, and there was no way out. Ira was tortured by this, it was like Baudelaire’s image of the bed teetering on the brink of the abyss. I’ve written about this: “In Tangier in 1986, Mohammed Mrabet said to Ira, “Once we were young, now we are old, soon we won’t exist, it is so perfect.” And the dying Vali Myers said, “Every beetle does it, every bird, everybody. You come into this world and then you go.” And Ganesh Baba appeared in spirit and said, “My dear Irawadi, it is Death who is the Lord of Life, & this you must know, so cease your craving.” While Ira himself wrote, “There is no END ever / There can never be any END / & and yet you can see it ending….” And, when Ira died, I wrote, “There are no survivors and no farewells, Sahabi.” I wished for him a different final act than the one he went through.
AC: The ending.
IM: The hospitalisations, the overdose of medication he was given – because they’d never met anyone like him before. It was misdiagnosis, the treatment he had was wrong.
AC: And it had a terribly detrimental effect on him, I understand.
IM: I remember Louise Landes Levi phoning from New York, and she put Ira on the phone and we managed to talk a bit, but it was difficult and quite sad. He wanted to talk with Alison, and I had to explain that she was out, she was acting in a Beckett play, The White and The Black, and she was playing an old bag lady, an Old Lady in the Van kind of character, and she’d blackened out her front teeth, channeling Wilfrid Brambell as the rag-and-bone man in Steptoe and Son.
AC: Oh, that’s kind of fun, absurdist, that would have given him a chuckle at least…the “Bandaged Poets” series of photographs was a significant work, which happened after Ira came to Amsterdam and met Caroline Gosselin. It was a kind of recovering from the trauma, perhaps, at the end of the Kathmandu period, with the bandaged element as healing….
IM: The poets and artists are shown in the process of being masked in bandages dipped in plaster of Paris, and casts were also made of body parts. You’re right, I’m sure, that’s almost certainly the case – it was a healing process – and also a ritual of protection and preservation. Though, if they’re life masks, taken from the living, they also suggest death masks – the living subject rehearsing for the final cast.
AC: Yes, like Tutankhamen and the Egyptians.
IM: Photography is a mortal art, and death hides in every photographic human image. So, those Bandaged Poets images are mortality doubled – photographs of living mummification. Which is maybe why Burroughs and Gysin thought it was just too risky, tempting fate. The process was very physical, with those plaster bandages covering the face; it wasn’t like the projections of different facial images onto their own faces which they’d explored with Antony Balch in the 1960’s. So, Caroline Gosselin made casts of Burroughs’ hand with the missing finger joint, and Gysin’s foot which he’d injured when riding on John Hopkins’s motorbike, and Ira’s photographs conferred on the casts of those bandaged, damaged limbs the magical status of illuminated, glowing Holy Relics.
AC: Another question. I understand that, at times, Ira felt somewhat excluded from the core Beat poetry community, specifically Allen Ginsberg – perhaps because they were similar types.
IM: The thing with Ginsberg was very fraught, and Ira had one very sad, agonizing encounter when he was quite brutally excluded from a dinner, and it was made clear that he had not been invited, and there were people there he knew well and, of course, he was very upset – as anyone would be. And as Ira was leaving, in distress, Ginsberg, smiling, and seemingly sympathetic, said, “I bet you’re feeling really bad right now.”
AC: Coming from a place of envy, or feeling threatened perhaps?
IM: Well, that kind of put-down, especially from someone like Ginsberg, known for his compassion and his tender feelings for others, does give one pause. But, then, Ira subsequently wrote a fascinating obituary poem, “Mirror Poem for Allen Ginsberg,” a work of mourning and reconciliation, though it’s also pretty barbed, and, when it appeared in the magazine, Black Book, in 1997, Ira was described as “a close friend of Allen Ginsberg for over three decades,” so I mean, go figure. The two men knew each other, but there was friction, and Ira’s poem is actually an attempt to understand their relationship – one that combined both recognition and antipathy. He sees their relationship as mirroring Borges’s fabulous story “Death and the Compass,” with Ginsberg cast as “Gryphius Ginzberg-Ginsburg who was not murdered, only fake Pierrot playing dead.” The poem posits real and imagined encounters between Ira and Allen Ginsberg over the years and across the world as they re-enact Inspector Lönnrot’s attempts to track down the murderer and criminal mastermind, Red Scharlach. What Lönnrot doesn’t realise is that he himself has always been the intended victim, and the three previous murders had been carried out in order to lure Lönnrot to the place where he would be executed by Red Sharlach. Lönnrot will die at the fourth point of the Tetragrammaton, drawn on a map, completing the name of God, JHVH. The poem pays homage to Borges’s sublime storytelling and his captivating prose, although Ira also loved his poetry. But, above all, it’s a brilliant take by Ira on his difficult friendship with Ginsberg and, as in Borges, the two men will continue their labyrinthine game of illusion and mystical interpretation beyond death, crucially swapping roles and identities, one triumphing over the other only to lose out next time, “with no more curtain calls, save one.”
AC: In “Hemp, Hemp, Hooray,” Ira mentions that he had sent copies of Gnaoua to Allen Ginsberg, who’d contributed to it while he was in India, and that Ginsberg had sent one of those on to Bob Dylan – the same copy that appears on the mantelpiece, on the cover of Dylan’s 1965 album, Bringing It All Back Home.
IM: Well, that was over thirty years before Ira wrote “Mirror Poem for Allen Ginsberg.” There were things which accrued over those intervening decades, and an irreconcilability and irascibility manifested between the two men, something which Ira tries to unravel and understand through his poem. It’s significant that Ira’s memorial to Ginsberg takes the form of a magical fable in which he and Ginsberg will remain in mutual acknowledgement but eternal contestation. And it’s an elegy which is also a detective story, with Ira as the Private Eye who examines the evidence, investigating past encounters, trying to distinguish between true and false, searching for the secret of their amity and enmity.
AC: You mentioned yesterday that you believe Ira’s talent as a prose writer has been overlooked. Why do you admire it?
IM: I love Ira’s essay “The Goblet of Dreams.” It’s about taking majoun, the history and preparation of the drug, and its extraordinary effects. It appeared in an issue of Playboy, alongside an extract from Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of his novel, Despair, so, of course, Ira was thrilled to be linked in that way with his teacher, but he worried what Nabokov might have thought, so I pointed out to him that the opening of his drug essay curiously homages the opening of Lolita, “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. . . Lo. Lee. Ta.” Ira’s essay begins: “Majoon, majoun, ma’jun.. . how soft the word. . .” Ira could write beautifully in prose, with impetus and flow and lots of vivid detail, without over-poeticizing, but he also wrote prose which is linguistically dense, a kind of assemblage, as sentences and phrases accrue from all these different sources, a mix of reportage and triggered memories, picking up on messages from a radio, café terrace conversations, a newspaper headline, a glimpse of a disappearing cat, something that somebody once said in a different city ten years ago…. The disparate elements collide and fuse and jump around and spark connections in blocks of text like the panels of a mosaic. It’s like the stream of consciousness technique in modernism, but without the literary, seamless, run-on style. In these cases his prose is highly concatenated, with each link in the chain fixed in place, without the staggered line breaks and the spaces of his poetry or his more syntactically smooth prose. Inevitably, a critic wrote in a review, “You don’t write prose like this.” Well, actually, Ira did write prose like that, and I’m grateful for it.
AC: Going back to Ginsberg, did Ira have warmer relationships with other Beat writers, such as Burroughs or Corso?
IM: Well, you can see Ira and Burroughs together in this photograph – which Ira gave me, inscribed and decorated with a bird of paradise.
AC: Oh, that’s a lovely one. And Ira’s wonderful bearskin hat.
IM: Burroughs and Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin all liked Ira and admired him, and Gysin told an interviewer not to put Ira down, because he loved him dearly. The interviewer would deny that he’d criticised Ira, but the fact remains that Gysin wanted to make clear how much Ira meant to him. Gregory Corso and Ira were friends, and they were both big fight fans, and they’d watch old boxing matches together on TV. And, of course, they had a shared, fearless, provocative manner of addressing certain situations. Ira wrote and dedicated moving poems to individual Beats and members of the Counterculture, and he took memorable, playful, and tender photographs of them. The love and veneration he felt for them is poignantly expressed. Because that was the world in which he felt he truly belonged, the Floating World of joined personal and artistic connections, criss-crossing through time and right around the world.
AC: How was Ira perceived by the New York literary and artistic communities? Did this perception change over time?
IM: Ira didn’t think in terms of categories or schools, he didn’t want to be identified as ‘Beat’ or anything else, so he came up with his own tag, professing that he was an “Electronic Multi-Media Shaman,” and, significantly, that moves him away from poetry classification into the area of inter-disciplinary performance and magical invocation. But there were contemporaries he felt close to, poets whose work he admired. He co-edited the big 2003 anthology, Shamanic Warriors Now Poets, and it’s significant that a number of Beats are included in that book – Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, Diane De Prima, Michael McClure, Gregory Corso, Paul Bowles. . . So, he felt those writers were key progenitors, while, at the same time, he included those with whom he was simpatico, writers who in turn were connected to or indebted to the Beats – Jack Hirschman, Brion Gysin, Jurgen Ploog, Simon Vinkenoog, Charles Plymell, David Meltzer, Charles Henri Ford, Kazuko Shiraishi, Angus MacLise…And then there’s Michael Rothenberg, Hans Plomp, Allan Graubard, John Brandi, Janine Pommy Vega, Ronnie Burk, Louise Landes Levi, Marty Matz. . . And Ira included me in the book, and again this was because we were on the same wavelength and he connected with what I was doing – which at the time, was essays in the form of short stories, and vice versa, blurring scholarship and fiction. I think that gives an idea of the area within which Ira felt connected, the kind of work which he related to.
AC: Neeli Cherkovski.
IM: Yes, the Beat poet and memoirist. And also Ray Bremser, and, of course, Bob Kaufman, who was Ira’s absolute favourite. He adored him and his poetry, and he was struck by the years Kaufman spent in silence, refusing to speak or publish, as a protest against the Vietnam War. Ira was included in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, published in 1999, and quite a number of the writers I’ve mentioned are featured in that book. So, I’d say that was the poetry context in which he was placed, and he was pretty fine with it, that he was one of the renegades as against the academic poets, though he also had a personal pantheon of poets he would homage, to whose work he was devoted – poets from across the centuries, from world histories and cultures beyond “Beat” and “Counterculture” – Ovid, Villon, Dante, Rumi, Attar, Hafiz, Chatterton. . . And Pound, Celan, Desnos, Mandelstam, Neruda, Borges, Ingeborg Bachmann, Mahmoud Darwish. . . They showed the power of poetry and the political dangers of poetry – like Darwish, who became the voice of the oppressed Palestinians, his poems known and recited and sung by the people during his lifetime and right now, as we speak, in Gaza. As Ira would often say, “Poetry is King,” and he was one of those who served King Poetry, and, hopefully, had his place in the Royal Household.
Burroughs would say that he was a member of the “Shakespeare Squadron” and Ira’s parents were living on Shakespeare Avenue in the Bronx when he was born, and Ira would say, only half-jokingly, that it was an omen of his destiny, his vocation as a writer. But Ira also knew, like Robert Frost, that poetry was a “self-appointed task,” and that it demanded “hard labour that comes from one’s own desire and internal pressure for perfection.” Like Pound, Ira understood poetry as the impulse to sing and dance, and Ira was a real song-and-dance man, and he knew poetry was seduction and enchantment, it gave comfort in loss and celebrated the earthy and the divine, it challenged taboos as well as leaving an oral or textual record of community and history. For Ira, poetry was life itself, and he knew it was the works of poets that would be left to speak for us.
AC: What about Rimbaud? When you speak of Ethiopia, I automatically associate Rimbaud and Harrar. Because that’s where Rimbaud lived at the end of his life – Abyssinia.
IM: Well, Ira knew Rimbaud’s poetry and letters very well – he’d read Enid Starkie’s 1930’s books on Rimbaud, including her Rimbaud In Abyssinia, when he was at Cornell in the 1950’s, but no, I can’t recall him ever talking at any length about Rimbaud.
AC: It wasn’t Ira’s jam.
IM: Inevitably, Ira would be asked about Rimbaud in interviews, and he would homage him there as one of the “tightrope walkers,” one of those who had risked everything – his sanity and his life – for poetry, and, for Ira poetry was risk – it was psychic danger and it was political with so many poets imprisoned, exiled, and executed within his own lifetime. It’s possible that Rimbaud was just too iconic, and was invoked so often, by so many poets and writers, that Les Illuminations and Une Saison En Enfer were always there for Ira but their significance went without saying….Rimbaud had become a cipher for renegade culture, his work and example were inescapable, foundational, and yet, somehow, simultaneously, screened by the mythologising. Ira did admire Aidan Andrew Dun’s Vale Royal, his mystic, mythic reconstruction of Rimbaud’s King Cross in London, and he liked Patti Smith’s homages to the “lonely marvellous boy,” her identification with the poète maudit. the enfant terrible. And Ira made a beautiful photograph of his son, Raphael Aladdin, eyes closed, reclining, a copy of Paul Schmidt’s translations of Rimbaud beside him – it’s like “dreaming of Rimbaud” and it’s Raphael himself cast as Rimbaud, Dreaming.
AC: You’ve mentioned that Ira was an enthusiastic Anglophile, and that he was fascinated with the particularity of most cultures and subcultures. As an outgoing person, did Ira ever struggle with the famous “British reserve”?
IM: That idea of reserve is bound up with old notions of the British class system, ideas of “due deference,” and “know your place and watch your mouth,” as well as the old public school and military ethos of the “stiff upper lip.” You weren’t supposed to express your feelings or speak out, and there was no blubbing allowed, and by the way, don’t ever forget to doff the cap to your betters. I do remember all that nonsense from my school days, but it was changing even then, in the 1960’s, thank God. It was awful then, and would be quite ridiculous now. It’s still promoted as a code of nationhood by right-wing idiots, but I no longer know anyone who would subscribe to it, it’s totally outmoded. Having said that, Ira certainly encountered people who were not used to his running commentaries on everything that was happening, and his free-associative raps, and there were people who found his verbosity intrusive. And there is also a certain resentment here when it comes to performers and extroverts, a desire to cut people down to size, like, “Who does he think he is?” It’s rather like the Netherlands, where there are people who say, “Normal is crazy enough for me.” Well, crazy was normal for Ira, and he liked it that way.
AC: He had several exhibitions at the October Gallery in London and gave readings there. How was his work received here?
IM: His exhibitions and readings were well attended and people loved the work, and he reconnected with old underground friends as well as increasingly drawing a younger crowd, a lot of young people who were intrigued by Burroughs and Gysin, whose work was also shown at the October Gallery. And, in 1991, Ira’s poems appeared in Ratio 3: Media Shamans, alongside Gerard Malanga and Angus MacLise. It was published by Temple Press, an extension and imprint of Psychic TV.
AC: Yes, Genesis P. Orridge.
IM: Who was an admirer of Burroughs and Gysin and, like Ira, knew them both personally. So, Ira had that currency and that level of recognition with the cognoscenti in London, because people could see the pictures and view the films and hear his poetry in situ, and, because so many of his photographs show the luminaries of the counterculture, and so many of his poems homage them, it was very much the case that the history and values of the counterculture were brought forth in his October Gallery exhibitions and readings. It was good for him, because he would stay at the October during his shows and he’d be on hand to talk with visitors, surrounded by his work, and his readings were billed as “soirées” – elegant gatherings, with a party spirit. His affection for London was bound up with his experiences at the October, and it was also the mystical London of William Blake, the London of Francis Thompson, who wrote “The Hound of Heaven” which Ira loved – and, above all, it was the life and poetry of Thomas Chatterton. Chatterton died from poison just a couple of streets away from the October Gallery in Holborn, aged 17. Dismissed as a mere forger, despite his influence on Keats, Shelley and Coleridge, his work was excluded for a long time from the canon of English Poetry. In my chapbook, Blue Iris, Black Rose, I wrote: “Ira went to see Henry Wallis’s 1856 painting, The Death of Chatterton, at the Tate Gallery, several times, and the myth of the doomed child genius exerted a powerful hold on him. But it was Chatterton’s poetry of flowers which compelled Ira to return to those verses in which human lives are “transient as the meadow flow’r, / Ripened in ages, wither’d in an hour.” Ira loved the hallucinatory sensuality of Chatterton’s “African Ecologues,” poems which he believed had been inspired by opium: “On Tiber’s banks, where scarlet jasmines bloom, / And purple aloes shed a rich perfume….” Ira recited those lines when he was in Ethiopia during the 1970’s famine, ritually connecting mythos and history, place and dream, establishing a poetic matrix.” Going back to your question about Rimbaud, I’d say that Chatterton took the place of Rimbaud in Ira’s personal, poetic cosmogony which is why he recited Chatterton in Ethiopia rather than Rimbaud. It was Francois Villon in Paris, and Chatterton in London, to whom Ira paid homage. They were both outsiders, both criminals, rascal boys and con artists, and they were both cursed, yet their poetry often bypassed the later avant-garde cognoscenti, despite Pound and Basil Bunting validating their poetry. “Villon is great,” Ira said, “Just to know that there is such a character sustained me all my life.” And it’s telling that he uses the present tense there, because Villon was alive for him through his poetry, and, though the original places the poets had inhabited had long gone – totally erased, Ira visited the key historic sites and locations to pay homage and to dream, to reconnect with their words, recovering buried history through recitation, speaking their lines aloud from memory, homage as psychogeographic projection.
AC: Perhaps the Mylar Chamber would be his best known and most highly acclaimed, most recognized, work.
IM: Yes, I’d agree, but I hope it will be recognised that the Mylar works had a key role in a creative ethos and spiritual philosophy which has become increasingly influential. Significantly, it was in the first years of the new Millennium that artists again turned to occult processes and mystic invocations, seeking to channel apparitions and messages from the spirit world, the magical “other place.” It was in response to the simulations of the new technological capitalism, the irrreality of digital communications which we haplessly embrace, even as they overwhelm us and, seemingly, exist beyond and despite us. An occult art aspires to a quite different validation of immateriality, it adopts and adapts new technologies, and parodies and deconstructs them, it reveals the spectrality at the heart of electronic systems, and attempts to create states of spiritual restoration and psychic healing, in effect transforming financial data stored in some “cloud” into Akashic Recordings, the alternative archive of human knowledge and feeling. Brion Gysin, Sigmar Polke, and other artists of the 1960’s, including Ira, were the progenitors of this return to an esotericism which is also strategically critical of a materialist, destructive ideology. One of my favourite poems by Ira is “Notes of an Alchemist,” from 1983, in which he celebrates his magical connection with Lionel Ziprin, Angus MacLise and Don Snyder, fellow artists, magicians, and adepts in the late 1960’s, esotericists transforming the world, channeling hermetic thought, and materializing their own mystic experiences through sound and vision – “We are trying to make it manifest on the plane of reality.” It’s mythic and delirious and insists upon the actual realization of the visionary, the four men’s poetry, music, and images manifesting divine self-knowledge through their multimedia transmissions: “Sufi means I-END if you consider the Hebrew, / like in Ain Soph, without END. And Soph is / wisdom in Greek. Am Keseph are the Silver People. . .”
AC: It’s epic.
IM: Yes, truly epic – Ira invoking the Kabbalah, citing Ain Soph as signifying “without end,” the Infinite Light of Divine Creation preceding Self-Knowledge. And this was connected with Angus MacLise’s fascination with the Sufi concept of Fa’na, which Ira understood as the overcoming of ego, at its most extreme a method of “self-annihilation as a stage of transformation leading to divine communion.” A third crucial concept was the Akashic, which Theosophists thought of as a universal compendium of all life events, past, present and future, the records of all thought-forms, Akasa being the Sanskrit word for “sky” or “aether.” From late 1960’s New York to Nepal in the early 1970’s, Ira and MacLise drew upon the Kabbalah, Sufism and Anthroposophy, and their esoteric reading and their creativity combined and interweaved, they understood their poetry, calligraphy, music, images and image projections as connected, as elements in an unfolding, multi-media immersive experience – a creation without end, a communal experience beyond the individual artist. The poet’s inspiration was a mystical transport and it required the fated submission to a muse, as in The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, by Robert Graves which was a major text and crucial influence on both men. If their own personal creations were still recognizably their own, they were collaboratively, psychically attuned, they were fellow contributors to the Akashic Records, their creations ideally surpassing the individual ego. They were seeking both Self-Knowledge and a Divine Communion, and they thought of themselves as “electronic multi-media shamans.” They would be channelers and receivers, creators as participants in a collective sensorium producing “a psychodynamic effect in our minds” through Tantric “healing frequencies” and “healing images,” “recording the astral fluctuations of our individual and collective imaginations.” This was not an art movement, it was occultation, the spiritual in action, watching the creation unfold and being changed by it, a psychic project profoundly bound up with Jungian notions of the Collective Unconscious. This was the true Psychedelic art, beyond ’60”s rock concert Art Nouveau posters and swirling amoeba light shows, it wasn’t the psychedelic as a mannerist graphic art style, a conventionalised aesthetics which merely signified and illustrated synaesthetic, hallucinatory, spiritual states. For Ira and MacLise, the psychedelic wasn’t depiction, it was revelation: it wasn’t fine art, it was esotericism in action, ritual sensorial celebration as the procuring and revealing of other states of consciousness, other ways of being in the world. If experiences on kif, marijuana, majoun, acid, and opium were significant, the metaphysical creative quest nevertheless transcended hallucinatory drug experiences. And there was no door fee, it was absolutely free, it was for everyone, if they wanted it.
And, as Ira wrote, “The Silver People followed everywhere we went. . . It was a journey containing our history. Contact was never a mistake. . .”
AC: Yet, they were not without casualties. There were those who ventured too far and lost their way, never to return. One tragic example is Ira’s friend, the tormented and doomed Alfred Chester, a sacrificial figure of Tanger who ultimately took his own life in Jerusalem. His entangled karmic web of suffering ultimately consumed him. Similarly, the “Dying God,” Angus MacLise, who “traded the White Goddess for junk” and “took on the karma of his generation,” someone Ira identified with deeply. In “Ballad of the Gone MacLise,” Ira wrote: “Your unsatisfied cravings fly out of the pyre…Forget all your regrets and go now with the egret, put on your robe of sky.” Jung, influenced by various spiritual traditions including Hinduism and Buddhism, explored the human psyche, and the Hindu/Buddhist concept of Samskaras which refers to mental imprints left by past experiences, shaping the subconscious patterns we carry from one life to the next. These imprints condition our desires, fears, and attachments, influencing us, contributing to the cycle of suffering and reincarnation, “Samsara.” A recurring theme in Ira and his fellow travellers’ lives is how trauma and tragedy propel them on transformational journeys, whether by physically escaping that sense of loss or by entering psychedelic realms. Examples include the majoun and cathartic trance dances of Jilala or Joujouka – acts of vanquishing demons, overcoming mental breakdowns, and self-healing through musical magic, transcendence, and self-annihilation. As Ira concludes in the editorial notes to the 1964 Journal Gnaoua, “the object is Exorcism.” Seeking renewal, burning away vestiges of false ego in a bonfire of the vanities, to be illuminated and redeemed through union with the divine, formless, nameless, and limitless. . . The Great Work.
IM: I think we all experience trauma and past conditioning to different degrees. If repressed and untreated, these damaging psychic mechanisms can propel us into excessive risk, addiction and willed or accidental “self-annihilation.” The cathartic examples you give, like the musical rituals of Jilala, can certainly help, but I think the spiritual quest for enlightenment and liberation is different from the treatment of mental and emotional distress. In the case of Jilala and Joujouka, those musical ritual experiences can achieve both “psychic hygiene,” as Brion Gysin put it, and spiritual insight and healing for a seeker of wisdom. But there are other methods of exorcism where you can conjure demons in order to vanquish them only to find that the demons have taken up permanent, gibbering residence. Some of Ira’s friends were lucky while others had catastrophic ends. MacLise took the “Fast Track” to enlightenment, and Ira and Hetty and many others mourned that he’d done so. Burning away the false ego? How do we know if it’s false or true? We need the ego. I was incredibly reckless for many years and got into some terrible situations, but there was a part of me that was always present, separate but somehow invested in my preservation, and this entity, as I thought of it, would tell me in no uncertain terms when to stop, get out of here, protect yourself.
AC: Ira’s legacy?
IM: I believe it’s the commitment to communality as a creative force which really brings together so much in Ira’s life and work. Because Ira was drawn to the communal and to ritual, from the Mylar shoots in the Jefferson Street loft to the performances of The Living Theatre, from the Kumbh Mela festival in India to the nightly street theatre of the Djemaa el-Fna in Marrakesh. For Ira, all these gatherings were part of humanity’s history, “the same as it has been for centuries, the Thousand And One Nights happened just yesterday, are still happening all around you.” And he saw himself as one of the storytellers in the crowd, one of the poets whose entrusted mission was to celebrate the spectacle and its spiritual significance, to bear witness and to preserve it through the sacred Word. In a note to his poem “Some Lines from the Hardwar Journal,” written at the Kumbh Mela in 1986, Ira wrote that Hardwar, one of the seven holy cities of India and one of the four sacred sites of the Kumbh, was “No static city, but a door through which multitudes can flow.” And he would be part of that flow, as a participant and a reporter, a creator and a recorder, going where things were happening, seeking out the marvellous and the spirit of belonging. And so he was a world traveller, and “home” was wherever he found himself en route from here to there. It was a pilgrimage in the sense that he was paying homage throughout his life to the sacred sites of artistic creativity and veneration and devotion. So he described the Buddhist monks circling the stupa on Swayambhu Hill in Kathmandu, and it was the prayer wheels and his own words which would keep “the whole planet spinning.” He was magnetically drawn to other people and to other cultures, and his legacy, I hope, will be the recognition of how his photographs and poems respect and honour difference and provide insights into ethnic communities, including the Nagas, the charas-smoking Shiva-devotees of India and Nepal, the proud Hamer people of Ethiopia, the ecstatic brotherhood of Jilala in Morocco, and the tribes of the counterculture in their worldwide settlements, however temporary – though, significantly, he recorded these communities through the portrayal of particular individuals as well as through their interactions: “People are always more important to me and a lot of my poems are often for people or come out of a certain person.” It is that deep sense of communal and individual humanity which validates Ira’s work. It’s a legacy of love and respect, wonder, playfulness, and divine restoration, all of which are sorely needed in our debased, degrading times.
AC: Yes.
IM: Ira achieved remarkable things in poetry, photography, and film. He was a visionary poet and artist, who created a wonderful body of work, but he never got the appreciation he deserved and clearly craved, though that is the lot of so many writers and artists. It was frustrating for him because everything he did was so special and he didn’t get the recognition, even though his work is so instantly recognizable, both his words and his images. Finally, I’d say that Ira’s work across all media is imbued with physicality, it’s analog creation before the domination of the digital, even though his electronic shamanism was prophetic of new technological media. Ira’s work is characterised by textual touch and a sensual relish, and he celebrates both the physical beauty and the visceral fluidity of the human body and the seductive, mercurial flux of the psyche. He was an omnivorous reader and a bibliophile, and the publishing of very-limited-edition chapbooks and mimeo poetry broadsides in the underground culture only made those works more precious to him: they were fragile, rare artifacts to be handled with care and treasured, and there’s an ethics there of preservation, of valuing the handmade, the marginal, the fleeting, creations beneath the contemporary radar but hopefully awaiting future rediscovery and recognition. Ira’s legacy? It’s good that we now have the books, Inside The Mylar Chamber and A Certain Kind of Wizard: Treasures From The Vaults of Ira Cohen, which together may find a new generation of visionary seekers. And I hope there will always be spaces where people will gather to watch projections of The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda on a screen or a big, painted wall. It’s Ira’s film, but it also belongs to all his compatriots and collaborators in the Universal Mutant Repertory Company who contributed so much, and it’s fitting that his most famous work should be one of the great communal works of the counterculture, a visionary theatrical ritual of spiritual aspiration preserved on film with multiple possible soundtracks, whether it’s MacLise’s score, or Acid Mothers Temple, Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, or Amon Düül, or Hildegard of Bingen’s A Feather on the Breath of God.
AC: Although not himself a musician, Ira was deeply inspired by the ritual of sacred trance, such as Jilala in Morocco, and by Angus MacLise’s music, and he sometimes combined poetry with music, such as his collaborations with “Sunburned Hand of the Man”.
IM: That did work a few times, though I always felt Ira preferred the poetry straight, no chaser, without backup or extra input.
Having said that, he loved jazz, he was an aficionado of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Miles, and he knew Lennie Tristano, the blind pianist and teacher, and visited him a few times, and he once ran into Miles in the subway. He was into Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Don Cherry, Albert Ayler, from Bebop to Free Jazz. And he loved to dance – it was like Duke Ellington, “It ain’t worth a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” You can see it in the footage taken in the Jefferson Street loft, Ira and Vali Myers and others dancing to Janis Joplin, The Doors, The Supremes. But I think music was always more than entertainment for him, it was never just a soundtrack, and this went back to the listening child, the one who was blessed with hearing and both experienced the joy of sound and internalised the pain of its absence. You’re right about Jilala – that really was his absolute lodestone in music and he would never forget the rapture of the Brotherhood’s ritual music – for Ira it was the ultimate, rapturous, spellbinding music of community and transcendence.
AC: You believe that Ira’s legacy will last?
IM: Well, that poem, “Notes of an Alchemist,” it’s a eulogy for a magical moment in time when everything seemed possible for Ira and his friends, and for the counterculture at large, “dreams of Aquarian splendor…” And then it all came down….The poem celebrates the element of Silver over Gold, spirit over materialism, and it makes me think again of the Mylar Chamber in The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, as it is finally shredded and blown away, the vision destroyed, leaving only a single drop of trembling Mercury…. As Ira writes at the end of his poem, ‘White Ashes’, “In death the seed of life / is held transfixed.” That silver drop is vital, it holds all potential vision in suspension, and it promises future alchemical transmutation.
AC: That was wonderful. Thank you very much.
IM: No, thank you. Actually, it looks like it’s going to pour down with rain any minute.