Number 298
Fall 2006

Museum / Anti-museum
SHARON COLEMAN
Copyright © 2006 Poetry Flash

Perhaps you also walked quickly down Third Street to Mission in the rain, cloud cover or even sunlight filtered by downtown dust as traffic and pedestrians spun about. Then you hung a left and another left to set foot across the threshold of the California Historical Society. Sometime between December 11, 2004 and April 16, 2005 you stepped into the antechamber of the exhibit Poetry and its Arts 1954–2004, an antechamber entitled Living Room, circa 1950s by Norma Cole. Then you may too have realized another time is almost always another place—even in its familiarity. In this first of three ‘writer’s rooms’ Cole created as site-specific works, you could pick up a copy of Poetry from the 1920s, sit down on an over-stuffed sofa to read it all afternoon or punch away at an old Royal manual typewriter—or was it a Smith-Corona? Bookshelves along the walls were filled with poetry and philosophy books from the first half of that century. The only anachronistic elements were the living poets: Cole herself, joined on and off by other poets, peopled the room throughout its run and chatted with visitors. How’s that for an interactive exhibit? Even if you just made it to this antechamber and not the entire exhibit, you probably don’t need convincing that poetry and literary culture can successfully inhabit museum space; rather, you may still be fascinated by possibilities they have to simply transform it.
Exhibiting poetry does pose creative problems: how to fill empty rooms with what is usually no larger than six by eight inches and not always visually spectacular? Curator Steve Dickison went beyond the mere solution—incorporating visual arts by poets or in collaboration or association with them—to create a multi-media window through which one could both literally and metaphorically step into the City’s recent poetic history. Once leaving Cole’s Living Room, you would have passed by Cole’s second room, Archives Tableau, a typical work table from the American Poetry Archives scattered with paper scraps, photos, reel-to-reel tape, and occasionally a dried flower, maybe a half-emptied whiskey glass. Then the third room, House of Hope, a suspended sculpture of four-hundred-twenty-six quotes streaming down. Words brushed your tingling skin as you passed through. Inside, a collection of rarely or sometimes never exhibited works of art, including many collages, alongside, poems associated with them. And a recounting of their histories. Dedicating the exhibit to Jess, an artist and Robert Duncan’s partner, Dickison sought to show the “geographic confluence of radically realized individual and collective visions” in their own terms.
But what he also showed is that that field is open for not only more poetry exhibits but also a permanent museum dedicated to the poetic arts. Poetry and its Arts attracted greater attendance than usual to the museum with an average of five hundred visitors per month, not including special events, which were packed. The docents at the California Historical Society still talk about Cole’s Living Room two years later. And another current art exhibit whose nexus includes poetry, Semina Culture on the Beat artist Wallace Berman and his legendary underground journal, Semina, is attracting audiences across the country. Curated by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna for the Santa Monica Museum of Art, it has traveled to Utah and Kansas, and opens at the Berkeley Art Museum on October 18 before going to New York.
For some, this is exciting news; for others, just a recent realization. Open any dictionary, and you will find the origin of the museum is in poetry and related arts, the muse. Open any encyclopedia, and you will find the history: mouseions in Ancient Greece were temples and other sacred places consecrated to the goddesses of fine arts and sciences, which in time housed collections of offerings made by devotees. But get on any search engine, and you will find only a handful of museums dedicated to poetry, very few in the U.S. Yes, there’s Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, and yes, there are other museums displaying the artifacts of individual poets, but museums specializing in poetry’s preservation, production, geographic, cultural, and spiritual reach are just emerging from blueprints. This is why imagining what such a museum could be is like walking backwards into the future.
One such museum that has recently opened its doors, though to a much more modest space than originally envisioned, is the International Museum of Poetry sponsored by the National Poetry Association (NPA), here in San Francisco at the SomArts building south of Market. Its focus is global: international poets along with English translations, though there will be place for national and local poets. And it will emphasize both the ancient heritage of poetry as well as contemporary international work. Currently the museum has a rich archive of mixed-media poetry-films (poetic films, not filmed poetry readings) for rent and a library of some forty-eight bilingual collections of international poets and other poetry collections from sixty-one different nations. It also puts out two publications: Poetry USA and Mother Earth International Journal. Eventually, the museum plans to expand to include a more comprehensive library, a photo archive of well-known international and American poets, a private recording studio, a theater, gallery space for a permanent exhibit of William Blake’s and Kenneth Patchen’s visual poems, gallery space for rotating exhibits of contemporary artwork incorporating poetry, a café and bookstore, and a publishing house for translations and emerging poets. Like the ancient mouseion, this museum will include many of the related arts: film, dance, music, painting, theater, particularly as they draw from poetic sources (Poesis has always referred to a multimedia or multidiscipline practice). The NPA has a long history of sponsoring performances of dance with poetry, art exhibitions, and a poetry-film festival that has a thirty-year run.
Garnering support for this project has been the passion of the founder and current president of the NPA, Herman Berlandt. And while the project is often represented as his project— his energy even at eighty-four is carrying it through— in reality many people have their hands in its creation. Architect Steve Matson has designed a building, for when funding permits, and tentative layout floor plan, and he’s even put it into 3-D animation. Berlandt has amassed an impressive list of supporting signatures including Mayor Gavin Newsom, U.S Representatives Pelosi and Lee, and dozens of major poets and authors in the U.S. and elsewhere. In 2002, major poets, including Maya Angelou and then San Francisco Poet Laureate devorah major read at a fund-raising event for the museum. Unfortunately, previous newspaper articles have focused more on Berlandt’s personality—his endearing bohemian demeanor—than the project itself and its value for the community.
Funding, as always, remains the problem. While a significant donor, Victor di Suvero, President and CEO of the Tesuque Charitable Trust, made grand overtures to finance the entire project, there has been no follow-through. After years of work, Berlandt likens himself to a trapeze artist who has let go of one trapeze swing and is turning somersaults in midair, hoping the other swing will be in place for him to catch hold. With the greater community forming a safety net, perhaps we can breathe easier.
Berlandt has also been posed the question: wouldn’t a poetry museum just duplicate what is already available in different places throughout the Bay Area? Yes, there are several reading series and libraries with special collections, and the Poetry Center and Archives at S.F. State, workshops galore, multimedia performances or exhibits that include poetry, and museums with the occasional exhibit. This is a richly poetic area. But while many libraries have notable collections, they have no exhibition space, except for the Main San Francisco Public Library, and, conversely, few exhibition spaces have the funds or room for archives. What a museum would provide is a locus for permanent and rotating exhibits that draw from extensive archives, and, most of all, these exhibits would attract new audiences. Norma Cole can attest to how many people who had at most vague ideas of, say, Beat poets came to the Poetry and its Arts exhibit. It drew in many tourists and other visitors to San Francisco, as well as locals who were just somewhat curious. Moreover, the exhibit was also visited by several high school and college classes, introducing a new generation to a recent past as it survives in the vibrant present of artists and writers.
The education of a new generation has been the specific mission of another museum, the Beat Museum, which, dedicated to spreading the humanistic spirit of the Beats to the next generation, also includes a substantial amount of poetry. First started in 2003 in a corner of historic downtown Monterey, the museum, then in the form of the Beatmobile, began taking the history, message and poetry of the Beats directly to over forty schools, colleges and libraries across the country. After successful U.S tours in 2004 and 2005, they are touring the West Coast and planning an international tour in a few years. To truly engage students, Jerry Cimino, the creator of the museum, and John Cassady, son of Neal Cassady, put on a multimedia show that is part history— the story of the Beats and the politics of the 50s—and part literature lesson—how the Beats changed literary conventions. From a selection of poetry, films, music (live and recorded), readings, slide show, talks, and story telling, Cimino and Cassady spontaneously custom-make each show to fit each school’s interest and space. Cassady also tells never-before-heard stories of his father, after whom Jack Kerouac modeled the character Dean Morliarty of On the Road. He specifically wants to separate the myth Tom Wolfe later popularized of his father as an all out druggie from the reality: Cassady always knew his father as a poet and freethinker who would not let drugs near his son. This view is of course in keeping with the museum’s mission: to promote the “friendship, inclusiveness, tolerance, compassion, and courage to live with your own truth” embodied by the original gathering of Beat writers, artists, and social activists. The presentation ends with the mantra of Beat poetry: “Speak your own truth.” The shows were so well done that, according to one testimony, they even turned the heads of “jaded New Yorkers.”
In mid-July, after the string of venues Beat Museum has occupied—it was relocated from Monterey to upper Grant Avenue then to the Cannery—it opens in a long-dreamed-of home: Columbus Avenue across from City Lights Books in the heart of North Beach. They are moving into the space that recently housed a Black Oak Books (The closing of bookstores alone signals why cultivating literary culture among young people is crucial). Many people in the North Beach community, of course, are excited with having a museum dedicated to recent local history—history they either made or remember. As earlier this year when the Beat Museum was located for a three-month trial run on upper Grant, it will attract both locals and national enthusiasts. Cimino personally greets visitors from as far away as Chile as they wander through. And volunteers and donations of memorabilia continue to come calling. But again, finances will determine if this will be the Beat Museum’s permanent home, and as Cimino is putting out an appeal to the general community for funds, responses are coming.
Others in the community are more doubtful, given that their breadth of knowledge and experience of Beat and literary culture spans far beyond that of the museum’s creators. They fear that the museum will draw too much from sensationalism and point to the plan to install a forty-nine Hudson, the car that Kerouac and Cassady drove across country, near the museum entrance, as well as the current Beat Museum banner, which more than one passerby noted makes the museum resemble a Halloween store.
Cimino’s next challenge is one most curators only dream of: an over-abundance of space. The Beat Museum went from a quaint five hundred square feet in Monterey to almost one thousand on Grant Avenue and in the Cannery. Now the creators are staring at five thousand square feet. The museum’s collection consists mostly of rare editions, broadsides, letters, posters, books, Kerouac’s typewriter, ephemera, and other memorabilia. At Grant Avenue, the collection was arranged in random order as in a curio shop, but all under glass. The museum is still a work in progress, but so far the new museum’s displays are organized chronologically and thematically. They highlight major figures like Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, focus on the obscenity trial of Howl, and emphasize the political and social changes for which the Beats advocated, but do not go greatly in depth.
There will also be a recreated Beat room with armchairs, a radio, and phonograph from the 1950s, a modest theater for ongoing films, a ‘Sixties Room’ of exhibits to show the Beats’ influence on the Beatles and others, loose-leaf binders of personal testimony on how the Beats changed lives, and a gift shop. The latter comprises about one-third of the present floor space, and has for sale T-shirts, buttons, incense, sage, Buddha statuettes, lotus-shaped candles, and books, not just on and by the Beats, but also on spirituality, writing, and self-help.
The museum opens up to the community in the form of poetry readings and rotating exhibits; presently, Harold Adler’s photographs of Ginsberg are on public display. For events, there will be poetry readings, rotating exhibits, and even historic walking tours of North Beach. For a pre-opening celebration, a reading at the museum with San Francisco Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman took place in July.
The museum’s curatorial objectives are historical, to show “how this era changed the world” and personal, to encourage people “to live the core of who they are.” Unfortunately, the Beat museum presently consists of displays and exhibits, lacking the dynamic of the Beatmobile shows.
Perhaps the creators are still trying to solve the problem of exhibiting poetry and literary culture while honoring the Beat credo, “to live constantly in the present.”
Because both Ginsberg and Kerouac did save and date much of their work, Cimino believes they would have been quite open to the museum displays. But it is also necessary to consider the perspectives of other Beat poets in rethinking the role of the museum. Although David Meltzer has walked though many exhibitions of Beat culture and poetry, they still give him strange feelings. “It’s like going through pre-mortem,” attests this latter-day Beat poet and jazz musician. The ephemera trigger memories, and he feels like a walking haunted house. “What we’re left with are young photographs,” he sighs. “I guess it’s a Beat thing.” Apart from the passage of time, he finds it a displacing experience because such exhibitions tend to manufacture an iconic history, a mythopoetics, which conflicts with the deeply nuanced history that he has inside. (You’d do well to read David Meltzer’s book-length, epic poem, Beat Things, La Alameda Press, 2004.) He particularly criticizes curators and academics who have an agenda or fixed ideas that do not change no matter what the survivors say. At panel discussions or gatherings monitored by such organizers, he feels like a Civil War veteran on display. “All dissident art movements suffer the embrace of acceptance,” he concludes. Meltzer does praise Rebecca Solnit’s writing on the Beats because she approaches the subject without a fixed agenda and wants to know what was really going on. He also appreciates curators who have a genuine interest in the Beat world and poetry, who might also be poets, rather than professionals and academics.
What Meltzer really wants the younger generation to know about the Beats is that they were just as seedy and hopeful as young people today. Just as in his teaching in the Poetics department at New College of California, Meltzer is against the impulse of periodization, to rigidly classify time periods. He finds students relieved to learn that their struggles are often similar to those of poets and artists throughout time. Only the time is different; the creative impulse stays the same.
Of course, even without Meltzer’s experience in our memory banks, many museums can feel creepy: the truth of the matter is that modern museums have had a sordid history. A mania for collecting and reflecting was ignited during the Renaissance particularly due to the exploration/exploitation of Asia, Africa and the Americas. Spoils from colonized and ransacked countries were held in awe, culturally and scientifically. At the same time, masterpieces in European art set standards for high art and civilization. When the private collections were opened to the public in the nineteenth century, the museums as we know them began. They were set up as acts of philanthropy for the public interest and edification and were meant to produce national pride, aesthetic taste, and scientific wonder. They usually reduced living cultures and creatures to dioramas. It’s easy to point to one of the worst manifestation of museumification: the Nazi’s projected Museum of Extinct Races. Perhaps it is more difficult to admit that even today some American museums still hold Native American artifacts despite the surviving nation’s request for their return.
It is this history of the museum to which Bob Kaufman may very well have referred when he wrote, “My body once covered with beauty / Is now a museum of betrayal…Today I bring it back / And let you live forever.” (“All the Ships that Never Sailed”). And yet we all thrived on museums as children; even David Meltzer admits he did.
Another local poet who grew up on museums, for him New York City museums, but now sees them as running the gamut between life and death, lost and found, conqueror and conquered is Steven Kushner, better known as Kush. But as a self-styled archivist of Bay Area poetry events for over thirty years, Kush is interested in restoring ‘experience’ to museums by radically rethinking and renewing them. Of all the museum plans discussed, Kush’s are by far the most theoretically revolutionary and, therefore, of most conceptual value to anyone creating museum space. Normally, museums recede from life, from the lived experience they attempt to represent through dust-covered artifacts. But Kush imagines a museum where things come more and more alive. For this reason, Kush walks backward through the sordid history of museums, negating it by describing his ‘museum’ as foremost an Anti-Museum. This name, unfortunately, has led to misunderstandings, so Kush has also described it as an activist museum and a Poetmuseum, since it should be run by and for poets. He actually loves the word “museum” as it contains both muse and use. To reanimate the poetic past and rejuvenate living memory, Kush wants to do more than display objects; he wants to create environments that induce a more total experience and that innovate perception. Kush sees that this can be done technologically by creating environments with the videos and recordings he’s done over the years. Imagine walking into a small dark room where a life-size projection of Ginsberg reads his poetry. It would be like walking into a time machine similar to Blake’s City of Arts and Imagination where Eternity is ever present. This museum could also be described as a Poetry Exploratorium, a very hands-on museum with learning experiences; visitors could step into ‘displays’ and become active participants, perhaps writing their own spontaneous poetry on a scroll in a manual typewriter or adding words or images to a massive collective collage.
The museum’s collection would focus on local poetic culture, as its mission would be “to preserve the poetic genome of the Bay Area.” Kush feels that the energy from several different San Francisco poetic renaissance-eras is still so close to us (he experienced the last one), and the museum would help to transmit those energies to younger poets. Kush himself was deeply affected when hearing the famous 1948 KPFA recordings of Jaime De Angulo’s broadcasts of his Indian Tales. In preserving the poetic geography of the Bay Area, the museum would extend before and beyond Euro-Americans, and provide space for indigenous Californians to compose poems, songs and stories. It would be dedicated to the ethnopoetics of the area and include ecopoetics. And because so many poets do come through here, making a home for a short time, it would also have national and global dimensions. In all, Kush imagines a Benjaminian reconstruction, or rather distillation, of the Bay Area poetic communities.
(It should be noted: Kush’s ideas of a “living museum” are not at all far from a field of study called New Museology. Initiated in a Czechoslovakian university in the 1920s and continued mostly in Eastern Europe, France and Japan with some interest in the United States, this kind of museum engages the public to actively shape and participate in its creation. It also conserves objects for present-day writers and artists to use in creating new culture.)
So how would such a museum be organized? Kush has realized his theoretical ‘musings’ according to this four-way design. “Experience Space / Learning Environments / Exhibition”: The public could directly interact with the collection, for instance via video and audio projections. “Library / Solitary Study and Writing Space / Archives”: Not only a quiet place to study and work, it would be a library of the twenty-first century with audio/visual stations, and would allow us to experience poets from over a thousand years ago, creating an open-ended continuum of time. “Production Studio / Video and Audio Conservation”: Here poets could be recorded, tapes edited, and analog-recorded materials digitally remastered. “Field Documentation / Web Documentation”: Current events would be recorded and disseminated. Two other important dimensions would be outreach—taking poetry back into the world with activist objectives—and spirituality—creating, then eventually destroying and recreating poetry shrines, based on Kush’s original Cloud House.
You need not know Kush to see that these are very ambitious plans, especially without a community of organizers and without financing. But those who have known him over the years have no doubt as to the sincerity of his dedication. Those who have known his Cloud House also understand the anti-museum. Cloud House was first started in Soho in New York City as an exhibition place for poetry when Kush rented a storefront in 1972 on Thompson Street, put up a curtain, and lived in the back. Whitman photographs became the first exhibition. Later Jack Micheline gave a lecture on Poverty and Jewish Poetry, which Kush recorded. The many visitors to Cloud House include Williams Burroughs. The storefront had formerly been a mortuary where bodies were displayed before burial, so Kush felt it had spiritual energy. One project he undertook was to hang thirty poems on a hundred-foot clothesline strung along the telephone poles on Thompson Street, which later got him run out of the neighborhood by the local ‘capo.’ Kush then took to traveling, and via Guatemala he ended up in San Francisco. When Kush heard the recording of Indian Tales, De Angulo described Pomo deities that live in cloud houses, and he took this as a sign that San Francisco was the right place to stay. He rented another storefront on 16th Street in the Mission and re-created Cloud House. The rest is local history.
Even as the realization of the Poetmuseum in full seems quite messianic, Kush has nevertheless installed several traveling experience spaces recently. In summer of 2005, he and photographer Harry Redl presented “Beat Archeology,” an extensive slide show of Redl’s photographs and two hours of filmed reading by Beat poets, in a gallery in Switzerland. In October of the same year, Cloud House Poetry Archives showed taped readings by Ginsberg at Stanford University for a celebration and discussion of Ginsberg’s Howl, with Harry Redl displaying museum-size prints of the Beats. Later in the year to celebrate the Six Gallery reading, Kush set up a simultaneous screenings of Redl’s photographs, Ginsberg reading, and documentary pop footage from the 50s at New College of California. Poetmuseum also screened Flowers of the Marvelous, film footage of San Francisco poets reading at the North Beach branch of the San Francisco Public Library in May 2006. And Kush is making the blueprints for an installation at Bard College, his alma mater, in 2008. It is entitled Golden is the West: A Poetic Genome for Inner College and will include commemorative and celebratory shrines on the Bard campus and an installation entitled, “The Living Stave: A Fiery Flower.” This piece will turn a room into four projection screens like Blake’s four corners: on one screen, a poet; on two others, places the poet inhabited; on the fourth, which will be the floor, a projection of Jay DeFeo’s Rose. Imagine.
In rethinking the museum through its antithesis, the anti-museum, Kush sees that the role of any museum is to make history contemporary, to bridge the past with present experience. This aim is, of course, shared by the other museums discussed even though it has not been as thought out as extensively. Such museums would be quite an antidote for the bitter irony that the work of the Beats and other recent poets who were dedicated to bringing culture out of the museums and academies and into the streets are now hot collector’s items. This is not without some comedy. Fortunately for some curators, the “origin is the goal,” as Karl Kraus once wrote, and their poetry exhibitions reinvent to some extent the spirit of the Greek mouseion. How else to ‘exhibit’ what usually remains within the covers of a book or between tongue and lips?

Sharon Coleman, Assistant Editor of Poetry Flash, teaches poetry workshops at Berkeley City College. Her poems have appeared in a fine letterpress book, Pressed Flowers from the Holy Land, with etchings by artist Barry Ebner, and on Speechless, an online magazine, www.speechlessthemagazine.org.