COHEN, IRA - Poems & Rants

The Gershwin Hotel, NYC, February 24, 2004. "Ira Cohen was born in 1935. In the 1960s he was in Tangier, where he edited and published GNAOUA, which featured William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Jack Smith, and Irving Rosenthal. He subsequently became "the Father of Mylar Photography," making celebrated photographs in bendable mirrors of Jimi Hendrix, Charles Ludlam, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Robert LaVigne, among others. In 1966 he brought out The Hashish Cookbook under the name of Panama Rose, and Jilala, an LP record of Moroccan trance music, and two years later he directed and starred in the award-winning film The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda. In the 1970s he went to Kathmandu and started the Starstreams Poetry Series under the Bardo Matrix imprint, publishing on rice paper the work of writers such as Gregory Corso, Charles Henri Ford, Angus MacLise, and Paul Bowles. He also published his own work including Poems from the Cosmic Crypt, Seven Marvels, and Gilded Splinters." - The Beat Museum.