Baum’s work unearths and explores the incidental poetry of UFO sightings, dog-eared paperbacks, and obsolete artifacts like card catalogs.

The collaborators on riots, punk, Richter, and the new book Now that the audience is assembled.

Jarvis Cocker, of Pulp, once told me: “During my accident, I remember hanging from the window ledge and thinking, this is actually a dramatic situation, but it doesn’t seem dramatic.”

In memory of poet and contributor John Giorno we revisit this poignant conversation with Marcus Boon.

“People think that when a poem works, it’s because of the lines of a great poet—Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, Whitman, or whoever—but it’s not so. The lines, when they magically work, are the reflection of your mind. It’s almost like the poet is making a mirror that nobody can see.” John Giorno

“Decoration in this folk sense is a kind of culturalized representation of nature. It’s closest to the raw elements that reflect a very specific geographical location in historical time. The importance of it for me is that I can have these circumstances of time and place in crystalline form, and I can feel those realities, feel the history that they inevitably speak about in this natural cultural sense.”

He is the consummate media junkie, overflowing with pop references, a veritable lexicon of trivia and kitsch.