Dear A. Lien

Let me describe life on our planet.

Everything on our planet has a name, including our planet, which is called Earth. The names are developed out of a substance called language, which is an amalgam of sounds. Each sound has a meaning. A meaning is a significance. A significance is a meaning. I am going in circles. I don’t know how to tell you what a meaning is.

The revolutions of our planet are divided into time. Time is a form of sandwich. Each component of the sandwich is nestled between night and day, which enclose it like slices of bread. There are minutes, hours, and seconds. Seconds are tiny, like sesame seeds. Minutes are a little larger. Think of them as pickles. Hours are long and big. Think of them as pastrami. Or ham. Everything else is lettuce.

We like to put our sensations into art. Make art of what we feel. We meaning humans. The other animals are happy just to eat and sleep. But humans need art.

Some people paint. Some people write. Some people dance. Some people sing. Some people sing and dance and write and paint. And some people make shapes out of clay and stone. There are even some people who artfully fold napkins into convoluted forms that humor our hunger with their vaginal folds.

You may wonder what art is. You may not have art on your planet. Art is to life what flavor is to food. It is a vital superfluity. We don’t need it; therefore we need it. We need to need what we don’t need. Otherwise life is pointless. We struggle, we fight, we grub for food and attention, we age, we wrinkle, we die. Art makes this palatable. It is our immunity against futility.

One might begin to make art by smearing paint onto the surface of a canvas with an intention to twisting and distorting reality in order to arrive at a higher truth, keener perception, deeper insight. The organs of perception are not enough in themselves. The eyes are balls of jelly. There are nerves behind them that lead into the brain, where thoughts form. Dreams and ideals. Dissatisfactions and hypothetical arguments.

It is possible to make a great amount of wealth in painting. But you must die first. Living artists do not make as much money as dead artists.

Except for the people that dance and sing. They make tons of money. Alive. They live in mansions, appear on TV, and get angry when photographers take their picture.

TV is a system for transporting images through the air. This is done electronically. The images are sent as dots and spread in lines across a screen. The effect is riveting. Hypnotizing. Hard to take your eyes off of it, even when the images are not saying anything of interest, or making jokes about human biology, sex and defecation. Sex and defecation are of supreme interest to humans. They are a perpetual amusement.

People who sing and dance like to be seen on TV, but do not like it when photographers take their picture unexpectedly, such as throwing a telephone at a hotel concierge, or washing their hair at an ashram.

Our planet is small, but amiable. It’s round, like most planets, with two poles, five oceans, seven continents, 18,995 islands, countless rivers, countless lakes, 1,511 active volcanoes, approximately four billion mismatched socks and a greasy spoon, all of it in elliptical orbit around a single star, which we call a sun. It confuses people if you call it a star.

I live in a one-bedroom apartment. The walls have been freshly painted misty rose and papaya whip.

I have a wife named Alessandra. She decorates cakes and writes poetry.

A cake is a form of food. It is soft and crumbly and full of sugar. Sugar is a sweet crystalline carbohydrate. It radiates the mouth with happiness and joy. Unfortunately, it must be consumed in moderation, as it has a tendency to make people fat. There are a lot of fat people on planet earth.

Poetry is a food for the mind. It used to be delivered orally, but now it is mostly written on paper. It cannot be turned on like a faucet, but must be wrestled into existence. It is difficult to create, and difficult to ingest. It is an engine of words on a chassis of lips. The mind sips at its waters, and the reflections waver. Gargoyles look up from below. Knives of sound break the air into a thousand shards of trembling reality.

Here on earth we distinguish that which is false from that which is true and call it reality. The difficulty resides in separating the false from what is true. Sometimes what is true is embedded in what is false and what is false is embedded in what is true. And sometimes there is more truth in a lie than lies in a truth. Truth is slippery, being subject to human perception, which has its limits, and can be easily manipulated. Contemplative immersion can bring us closest to that which is immanent in the world, the sense of the divine, shall we say, which some people call God, an invisible, all-powerful force which they prefer to think of as inhabiting the sky. Others find this divinity in themselves, and in everything around them. By speaking, it becomes something which moves in itself. That is to say it emerges and makes itself known in strange places and on odd occasions.

This dynamic of immanence is, in a sense, an encapsulation of what art is. A universe in a drop of paint, a divination in a deviation.

I also have a cat who likes to chew on my hand. A hand is an appendage that hangs from the arm, which is similar to the branch on a tree. There are five fingers on each hand which, when splayed, resembles the rays of a star.

Write when you get a chance. I look forward to hearing from you.

Parade Sauvage

Joanna Fuhrman
Pageant
(Alice James Books, 2009)

Last Thursday Roberta and I went to attend the Seattle Shakespeare Company’s production of The Two Gentlemen Of Verona staged in the Seattle Center Theatre. As soon as we entered the Seattle Center fairgrounds and headed in the direction of the Center House, I noticed something missing: the Fun Forest. The area it had formerly occupied, a zone sandwiched between the Center House and the hideous Experience Music Project building, designed by architect Frank Gehry, which, from a distance, resembles a cross between a plane wreck and the bear house at the Woodland Park Zoo, was sadly, pitiably, eerily empty.

The Fun Forest had been a small amusement park. Nothing remotely on the scale of Ohio’s Cedar Point or Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach, the Fun Forest had something eccentric and slightly seditious about it. It was small, but had a dimension all of its own, much like the amusement park in Rumble Fish, with its louche seductions and voluptuous deliriums. The rides were nothing to write home about: a modest roller coaster called a Windstorm with 1,430 feet of track mounted 59 feet high and a maximum speed of 30 mph, a gaudy Pirate Ship that swung back and forth, a contraption called an Orbiter that consisted of articulated arms radiating from a central rotating axis, and a few other rides calculated to stir the senses and lighten you of your money. In its later years, the Fun Forest had grown woefully moribund. The bored teenagers hired to operate the rides outnumbered the customers on a ration of five to one and spent most of their time doing their nails or text-messaging friends. This was sad to see. I remembered the Fun Forest from days of the World’s Fair in 1962 when it was jammed with people and crackled with hormonal energy. If you watch It Happened At The World’s Fair closely, you will see Kurt Russell in the Fun Forest, aged 11, kick Elvis Presley in the shin, and ask him if he’s drunk.

I love amusement parks. I love them for their noise, their strange seductions, and their unabashed extravagance. They are magnificently vulgar. They are unbridled and profligate. They are radically empirical. They embody the spirit of poetry. The velocities, the chrome and splashy colors, the hilarious distortions, the chaos, the turbulence, and underneath it all, holding them together and powering them, an engineering of great ingenuity and balanced forces. Torque, tensility, angular momentum. Mass, relativity, quantum leaps. Sonnets, quatrains, free verse, sestinas, omoioteleton, canzones, spondees and sprung rhythms, are all elements and devices in the cerebral amusement park that is poetry.

Which brings me to Pageant, a recent collection of poetry by Joanna Fuhrman. Fuhrman, who lives in Brooklyn, is in the tradition of poets such as Ron Padgett, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara. That is to say, hers is a poetry full of bizarre images, excitements and enthusiasms, handsprings and conversational aplomb. Reading O’Hara, one quickly gets a sense of someone who really enjoys the city, needs the city, needs it for its diversity and culture, its dynamic idiosyncrasies, its bombast and talking and hilarity. Pageant is a good title for this work because it is full of whirlwind reflections and verbal spectacle.

“I devoured every radio/ eating the wires,” she writes in “The Summer We Were All Seventeen.” “I hooked my veins to the electrical current/ and wrote emails to Gilgamesh twenty-four hours a day.” The appetite for life is palpable. It helps explain why some people become poets. Need to be poets. We have rock ‘n roll. Thank goodness for rock ‘n roll. And Bizet’s Carmen and Mozart’s Eine kleine nachtmusik. That’s the kind of energy we humans need to burst out of ourselves, transcend the deadening purviews of the routine and mercenary and banal, and live intensely, bombastically, unreservedly. The reference to Gilgamesh is apt. It is Gilgamesh who, after all, travels through the perilous darkness of the double-peaked mountain to find the soul of his dead friend Enkidu. Passions this enormous are the stuff of poetry.

“And Yes, I Would Like Another Ghost-shaped Truffle,” is set at a proofreader’s Halloween party, and becomes a reflection on genital piercing: “A woman across the room dressed like a sexed-up pirate/ is talking about genital piercing, the stuffed parrot on her/ shoulder shaking at her every word, and I am feeling a little/ repulsed at the thought of her clitoris or any clitoris exposed/ under the red light of the highway piercing parlor, all the strangers/ in the dim waiting room turning the pages of celebrity magazines/ hearing her yell out, and yeah, I know my revulsion is not/ a very compassionate emotion -- and I remember once seeing/ the number of Americans who are into genital piercing/ and thinking that there are more people who are into genital piercing/ than read contemporary poetry or read any poetry --- “ Fuhrman’s reflections here took me a little by surprise, but they strike a chord because she is touching on something that I find strangely disturbing, young women who are not content with one or two tastefully positioned tattoos, but who tattoo their entire arm, and make of it something freakish and ugly. To continue my earlier trope of poetry-as-a-form-of-amusement-park, Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island Of The Mind, Fuhrman is exploring a level of vulgarity that has lost its more Felliniesque earthiness and gusto, lacks the more refined decadence of the French Symbolists, Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire and Joris-Karl Huysman, and has lapsed into a heavily commercialized narcissism, a kind of shopping mall paganism. It is like making a sudden leap from the poetry of Rimbaud’s “parade sauvage,” to the craven, tabloid escapades of Britney Spear’s shaved head, Paris Hilton’s infantile scribblings in jail, or garish bling bling of this week’s rap star.

I will end with “A Question.” “Is one still kosher/ if they replace/ part of your heart/ with a pig’s?” jokes Fuhrman’s mother, “about her upcoming/ aortic surgery.” I am not Jewish and in no way able to answer that question, or even if there is an answer, or requires an answer, but it sure gets you thinking. Fuhrman concludes this little poem with a wobble: a pain in her heart “like a working class/ fashionista/ fake leather/ stilettos/ wobbling up/ the subway’s/ broken/ wet/ escalator.” Life is not a residence, but a riddle. Nobody gets out alive, as they say. And as for the meaning of it all, there is probably no answer for that either. We are all in this life for a brief while, along for the amazement, along for the ride.