Fan Letter

     So here it is. Please don’t call this a fan letter. Although, I guess that’s probably the best description. Lawrence Durrell wrote to Henry Miller, so writing to you seemed…okay. First off, your book is vivid, brutal, economical, touched, wild, flailing, uncompromising, renegade, true, and – correct me if I’m wrong – very much alive. At the end of Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen merges literature and bubblegum pop, infinity and the comic strip. Who else? Dean Young. But you too.
    Leonard Cohen, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Koch, Joseph Brodsky, Dean Young, and now this. And that’s just the poetry. Not that I am trying to imply any lineage for your work. Just a lineage for my inspiration. Joseph Brodsky writes like water (and as David Berman tells us, “all water is classic water,”) – like water in a glass, in a stream, in the ocean, not to mention mist and rain and evaporating steam, and ice, Brodsky definitely writes ice. But if Brodsky’s words are water, yours are a whiskey and cola with a menthol cough drop dissolved in there – it may not cure everything, but it’s an effing elixir!
    I can fall in love with a girl with nothing more than a phone call. And a book can be the same. A page! Just one page can do it! And then, obsession. Or maybe not so much obsession as doting. I dote on books. Try to read them from different directions, get them to love me back. Sometimes I read them backwards, reading a page and then reading the previous page and so on. Is this insane? How many sit-ups must I do, how many books must I read to make her love me?
    What is that line about questions in a letter? Not that I expect you to have the answers anyway. Or maybe you do. Your work certainly implies a vast knowledge of these types of things. Page 136 for example – ah but that’s solitude, isn’t it? I’m trying. I’m really trying.
    I went to Uganda and I couldn’t write a word. This was almost a year ago. I wrote so many more words about having my tooth pulled – which was bloody and visceral – then I wrote about all my time in Uganda. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t be there and write about it, as if these were two separate existences that cancelled each other out. And then, just last week, I could. I wrote about it in the past, but the past as if it was the future. Maybe it will be the future. I wrote simultaneously about what had happened and what might happen. Wrote about myself there with entirely different people and entirely different experiences. This means something, I am sure. About writing or about love, I know not. Maybe writing is about the dissolution of the perception of linear time. Or maybe that’s what love is. Or maybe love just makes us rewrite our experiences with our fantasies. Do you know? Can someone write a book so good and not know?
    I went to Berlin, I went to Amsterdam, I had a toothache. I wrote these words once: “you know how you can see the breeze in a photo? / It’s kinda like the feelings in a letter.” Do you understand what I mean? I wish I was writing to a girl.
    I used to think a poem was all you needed to make someone fall in love with you. Has it ever worked for you? I don’t think it’s ever worked for me. Although maybe a poem is not the best thing to found a relationship on anyway. What’s next? I had a horrible, horrible dream last night. But I woke up feeling so invigorated.
    I’m not going to sit here and analyze your poetry to you. What a waste of time. The combinations of words in my analysis could never begin to say a tiny bit of what the combinations of words in your poems say. But I’m trying to tell you, at the very least, that it means a lot to me, this book with your words. It was Andre Velter who reduced his biography to one single word: traveler. I like this. I read his poem Frontiers translated into English from the French by a publisher in New Delhi, India. This seems fitting. What I’m saying is that geographical expanses conflagrate my heart. But your writing does something altogether different – like positioning the epic at the meeting point of my foot and a dented soda pop can. This blows my mind.
    What else? I dunno. I guess my task is complete if I’ve communicated in any real way the meaning of your book to me, how grateful I am for you writing it. Put on some tea, turn on the teevee and call it a night. Good job.

a forgotten turn of phrase: one shot of circumstantial poetry

1. Back from Holiday hiatus.

2. "Walking along the Champs-Elysees I keep thinking of my really superb health. When I say 'health' I mean optimism, to be truthful. Incurably optimistic! Still have one foot in the nineteenth century. I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans. Carl finds it disgusting, this optimism. 'I have only to talk about a meal,' he say, 'and you're radiant!' It's a fact. The mere thought of a meal - another meal - rejuvenates me. A meal!" -Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, Grove Press: 1961. Pg. 49

3. Brahms, Violin Concerto in D Major, Opus 77

4. Jacques Prevert

5. Writer's conferences and gunfighters. Directors. Forgotten names. Industry. Robbery and sympathy. Literature for airports and technology.

6. Tell a lot of story, fast.