Illusions have been my lifelong pleasure. I’m not a magician. My first book began in Mother Foucalt’s Bookstore when I recited a wild hare poem about a ventriloquist’s dummy. Quite by accident I found a used Dover edition of Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, King of the Conjurers. Besides being the author from whom Houdini took his name, Robert-Houdin’s writing is a marvel of fabrication, creating a novel of manners no less than Jane Austen or William Thackery. Like any magicians, he was an engaging liar, but like any story teller, he revealed misdirected half-truths. Last summer I attended an exhibition, “The Spectacle of Illusion” at the Wellcome Collection in London to inspect a pair of Houdini’s handcuffs and found an exposition of techniques. Wonderful, but not what I paid my admission to experience. I didn’t desire scientific explanation; I wanted personal proximity. As a boy in Youngstown, Ohio I regularly walked past a bar on Market Street called “Nick’s Magic Bar”. It had a neon sign with a rabbit coming out of a martini glass. Passing by I didn’t know it was only a sad narrow hallway of a bar beneath two stories of sadder apartments. I imagined inside I would see magic. After considerable child scheming, I convinced my father to take me into “Nicks”. There was no magic show, no martinis, only shots of Imperial and Stroh’s on draft. Dad nursed a beer while a red-nosed Nick pulled a quarter from behind my ear. He said he used to be a magician. It was like meeting a doomed character from a comic book---the bathetic presentation altered a bad coin trick to a level I was more willing to enter. It was cheap illusion, elevated, not by perfection but distorted by interaction.

I believe any art, from fine art to hustle, exercises a primitive skill of deliberately inducing another person to consensually participate in an illusion. Paleolithic people painting in caves drew on the same instinct we feel being fooled by the cups and balls, the Sistine Chapel, King Kong breaking through the gate on Skull Island, or a mirrored wall---all false invitations to enter or ignore. But to engage an artform is also to alter it. Just as in life, art is altered by desire. The exaggerations we desire in a carnival or magic act are both ephemeral and fundamental. Studies by Gustav Khun, Stephen L. Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde, and others, reveal the neuro-physiological roots of controlled distraction that conjurers have understood for centuries. Seeing is believing but believing is a consensual illusion. My poems exist in that shared blurry space part lured, part religion, and part blasphemy.