“I Don’t Like Art That Feels Well-Behaved”: A Conversation with Joanna Fuhrman

Joanna Fuhrman’s new poetry book Data Mind draws unexpected, wildly surreal connections between various overwhelming, data-heavy entities we face daily, from social media and the city to your own networked mind. Fuhrman expertly captures an existence in which humans struggle to ascertain if they are, in fact, still human and, if so, how and where they can find connection.

Fuhrman effortlessly splices together the mythopoetic with the uproarious, the sacred with the profane, pomegranates and hemorrhoid cream, drawing out fresh associations by fusing disparate elements to powerful effect. She is a poetic jester, carving out a space to reveal the truths of our society. Data Mind grapples with an absurd, troubled universe living through numerous catastrophes, including climate change and late capitalism. If all of this sounds heavy, though, here is where I tell you Data Mind is also hilarious and a heap of fun to read. Below is our conversation.

In “The Internet Is Not the City,” you write: “I thought of poetry as a way to get lost like the internet, but I hadn’t yet / heard of the internet.” Throughout Data Mind, you draw intriguing links between film, the internet, and poetry as spliced, montaged media. Can you go into more detail on the correlations you are interested in exploring here?

Yes, I think since I was a teenage poet and first read John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara I have been interested in a poetry that embraces juxtaposition and that creates in the reader a feeling of being out of control, slightly lost. I love living in the city because wandering on the subway you never know what snippet of conversation you are going to overhear that might work as a sort of live-action bibliomancy.

Rather than willful action, I am interested in how the self emerges as a result of random interaction. I think this sense of juxtaposition and randomness is what appeals to me about social media. I know social media is horrible for all of the reasons we all know it’s horrible, but when I see someone confessing something really personal juxtaposed with something really banal, I find myself especially moved. This quality in social media has that element of surprise that interests me in poetry. There’s something about seeing the real diamond in a pool of fake diamonds that makes it more it beautiful. It catches me off guard because I enter the space of the internet expecting to see cynicism, but actually there’s a lot of sincerity there too. So much of what I think of as my “aesthetics” is about this feeling of jumbledness, the chaos of the moment. I tend to prefer movies and plays that make you think they are going to be one thing, but end up being something else. I don’t like art that feels well-behaved.

I love the notion of “live action bibliomancy.” Maybe this question is too out there (does that exist?), but you have so many wonderful poems about riding the subway in this book, which is of course so much about the internet, that I wondered if you’d like to discuss whether you view the subway as its own sort of networked system?

Yes, I do enjoy the feeling of being connected to others, whether it’s through the subway or social media. I have lived in NYC for so many years and I am a non-driver, so I think of public transit as an extension of my own body.

You describe scenes of seeking connection throughout Data Mind, whether it be through a MOMA painting, Carole Lombard film, cat meme or chatroom. In “The Early Adopter,” “In an empty chatroom in 1993, she found a stranger’s glow-in-the-dark brain wiggling and saw her own brain / plummeting from above.” What sorts of connections are we looking for (and are you interested in dramatizing in this book) when we look, watch, and log in? And how are these modes of connecting different?

In a way these are all parts of the internet as opposed to things separate from/contrasting to the internet. A repeating title/meme heading in the book is “The Future Leaks Into the Past.” I am interested in how our experience of relics from the past are influenced by having them mediated through our being in the internet-entangled present.

As with, “The Future Leaks Into the Past,” you made certain lines of your poems into memes and used them as section separators. I’m sure this was really fun to do. How did you conceive of/construct the memes and how do you see them as functioning in the collection as a whole?

Publishing with an academic press, they have what is called a “peer reviewer,” an anonymous person who reads one’s manuscript and offers feedback. The peer reviewer said she thought the manuscript would be stronger if it contained more of the internet's “texture.” One of the ways I addressed what I thought was a smart critique was to add poetic memes. It’s also a way to introduce the sections without having to label them. And yes, it was super fun to do.

Speaking of textures, ghosts make frequent appearances in these poems. What role do you see them playing here?

I think they most likely function different ways in different poems because I am not a writer who is interested in the “symbolic.” Sometimes I think they are a way of gesturing to the mythic or ancient. Other times I think it might have something to do with the split between the mind and the body that is associated with digital life. As we lurk in the non-space of the internet, have we all become ghosts?

You do it with the ghosts but you also portray various media as pieces of present, past, and future, as though media itself were a sort of time machine that can mentally move us around. Agree or disagree?

Yes, for sure. I would say not just move us around, but change the nature of what we think of as each of the categories.

You’re also a professor. Can you give some ideas for how teachers can use your poems in their classes? What are some innovative assignments or projects they could do?

I don’t know how “innovative” these are, but I always have lots of ideas.

1) One could ask students to write their own poems that embody how it feels to be online.

2) Students could make their own version of poetic memes.

3) One of the sections in the book “updates” or “remixes” the plots of famous films. Students could write their own poems that put old films into the context of the present day.

4) There are a lot of questions in my poems. Students could go through the book pulling out the questions, and then writing their own poems that answer the questions.

5) I had a lot of fun playing with internet lingo. The class might want to brainstorm a list of language that is only used online and experiment with putting it in a poem.

6) I also like to riff on internet trends (like the cakes that look like objects or the guy who got famous for eating rotisserie chickens). The class might want to brainstorm a list of internet trends and then use one or multiple of them as the starting place of a poem.

7) If you look at my Vimeo, I have some videos made from the poems. Students might want to experiment with creating their own poetry videos.

Thank you so much, Caroline!