The Tao of Sparrow

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Perhaps it's a writer's genius to connect with readers this way and then suffer, with varying degrees of patience and gentleness, fools such as me who respond to their words by writing to them.

What does Sparrow know that matters most? Where has my brother-in-spirit been all these years? He was born Michael Gorelick in New York City in 1953. His father was a Jewish-American labor organizer, his mother a Pennsylvania Dutch working-class woman. "Like all New York City children," he says, "I believed sparrows were baby pigeons."

A smart lad with aspirations to become a doctor, Gorelick took a turn at the age of 12, when he discovered and read a paperback translation of the classic Taoist book of maxims, Tao Te Ching, at his grandmother's house in Philadelphia. (I own a dog-chewed copy of the same 35-cent Mentor edition.)

Lao Tzu's advice -- "Asserting yourself brings no credit," for one -- was originally addressed to a ruler. Centuries later, though, it was taken to heart by an impressionable (and possibly preternaturally wise) elementary school student. Almost overnight, Gorelick started moving consciously toward being, he writes, "what we call in America a 'failure,'" determined now to grow up and be "a quiet, humble soul -- perhaps a street sweeper."

Gorelick did head dutifully to college, intending to study subsistence farming, but flunked out of Cornell in 1973 after two years. (He got a D in soil science.) Then he hitchhiked to Florida, where he worked in a sheet metal plant, painted houses, landed his dream job at a natural foods store, and gained a new name.

"Here was work I believed in: bagging raisins, prescribing orrisroot for pleurisy, beholding the yellow beauty of millet in its barrel," he writes in a short essay published in The Sun. When confusion ensued after another Michael was hired, the appellation "Sparrow" was given by a woman herself named Jennifer the Princess of Love, who "looked like a Tarot card come to life."

Renamed, Sparrow took wing as "the famous hippie poet of Gainesville," writing poems asserting that "God is an outlaw" and other apparent heresies, and becoming a yoga adept.

This didn't happen overnight. His iconoclastic c.v. includes stints at the Naropa Institute, where he studied with Allen Ginsberg and others; at Empire State College (which he calls "a school without teachers, grades, classes"); at City College of New York, where he earned a master of arts degree (not that he ever seems to have wielded it); and with a loose-knit group of New York writers and artists known as the Unbearables, who acted out creatively by collaborating on a doctored parody edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, for example, and by storming the New Yorker office with comical signs reading GIVE OUR POEMS HOEMS and WE REJECT REJECTION. The latter activity garnered enough attention that the magazine accepted five of Sparrow's poems, for which he was paid $250 each. (Two were eventually published.)

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