A Further Exploration of the OBJECT:PARADISE Manifesto
OBJECT:PARADISE began with a simple irritation: why don’t more people feel inclined to engage with poetry? To write it? To read it? To experience it? And what can we do, as people who speak, laugh, and awe at language, to promote spaces where everyone is welcome to explore the nuances that poetry can have?
For us, poetry isn’t a product; it’s a happening—an experience in response to a specific moment in a specific place, between our subjective selves and texts. Once you accept that, the question shifts from “how do we produce poetry?” to “how can we create contexts where poetry can be received?” How can we highlight the poetic as opposed to poetry?
The following twenty mantras are not rules. They’re prompts. They’re ways of curating contexts so that language, sound, and action can happen more freely so that they can be received inductively, naturally, and natively to the immediate.
1. MEDIATE THE THOUGHT AND THE BEAT
In a mouthful of English exists a built-in backbeat that stresses the accent–a 1 and 2 and 1 and 2 that built the rhythmic voice of Rock & Roll. Czech, on the other hand, pokes the first syllables of words and steps through them like a polka. At the tips of our tongues, exist rhythms that hold natural music if produced and received consciously. Let the mouth become the ear and let it converse in context.
Every sentence has its own internal pattern—stress, pause, repetition, breath. The flick of the tongue bangs on in beat. When someone speaks, these rhythms surface: the vowel drag; the consonant click. These are not imperfections; they’re the music that language is.
And when those sounds leave the mouth, they play in concert with all other sounds in the context. To mediate the thought and the beat is to first recognize this and then to treat the opportunity as an instrument. The white and black keys find figure between the line break. A drum will answer consonants. A typewriter stabs the full stop.
The voice should listen to how it sits in the room; this instrument exists within the larger channel. There is music all around. Let the beat in language be the beat in thought that comes out the mouth, finds rhythm against the wall, bounces back to the ear and then out the mouth.
2. DEMONETIZE LANGUAGE
Once you start thinking in rhythm, the next hurdle is hierarchy.
We’re trained to believe that some sounds “count” more than others:
the word over the heckled word, the mic over the cough, the comma over the period.
To demonetize language is to refuse this economy. Every sound in the room is equally available to be read as part of the text—by whoever’s there to receive it. The shattered glass, the foot bounce, the foreign language: all of these inform the happening.
This doesn’t mean that all sound is “good”; it means “good” is not holistic of individual unit but of composition as experienced. The quality of the composition cannot be qualified unless it is allowed, first, to exist and to be received.
Context—time, place, people—is the only real currency. A glance may be more powerful than a word, depending on when, where, and how it feels when it hits you.
3. EMBRACE MISCOMMUNICATION
Miscommunication isn’t a glitch; it’s the default setting.
Between your thought and your mouth, your mouth and the air, the air and someone’s ear, their ear and their inner language, at least four translations are happening. Each one is happening in a particular body, with a particular history, at a particular moment. No wonder miscommunications happen—even when we are speaking “the” “same” “language.”
We spend a lot of time trying to fix miscommunication—grammar lessons, style guides, “what I meant was…”. That has its place. But at a language happening, the goal doesn’t have to be perfect clarity. It can also be to explore the mess.
To embrace miscommunication is to treat misunderstandings, mishearings, and mistranslations as opportunity. A wrong word can open a new image. A misheard phrase can become a refrain. Someone thinking the police are part of the performance (when they’re really there to shut it down) is not a failure; it’s the world presenting its poetic opportunity to us.
4. THE BEST WORDS IN THE BEST ORDER DOES NOT EXIST
We’ve all been haunted by Coleridge: “the best words in the best order.” Sounds nice. Just kidding.
Words don’t come with intrinsic quality—and if someone insists this, ask them their name and they will communicate to you the intrinsic quality they believe their name to signify. A word is just a unit in a system that a community temporarily finds useful. “Best” only appears after a communicative act, when someone looks back and says, “Yeah, that worked for me.”
If language is always context-dependent, then “the best words in the best order” can only mean one thing: the words that achieved something for someone in that specific moment. That might be a poem from the Poetry Foundation, or it might be someone screaming “fuck the Poetry Foundation” into a stairwell in Žižkov.
At a reading, trying to assemble “perfect lines” kills the possibility of those lines happening and the ability to discover them happening. The more the poet clings to the right order, the less room there is for anybody else’s reception.
The social use of “best” is about taste, status, scene—who gets to decide what counts. What are we taught in art school? Who writes the history books? The mantra here is a reminder: no formation of words is universally superior. At most, it was the right accident for a particular crowd on a particular night.
5. LANGUAGE EXISTS ONLY IN A SINGLE MOMENT, THAT MOMENT
The ones that write the history books are the ones that are alive to. The same goes for the dictionary. Language exists newly each time it’s produced and received in a particular context.
Context here means time and place—but not as neutral coordinates. Two people can inhabit the same room and totally different experiences. Their histories, identities, and moods are part of the context too. Two receptions; two texts.
So when we say language exists only in a single moment, that moment, we mean: every utterance is an event that can never be fully repeated. Even if you repeat the same poem in the same taxi, a week later, it’s a different poem: different man, different haircut, different you.
This frees us. Each set, reading, or performance doesn’t have to live up to some ideal version. It is the version—for that moment only, for whoever happens to be there to receive it.
6. DEDOOM THE WRONG NOTES
Music is policed even harder than language. “In tune.” “On time.” “Wrong note.” I once heard a barman describe jazz musicians as robots.
But sound, like language, is built from agreements. We decide what counts as “disharmony,” and then we forget we were the ones who decided. We forget that a wrong note only exists because someone’s ear was trained to call it that.
To dedoom the wrong notes is to suspend the idea that deviation equals failure. A missed key, a late entrance, a feedback squeal—these can all be treated as openings instead of embarrassments. Who gives a fuck.
The same goes for language and image. Hesitation, broken syntax, accent, mispronunciation, a shaky VHS camera—these are not bugs in communication; they’re evidence that a living person is trying to say something in real time. Receivers feel that.
When performers and receivers agree, even temporarily, to drop the worship of “correct,” they can start listening for what else might be expressed underneath. That’s when we can start to understand each other.
7. THE AUDIENCE IS THE POET
Art with a capital A usually shows up as a noun—an object we point at. When it does appear as a verb, it’s framed as something made by the Artist and received by everyone else. Active production; passive reception.
But what if our spaces encouraged the opposite: passive production and active reception? What if the audience was the one who made the work happen?
The receiver already does this. Every image, line, and sound has to pass through their entire lived experience. The producer quietly depends on this: they rely on the audience to “get it,” to fill gaps, to connect convention, and to understand. Yet, It’s the receivers who decide what sticks, what gets etched to the back of cranium. Not consciously, but naturally, so embrace it.
To say the audience is the poet is not a metaphor. This is a very serious document. A poem only “exists” when someone reads or hears it. Until then, it’s potential text, just sound waves floating till they hit something.
Gatekeepers, institutions, and scenes will state otherwise. They act as if the poet’s intention and the poet’s credentials are what make the work valuable. But value is quietly being assigned in each person’s head, whether they’re invited into the conversation or not. And when everyone in the room is looking at the poet with tunnel vision, you can be comforted that many of them are not listening—because the opportunity to be part of the dialogue was never provided.
The most we can ever truly share is a moment in time and space. The qualification of that moment—the meaning of it—is done individually. Any language happening that doesn’t acknowledge this is lying about what’s really going on.
Don’t let poets make you not one.
8. ELIMINATE THE EGO
If the audience is the poet, the performer cannot also be a god.
Eliminating the ego doesn’t mean erasing yourself or your personality. It means refusing to frame the event as a vehicle for your brand & your persona.
When a poet clings to ego, everything becomes about their success and that also their failure.
Without ego at the center, the focus shifts to:
What did we just experience together? What did the language do to us? What did we learn about the room, not just about the writer? Without the ego, the producer and the receiver can look more subjectively at how the language behaved.
This can be helped by dispersing attention: bringing in other performers, other mediums, other points of focus. Two people making out can take the spotlight. A live drawing. A balloon. A tattoo needle. The poet becomes one contributor among many, not the star of the show.
The less the poet needs to be special, the more special the night can actually become.
9. USE THE LANGUAGE THAT THE PERFORMER AND AUDIENCE CREATE IN THAT MOMENT
Inside jokes are some of the most powerful forms of language we have. They’re microscopic myths: a tiny reference that only makes sense because of a shared past moment.
In a language happening, new “inside jokes” are born constantly. Someone mispronounces a word; someone spills a drink; someone says something off. People get off on this; these tiny accidents can be turned into callbacks, refrains, motifs throughout the night.
To use the language that the performer and audience create in that moment is to treat the room’s emergent vocabulary as the main text. Not just the prepared poems, but the spontaneous phrases, gestures, noises that everyone just witnessed together. We can let language happen.
Poets, comedians, and musicians have always done this—callbacks, refrains, motifs—but usually within a tightly controlled script. Here, the call and response is more open. The “set list” can bend to what the night invents.
That’s how you get language that is native to that context, shared by everyone there, and impossible to export without saying, “You had to be there.”
10. DOWN WITH DENOTATION
Denotation pretends words have one stable, dictionary meaning. Connotation knows better.
A word like “fuck” doesn’t land the same way for someone who’s never experience it, or who has only done it, or who can’t. The dictionary doesn’t cover that.
To say down with denotation is not to abolish reference entirely—we still need to point to things. It’s to dethrone the idea that there is a single, correct reading of a word that we all must obey. No way Jose.
In a language happening, you can either cling to “what the poem means” or you can open to “what this word is doing here.” Once you stop policing the “right” meaning, you can watch how language mutates as it moves through different people. And this process of real-time mutation is when we can engage in the process that poetry is--the witnessing of the appropriation of convention.
Denotation is a tool created by past users to get certain tasks done. It’s useful, but not sacred. In a live context, connotation—the messy, shifting, subjective layer—is where the actual experience happens. Invite yourself in.
11. CONTEXT IS COTEXT
Context isn’t a backdrop. It’s part of the sentence.
The building, the basement, the weather, the political moment, the city, the smell of the room, the price of beer—all of this is co-text, not decoration. It shapes how the words are heard, even if no one names it.
To say context is cotext is to treat the environment as part of the poem. The rumble tram outside does not “ruin” the quiet hour; it’s answering it. The espresso machine that pumps flat white for foreigners from Vinohrady does not interrupt, it integrates.
At the same time, context itself is perceived. Two people stand in the same courtyard but have totally different readings of “Žižkov” “this police presence,” “this kind of audience.” Those perceptions are also texts.
So neither the poem nor the context exists independently. They keep rewriting each other. A language happening that ignores its surroundings is already half-deaf, and, like the text, our perception of context continues to happen. Could you imagine if it didn’t?
12. LET ALL PLANS GO WRONG
You can plan the night. You can plan the set list, the lights, the camera, but not all of it in action
To let all plans go wrong means recognizing errors as opportunities. It’s easier that way—actually.
If art is alive, it can’t be fully scripted. A “perfect” show that goes exactly as rehearsed is, in turn, a play, a production, a product with set expectations and instructions. The real opportunities—the new pathways, the surprise meanings—often appear exactly where the instruction ends.
Linguist Geoffrey Sampson uses the image of a meadow with only one visible path between point A and B. That doesn’t mean it’s the only path, or the best one. It just means it’s the most worn. Art should always, in every context, test a different route, even if it’s “scary.”
In practice, this mantra means: hold your structure lightly. Let the projector’s bulb burn. Let the mice chew the mic cable. Let the police come in and accidentally arrest someone. See what the room can do with that.
13. EVERYTHING IS PART OF THE PERFORMANCE
Once you remove the strict border between “on stage” and “off stage,” everything and everywhere becomes available.
The lovers in haircuts arguing at the bar. Honza who arrived late and doesn’t know what’s going on. The barbabe rolling her eyes. The french guy. The kid staring at the ceiling.
To say everything is part of the performance is not to force meaning onto every object. It’s to notice that meaning is already being made, constantly. The only question is whether we acknowledge it.
In curated spaces, people will ask: “Is this part of it?” That question itself is part of it. It’s a small moment where the world and the performance overlap. The goal is not to answer it definitively, but to keep people in that state of noticing. Inductivity is everything.
If we practice this indoors, at readings and happenings, maybe we’ll start to see the same patterns outside: at the tram stop, in the supermarket, in the bureaucrat’s office. Real life is fucking crazy.
14. ORCHESTRATE THE CHAOS
Chaos is not the opposite of structure. It’s the raw material structure works with.
An OBJECT:PARADISE happening often looks chaotic from the outside: ham slicing, spaghetti eating, typewriters clacking, hot guys and girls, people moving in and out of themselves. But behind that is a simple intention: give chaos a frame but not a cage.
To orchestrate the chaos means:
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Allowing all to happen at once
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Letting audience reactions steer the event
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Responding to accidents as offers, not interruptions
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Accepting brokenness and error as part of the experience.
The key is not to chase total randomness. It’s to listen for patterns inside the mess and gently amplify them. Like a conductor who doesn’t control every note, but signals when to come in, when to drop out, when to swell.
The result is not clean. But it’s alive.
15. DETHRONE, THEN DEMOTE THE POET WHO CAME KNOWING
The “poet who came knowing” is the one who arrives with answers:
This is what poetry is. This is what my work means. This is how you should receive it.
First, we dethrone that figure. Defenestration. We stop treating them as a priest. We stop pretending the poet’s bio, pedigree, or CV grants them a special pipeline to meaning.
Then we demote them—not to humiliate, but to re-situate. The poet becomes a participant among others, a person trying things in a room, not a gatekeeper.
This doesn’t mean we reject experience or craft. It just means we stop confusing experience with authority. Because we believe in an art that is lowercased. Discovery is more interesting than demonstration. poetry as effect is more interesting than poetry as presentation. A poet discovering something with the audience is more powerful than a poet reciting what they’ve already decided. We have decided this.
16. DEPLATFORM THE STAGE
The stage is both architecture and ideology.
Physically, it raises the performer above the audience. Conceptually, it separates “those who speak” from “those who listen,” “those who make” from “those who watch.” Roles and expectations get baked into the layout.
To deplatform the stage is to experiment with spaces where this hierarchy is softened or scrambled: performers in the crowd, audience in the middle, words coming from corners, balconies, toilet queues.
When the stage dissolves, two things happen:
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The pressure on the “performer” is eased; they are no longer the sole focus of the room.
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The “audience” can start to locate their own poetry within the shared context and exchange, inductively, rather than being handed a finished poem to consume.
This doesn’t mean never using a stage again. It means remembering that the stage is a tool, not a natural law—and that it always carries a politics of who gets to speak.
17. OBJECT:PARADISE IS THE INDUCTIVE SEDUCTION OF THE OBJECTIVE MOMENT
The world is full of “objective moments”: clocks ticking, tickling piss taking, bodies perched in a windowsill at sunset. These are measurable, recordable, filmable. We can all agree that something happened at 21:07 in a cellar in Žižkov.
What that something was is subjective. It was then. It is now. It will be in the future. The past and future do not exist; a memory means something different everyday.
To call OBJECT:PARADISE the inductive seduction of the objective moment is to say: we’re not here to tell you what happened or will happen. We’re here to celebrate your being, subjectivity, and interpretations.
If the context is right, input becomes intake: you don’t just see things; you internalise them, rewrite them, and they become part of your own language. That’s the only “success” we care about.
18. INTERACT THE REACTION
Every text produces reactions: applause, boredom, confusion, laughter, anger, seduction, eye contact, a guy checking his work email in the front row, his face illuminated by the screen.
To interact the reaction is to treat those responses as live material, not background.
If people laugh at a line you didn’t write as a joke, you can lean into it. If someone walks out, that’s a movement in the piece. If there’s a murmur in the back, you can answer it. If the room goes very still, you can push or release. The environment is yours to exist in.
This doesn’t mean harassing the audience or forcing participation. Never make someone do something they don’t want to do. Especially in the name of “poetry.”
Instead, It means acknowledging that the audience is already participating simply by being there. The performance is not what you planned; it’s what actually happens between you and them.
19. CELEBRATE THE PARTY THAT LANGUAGE IS
Every time a word is spoken in a new context, something unprecedented happens. That exact combination of mouth, room, time, mood, listener has never existed before.
That’s insane, if you think about it. The words you are reading now have never existed in this exact time and space on Earth before. This is an amazing, authentic, experience.
To celebrate the party that language is is to stay consciously excited about this basic fact. It’s easy to forget, especially in institutional settings where language is treated as a test to pass or a puzzle to solve.
In a language happening, every line, every tangent, every slip-up is another chance to recognize: this is the first and last time this specific utterance will exist.
If we can’t find joy in that—what are we even doing?
20. PROMOTE THE CONTEXT FOR THE SUBJECTIVE WORLD TO BE EXPERIENCED IN THE OBJECTIVE MOMENT
We all live in our own heads. The “subjective world” is the only world we actually experience: sensations, memories, fears, jokes, associations, languages. We carry it around like a private cinema.
The “objective moment” is the shared now: the room, the chairs, the time on the clock, the fact that the radiator’s too loud.
To promote the context for the subjective world to be experienced in the objective moment is the whole game: create situations where people feel safe and curious enough for their inner worlds to leak into the shared space—and vice versa.
When denotations loosen, when hierarchies soften, when mistakes are allowed, when the audience is treated as poet, when the stage is deplatformed, when everything is part of the performance—then subjectivities and discoveries can be made.
At that point, language doesn’t just describe reality; it happens to us. Together. Once. In that shared moment & time where we’re all alowed to be poets.
Conclusion
These twenty mantras aren’t a checklist for how to run a correct OBJECT:PARADISE event. There is no correct OBJECT:PARADISE event. If anything, they’re reminders—little warning labels we’ve taped to our own brains after too many nights of watching good language get flattened by format, hierarchy, and expectation.
They’re also not limited to “poetry readings.” Any time a work is presented—film, sound, installation, concert, open-mic, living-room hang—these dynamics are already there: who is allowed to speak, who is expected to listen, which sounds are considered “noise,” which meanings are pre-approved, who gets to walk away feeling like they were part of it. Poetics is just the word we use when we choose to notice.
If there’s a single through-line here, it’s this:
art doesn’t happen in the object; it happens in the encounter.
The text, the song, the image, the ham on stage are just excuses for that encounter to take place. Once we stop obsessing over how to produce the perfect piece and start asking how to cultivate receptive, curious, chaotic contexts, the role of “artist” shifts from manufacturer to host.
You don’t need a cellar in Žižkov, a projector, or funding to test any of this. You can start on the tram, at work, in your kitchen: notice what language is already doing around you; notice how your own reception rewrites it; notice which tiny moments become strangely unforgettable for no good reason. That’s where the poetry is, whether or not anyone ever writes it down.
If OBJECT:PARADISE stands for anything, it’s this:
you don’t come to us to be shown poetry.
You come to be reminded that it’s already happening—and that you’re one of the people making it happen, whether you wanted the job or not.
We’ll handle the ham. You handle the reception.