Architecture of Poetry
Architecture of Poetry was the second language happening curated by OBJECT:PARADISE, held on 16 February 2019 in the musky cellar of Souterrain Cafe. The night treated language as a city, words as the buildings, and the audience as the architect.
On February 16th, 2019, we filled out the musky cellar Souterrain Cafe with lava lamps, coffee tables, flowers, found props, balloons, beer coasters, and Jenda’s little red keyboard. We were all in on it and Céline flew in just for the show. We thought that it would be funny if she ate a bowl of spaghetti on stage throughout the reading so I brought a ziplock of warm noodles and a jar of basillico, “You know, to take the edge off, eat them like a percussion instrument” I told her.
Jenda and I opened the show as we described in sound and language the metro stations on the red line and what kind of pizza each of the stations have to offer. “Salam for everyone!”
There are people everywhere doing things and you don’t exactly know what. There is a sound of a typewriter, and behind it is a man wearing a shower cap. He will later read what he had been writing, and you will find out it was a shopping list.
It was my turn to read. Jenda slowed the pace and then jumped up again as I began snapping to a beat that I couldn’t keep. Bump bump booooo ba da bump bump boooo. Celine ate two plates of spaghetti in a plague mask while Jeff sat next to her, slicing a large ham on a table on stage.
I look over at Jeff and he hands me a two inch cut slice of Prague ham. I begin flipping it over and over, examining it before the crowd begin reading it like an Ikea blank page that suddenly comes alive in the metro. I open my set with my favorite piece “I know a man” by Robert Creeley. Jenda wails his little keys and smiles up at me with diamonds under his eyebrows and in his lids.
I reach over and drink from the flower vase on the table like a man desperate for love turning blind corners just to talk to someone. The crowd jeers and I ask, “So what is poetry?”
Jaromír comes on quick, relentless after me, in beat, key, and tone with Jenda kaleidoscope-throat Pudlák. He stands there methodically beating down the audience with a stance and then grabs a hanging balloon by its throat and fills his lungs with its helium.
And then In a voice small enough to outfit a small child he begins: “First you inscribe, describe, unscribe, ignite it.” The crowd hoots at the pitch shift but they listen, too. The words hang there like scaffolding.
By now Céline has been eating spaghetti for almost an hour. The plague mask is fogged on the inside, and every now and then she lifts it just enough to fork in another coil of ragu.
Jeff sits beside her, placing thinner and thinner slices of ham a plate like documents waiting to be notarised at the kulturani Úřad.
Somewhere in the front row someone is seriously trying to read the marbling.
Tim reads next, then An, then Vít—each of them stepping up, taking the mic or the centre of the room, and dropping their pieces straight into Pudlák’s rhythm puddle. They don’t have to do much more than that. Jenda does the rest, doodling to the pause of every comma.
Behind them, mustached men at the bar are half-watching, half-hard, half-concerned.
There’s beer everywhere by this point. Hands. Mouths. Mustaches. Krotches.
When we get to the end, we don’t really end or want to. We just all get up. Six readers with 6 mouths and 12 eyes look at each other and begin to read together.
Jenda starts a pattern—three notes, then four, then he breaks it—and we all come in at once. Texts overlap: English into Czech into something else, lines slopped in beer, mouth shouted in verse, fragments of love poems, shopping lists, metro stations, ham, architecture, Kačerov, salam for everyone.
Céline is still eating. The balloons are half-deflated. The shower-capped shopper is laughing behind his typewriter. The entire cellar, for a moment, feels like one big throat clearing itself, one building being drawn and demolished at the same time.
It was excellent. The happening ended not with a bow, but with the sound of everyone talking at once slowly thinning out into regular bar noise—the spaghetti plates licked clean, pints flowing, chairs empty. A real dada dinner party, spaghetti and everything. On the way out, someone asked what exactly they’d just seen. We told them, as seriously as we could, that it was architecture.
Cast
Readers
Jeff MiltonTyko Say
Jaromír Lelek
Tim Postovit
An Nguyen
Vít Bohal
Performers
Tyko SayJeff Milton
Celíne Dubois
Jaromír Lelek