Poetry of Sound
Poetry of Sound was the first language happening curated by OBJECT:PARADISE, held on 11 November 2018 in the red-brick cellar of the Czech Inn on Krymská. At the time, O:P was just an idea, not yet a collective.
On stage, a 20-minute loop of a woman giving birth to the universe flickered behind hostel strangers, while Jenda Pudlák improvised on a red piano and a typewriter was used as percussion.
Between mispronounced Czech, cheap Brežňák, and accidental guests, the night tested what a reading could be and quietly marked the beginning of OBJECT:PARADISE.
Straight from the Pisser: The Birth of OBJECT:PARADISE
A recount of Poetry of Sound and the events leading up to it.
Written by Tyko Say, written January 24, 2023
Written by Tyko Say, written January 24, 2023
It was 12 in the morning and we dropped and popped acid in the museum ballroom book room with linoleum cleavage hanging from the unsung ceiling and talked until we heard ourselves. I was 23 and It was nice the place with everything you could ever want to read but didn’t when you wanted to and anyways that didn’t help me want to write or help me become a writer. In fact I didn’t want to become a writer, I was just looking for love.
Annie brought out chlebicky which, in Czech, is “cute bread”. She brings out six slices each topped with folded salami ontoppy mayonnaise and white wine on sidey. Czechs were like an open sandwich but without the other piece of bread—this would later become more and than less and then more apparent (more on this later). We drank the white and ate the cute bread and chased the mush down with red wine two times and Jeff and I sat writing back and fourth names for what we’d call our first show which would happen exactly in two weeks.
We heard Jenda escalating the spine of the corridor, an elevator that was holding on only by a belt Jeff told me. Jeff shot up quick opening the heavy victorian door,
“You son of a bitch! Get in here!”
Jenda lanked through the escalator arms and peered shyly in like a cat who just pissed on the armchair and greeted the room with a point to the corner and asked,
“This is the keyboard?”
“Go on, play it and we’ll read to it. You know, something boppy, snappy, yappy, not happy but also happy—we’ll read to it” said Jeff.
I met Jenda a few weeks before at a squat in some high-end low-end project in New Town near Muzeum. I was there with Céline and we were drinking beers from bottles when we heard a real twirl and swirl from the center room. It was Jenda Pudlák in thick frame glasses and a slim slouch build, hunched hunky at the keys smiling slightly here and there at the girls and boys dancing in figure eights round and round. November after all. There were city view windows tall like twelve story buildings in the music room and I went over to Jenda, whispered coy in his ear and asked him pretty please oh please what’s your name and will you come play your piano at our poetry show while Jeff and I and all the people I’ve met read from notebooks, oh please?
So that’s how now became now and wow Jenda is here, I thought, as he sat adjusted to the keyboard in Jeff’s walk-up book room two weeks before the show.
Jenda pressed the tips of his fingers to the keys and I felt suddenly like I had read every book in the world. I recited a piece titled Kacerov, the neighborhood I first lived in in South Town.
Kačerov,
you’re a tired pavement walked on
by outskirt city buses
full with
noodle boxes and
wrist watches
pizza joint open late,
the line unfolds from each
other’s wallets
70 pence cent piece knuckled from
your pinching fingers
and chucked into the small window
the woman with a daisy
skirt reaches out for
your mellow day here is low
under umbrellas walked
about with your unfloraled carpets
painted there
here who where
did your potraviny
close its doors or
will they open to your assortment
of chocolate nic-nacs and
unpronounceable soda pops
with a man there
fiddling under his hat like
a table tennis
champion moving from foot
to foot?
Your garden between main street
sings out
heavenly summer with lawn chairs
statued with men circling the velvet table
cloth unwrinkled by your dehydrated sky.
One chuckles out ‘was married twice in Ukraine
to the same woman’. His young face cannonballing
the bottle like joyous spring
Kačerov,
Kačerov,
you’re on top of the under world
with your knickers tucked into
your shorts stampeding the poor folk
gawking the television tower
you’re a brown bagged boozer
stuck at home with your fingers tied to
panhandled cigarettes, wishing you
had the time, man
And from the pisser, Jeff came in and on with wild wine eyes, “you son of a bitch, get over here! We’ll call ourselves OBJECT:PARADISE.”
And that was it. OBJECT:PARADISE—straight from the pisser.
The next morning, I woke up on the couch in the bookroom with my eyes in a glass of water, parched tongue, and a ham sandwich under my head for a pillow. I stuck my fingers into the glass and fished around for my contact lenses. I pinched them in and felt an instant sting that made me think about how my grandma got glaucoma—not knowing if that’s how you get glaucoma or what even glaucoma is. I took them out of my lids and flung them across the living room and left the book house for Ikea.
Céline was coming in from Paris for the show. We’d go one—maybe two—months on and off seeing each other and other people, but she was coming to town and she made me promise her I wouldn’t have those disgusting bedsheets the next time she visited, “how can you live like that?” her voice rang in my head as I opened my eyes on Jeff’s couch. So I was off to Ikea, four hours before she touched down, to walk blindly through Ikea for love, touching and testing linens.
I was only going to be in Prague for a few months—a year at the most. We had, Celine and I, planned to move to Taipei where we could both get a Visa and live together, so I had settled to not buy any towels, towelletes, kitchen bits, or spoons, but this time I felt like she really meant it.
Before taking the elevator down, Jeff handed me four pieces of new parched paper that would be good for my aristocrat typewriter (which Celine got me for my birthday), “here you go, you son-of-a-bitch. OBJECT:PARADISE BABY!”. It was 10 in the morning and I left the building with no eyes, a copy of “Just Kids” and the four naked pieces of paper. And it wasn’t until I was on the metro that I realized I was still tripping.
I started to see everyone in the train car as one big group who came there with me because they were following me and wanted to live with me. And they’d cut the power from the mainframe and we’d all have to live in the underground for the rest of our forty or fifty years of life, playing musical chairs on the red metro stools and getting in arguments and solving domestic dilemmas cordially. But I liked it and it didn’t scare me and I was kind of excited to make friends with everyone.
I arrived at Ikea with a hangover the size of Alaska and eyes the shape of Colorado. Sheets. Bed sheets and pillow cases. I get the good coffee that Ikea has and order some sausages for good luck and good measure. Did they prepare this all for me? Or do they do this for anyone who’s out here looking for love? I drink two cups and throw up in the parking lot a liquid that later dried the shape of an unknown State of America.
And don’t please do as I do (this is note to self) to ever (again) walk through an Ikea or any conglomerate capitalist aisle assortment for love or otherwise (while on acid with four pieces of blank paper in one hand and a book in the other).
In the end I bought two dish towels and took them back to South Town, placing them between my tired head and the glass window of the metro while everyone in the train car rearranged all their faces to look like mine.
~
We read the next evening at Maze in Chajovna, which means A Maze in Tea. There were tea heads there alright. I’d only met Jeff two weeks ago when he came into Ouky Douky, a cafe near his Holešovice book house, while I was getting a buzz on. He stood slouched in hat under a doorframe, with a janked head reaching into the book nook I was writing in.
“You know, you look a lot like Ginsberg”, I said
“You son-of-a-bitch, get over here” he replied.
Tonight was no different. He read first, his piece Wild Buffalo which depicts the natural course of man—life beginning and ending in the vagina with a quick stop at the vulva and the fish taco stand. It was excellent. He was originally from Southern California and met a Czech lady named Annie back in the U.S. and followed her back to Prague. We were so young then.
We drank jacket pocket fernet outside against the neon noon and talked about our first real poetry show. We would call it The Sound of Poetry, and we’d let Jenda do most of the work and only chime in occasionally when it felt right.
It was in the red brick cellar of the Czech Inn November 2018 where OBJECT:PARADISE had its first happening. The Czech Inn was a hostel on Krymska where I shaved my face daily for two weeks when I first arrived in Prague the December previous and they had Brežnak happy hour from 6-8 for 20kč a pint. A good mood place that was my first home in town, just across from my favorite non-stop potraviny.
Jeff edited and stitched together a 20-minute video of a woman giving birth and the universe expanding from her vagina and projected it as a backdrop to our show—this I believe had something to do with wild buffalo, or, the other way around. It was beautiful and Jenda played his red piano loudly proudly on the raised stage to hostel strangers who were probably only accidentally there.
I read my piece Kačerov and mispronounced all of the czech words on accident and then later on purpose (I would tell people). And while I was reading Asgeir H Ingolffson came on stage and began ramming the typewriter like a percussion instrument to Jenda’s keys, both the clanks and glugs in and out and somehow in sync with the other.
You can hear the small hammer in a piano swinging at the keys and men with long coats clapping their softened hands. There is a rhythm in the faces around you. Everyone looks like everyone you've ever known. You ask the bartender for a cheap drink. They are all cheap. From the counter, you hear a form of language unfamiliar, yet so close to you.
You twist your shoulders around to hear a commotion of crowd, music, and voice all speaking to you in this language.You fold your hands on your knee and breathe every moment of the past and future at once. You think about metacognition. What does this mean?
You watch a spanish man hold an orange with an oval sticker that reads #1003. You speak to him and jazz your foot around to the beat. The night tram home reminds you of the transition of poets. So familiar but somehow surprising. You walk home smiling and eventually dream in a new language of poetry and beat.
And it happened like that—not because of me or because of Jeff or because of Jenda or because of the woman giving birth to mankind on stage. But we believed that it did, that it all happened like that because of us. And if it did or didn’t, we had fun doing it, and little would we know, that we had just started something much, much, bigger than us--OBJECT:PARADISE.
Participants
Tyko Say
Jeff Milton
Ásgeir H Ingólfsson
Jaromír Lelek
Autumn James
Jenda Pudlák