Sound of June
It was as hot as August when we sat cross crissed on cobble, the sweat dripping through the cracks as we wondered if poetry really existed.
Sound of June was the third language happening from OBJECT:PARADISE, the first to call the audience the poet, and the last that Jeff would co-direct.
After Architecture of Poetry, we wanted more--more sound, more language, more opportunities to explore the relationship between sentence and meaning.
Buzzed and buzzing still from February, Jeff and I got drunk on a train South to Annie’s father’s cottage. The three of us and our rucksacks took the 15:30 connection out of town on a Friday would plan the next O:P happening, there, in a cabin tucked into the trees.
I had taken the train once by myself out this way and romanticized the concept of writing on a train so much that I didn’t write anything, just stared out the window and thought of the image.
This time was different. Jeff c
I pinched some tobacco from my pouch and littered it into a važka and looked longly at Jeff,
“You have a bike right?”
“I did ya’–back in New York. I could get one if you need it.”
I looked back even longlier at him.
“What if you rode it around the audience while people read? You know, have a little fun? A circus”
His white perfect pearly teeth appeared under his mustache and aviators.
“You son of a bitch–”
“That’s a great idea”
So we did it. We called up Jenda and got him on the agenda. Eight readers, two musicians, and seven performers in the June ruins of a bar in New Town, Zazemí. Jeff and I knew nothing about theater, art, music, or whatever you could call it, but we knew what we’d like to see at a poetry reading: no poetry at all.
I had booked some big wigs for the gig. Real heads. Seasoned writers from the BODY writing collective, some kluks from the first & second wave of anglophone immigrants who washed up here after the Velvet Revolution and just never left. From their side, I got why they were wary. From my side, I didn’t.
A few hours before the show, my phone buzzed. Christopher Crawford, voice low and cold, like he’d just found out his landlord was me:
“What do you mean there’s going to be someone getting a tattoo while I’m reading?”
“Ohhh maaan, come on Chris,” I said, already pacing. “I sent you the description and schedule for the event. This is our whole thing, man. We don’t want the attention on the reader. We want the audience in it. In the mess. In the chaos.”
We had a good turnout even if Jenda called in the day before on sick leave. Jaromír knew a 16-year old pianist, Honza Zhang, who filled in and played alongside Heyme Langbroek whom we also met a few weeks prior.
It was really beat and sweet and there was a lot of sweat. A real thing. Only this time we played footage of Prague in the 1930s for a backdrop as opposed to a woman giving birth.
There was a lot happening. Jeff took apart his bicycle and I sat on stage throwing typewritten paper airplanes out to the audience while readers came up and read to Honza and Heyme’s bop.
Adela came and Florence too. On stage, Adela got a tattoo of an ant on the back of her neck and next to her, Florence read with her British accent a few poems about love making and the politics of folding blankets. It was excellent. It was the sound of June. And, in the end, Chris read and no one listened to him but rather to the entirety of the performance and it was, indeed, poetry.