SpokenWord Paris

Bruce and Isabel among the audience:

Robert Cole, published in Ambit & elsewhere, editor of Chimera magazine:

Troy Yorke, taking a break from the manic satanic glee that his poetry brings out in him:

Or commun:

Some highlights: Or commun était abimé par l’espoir. Susie Reynolds was snowballed by a snow priest and a hermaphrodite nun. Rufo is against farmers. He needs a library to burn, time to get even. Troy Yorke likes to stuff a cat in the garbage can & then eat strawberries. He has quite an arsenal of sarcastic and shall we say direct & explicit poems. They went down well.
Robert Cole began ”All my poetry’s junk.” Saw Dali’s brain overrun with chocolate ants. Staggering with the bends. The other Troy read Beckett: Wasps in the jam. Isabel’s grandfather’s business was junk. Used to say people’d pay a dollar for this family. Ukelelelen sang an ode to Junk, the first time I’ve heard The Ramones’ I Wanna Be Sedated played on the ukelele.
Marty burns brighter, burns fiercer. His hair has grown back now.
Yanique wasted time sorting through your junk.
Bruce was, and maybe still is, Aleesha at Lonely Burger.
And finally Isabel just could not enjoy her corn dog, with cotton candy in her hair.

Robert Cole and Susie Reynolds will be seeking submissions in February for the next issue of Chimera Magazine. Stay tuned.

20h30
at the Cabaret Populaire/Culture Rapide
103 rue Julien Lacroix
Metro Belleville/Pyrénées

Qui a décapsulé la coca-cola apocalyptique?
Qui a décapsulé la coca-cola apocalyptique?
Changes.
Substitutions.
Claudine Tauziede for Michele.
Same psychedelicatessen:
Qui a décapsulé la coca-cola apocalyptique?
Qui a décapsulé la coca-cola apocalyptique?
Who the fuck has decapsulaized the apocalyptic coke?
This song will be an hit single in Canada.
This or Locomotion by The Sofia Lorenians.
Who Knows? Times are changing.
The Albatross of Baudelaire is changed.
Three months in Paris and you are changed.
Change.
Being in love with a boy of the east coast.
Change.
Being in love with a boy of the west coast.
Changing Willy.
Changing Will.
Will. Change the title of that poem as your mother likes.
The dealer who stabbed him has changed his mind after listening to his poem.
He’s reading slowly, now, because he’s bleeding a lot.
The dealer who wanted him dead, changes his mind, and takes him to the hospital.
Changes.
This body of mine will darken, whiten, grow cold and dry.
Change.
I’m gonna be a father.
My son will be a king.
Change.
My daughter will be a queen.
Paradoxical theory of change:
Change occurs not
when you try to be what you are not
but when you become what you are.
Further changes are waiting for us
in the next Future.

What strange driftwood washed up tonight?
Escher got it right,
bottled and buried at sea
while sailors talk of that Stone Age book
– that absurd old book! –
and Abraham sways onto the stage
where the waves are much less taller

as the moon fishes for some old song that fell from a sailor’s pipe
and a dwarf clings to a 60 year old mermaid
and they go at it like Baudelaire

. and from Senegal
. small boats break off for Europe
. seekers whose dreaming eyes are closed by the ocean

A deep sea diver descends to walk the Paris streets
Poe’s strange city lies alone
Its time eaten towers
the haunted destination of the albatross

Split now between English and French selves,
a woman waits,
wanting to see the ocean

Ukulhelen va seule sur la plage
harvesting Spain

Dogger. German Bight. Tyree.Fastnet. Lundy. Irish Sea. Rockall. Malinhead. North Adsera…

Charlie has been hanging and rhyming around Trieste, Genova, Naples, Verona, Milan, Bologna and Rome. The new accappella trio “Le Gallinelle” affected the world with a requiem for a dead cock: “Le coq est mort” and the experimental ukulelist Ukulelena followed the line with a bewithching song about the banana bird. The theme was not “Birds” actually, but “Anything Italian”, and so Pauline revealed Charles Cros has Italy inside. Michele, made in Italy and made in heaven, raping our childhood with the virtual toys of his poetry, and a wounded, stoic, unstoppable one-legged David walked on stage reporting a dialogue between Kubla Khan and Marco Polo, by Italo Calvino. Michael Levitin from SF, but Berlin based, read from his novel “Disposable Man”. Beth performed “Orchestra” and some other old school hits, completely new for us people of Paris. Alberto issued the “Divine Comedy in 5 minutes” or “Dante’s for Dummies”, Betty rocked the house pushing the folks through a coral clap hands performance and Bruce run away with sudden stage fright. Raoul Mussay (photo, below) tuned us on the french touch of the “grand reveur”. Said was possessed by Shakespeare talking in italian “the winter of nostro scontento” (photo, above) from Richard III, before an an untangled, unavailable, unpluggable, unshakable and uncensored Charlie II. David and Sabrina, aka Kubla Khan and Marco Polo, closed the night assuming that maybe “the audience exists and the poets do not.” “The Sea” is coming to drown us all, in 2012, or next monday.

Charlie was so drastic as to completely dressed in plastic. In Pia(aaa)’s TV series, JJ Rouseau learns American slang fast. Alberto wants plastic surgery – a new pair of naieve eyes still eager to see. Michele is running away from Detroit, dreaming the fig on the pillow. Adam cherished his TV. Pauline read Alexander Dickow, menaced by the horizon; eat crunchy, kiss me big. Theo Edmonds (whose show is at The American Chrutch, sorry, Church) swings in with a Zip!Bop!Bam! What grooves you? Gonna roast you a cool nickel, Jack. Is anything like it seems in your dreams? Plastic John (Kirby Abrahams) shot his Missus into space. Rufo scares the horses into Tupperware weddings. Beth’s silence lingers. Flo est toujours sur la route, with le talisman (le Thalys ment.) Giusy en la luce perfecte. Adam’s special message to the customer: Order your 52cent coffee, and leave me alone! Chris’ father scratched his ivory balls, guards plastic bags filled with light. Tom pines for the moon. Liza tarred her lungs.
But most fun of all this week was filming Bruce’s video for his song, he got 20 people up on stage dancing and waving their arms about to the music.

SpokenWord is every Monday now and we started with a Genò-cide of mosquitos, in French, “J’aboie à la lune”, then David’s tribute to Derek Mahon with “A disused shed in county Wexford” with worms, spiders and cockroaches. Michele keeps on spinning his “psychedelic washing machine”, that’s sure, and Money D. brought his essay called… mmm…something ending in –fagia, that means eating bugs. Colin translated and remixed Boris Vian, then our guest star Marie Claire Calmus performed an excerpt of her show: Corps et Mots. Poèmes, Chroniques, Chansons. M-m-m, “Minced Meat Marty” plunged us into a throbbing swamp and Sam, for the last time, into Secretionopolis. Alberto said goodbye to Sam, reading a poem “Memories are skidding bulls” they wrote together once, while doing the laundry. It was the last time for Stefanos too, and he left Paris tuning a sad song with an happy melody, written in prison and played with accordion. Mischa read a poem about the “Fèe verte” who inspired generations of Parisian artists, the greatest Swiss invention after the cuckoo clock, I’m talking about the absinthe. Charlie closed the first round: “That’s not about insects, but war bugs me, so…” And he switched to Iraq a poem originally written for Vietnam.

After the break, Onur opened singing a very frantic Turkish song, and Jan improvised a dynamic body performance, killing a cockroach on stage. It was Beth’s birthday: “My name’s not hidden in the sea, nor in the rain”. Bruce’s love letter: “ You don’t know me. I don’t know you, but I’ve been loving you, since before I knew the word”. Laureen Moore revealed another secret: worms were sucking her blood when she was nine. Piirko, aka Kokodiva, aka 5ieme ex-femme du president de la republique francaise, during a shocking act, gave birth to a puppy dinosaur on our stage, Luc, songwriter, played a chanson douce “17 years old, our parents still together, back then, life was so simple”. Johannus remembered it was the Berlin Wall anniversary with “No Man’s Land”, Polina explained why being a New Yorker from Manhattan, she’s a breakfast goer, Will offered a “bullshit he wrote when he was fuckin high”, Michele, when was 18, “sucked the pussy of a rocking horse” and the crowd was nearly crying. Een picked up from his I-phone the in-famous “La cigale et la fourmi” (greatest hit: recited by memory by the whole French audience), and then opened our second seasonal bottle of autumnal Baudelaire: “Une Charonne”. Hubert said he was experiencing stage fright, a thing that never happened to him when is on stage as a musician, hidden behind his keyboards, but “men invented word to hide their brain”. Charlie was experiencing hangover and that tall, once long-haired guy, called Sam closed the night with his last poem, leaving the spoken word to come back to Australia. See you soon. Next Monday.

Michele’s poetry is chock full of secrets. Why does the plastic belly dancer suffer when she dies? I am confident that I will never know. Theo Edmonds’ pockets were stuffed, not with secrets, but silly damn questions from the Appalachian mountains. Géno’s tramp’s rêve, ce n’était pas Las Vegas, c’était retourner dans son coin pourri. Kate Fussner from Philadelphia was the featured reader, with her loosely-linked true stories of her own and her family’s secrets. The people in these stories don’t know that these exist! Or that she was reading them to a crowded bar full of strangers in Paris. She certainly proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can’t go into a good piece of theatre and come out the same.
She also secretly fell off a boat.
Antonia dances without her shoes. Sees her own eye peering through the keyhole… Lost, on the wrong side of the mirror. John Abrahams wanders there no more. His song his only wealth.
Beth, aka Miss Peacock, saw dead birds on the motorway; burst the blisters; sifts the trees. Check out more of her stuff on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhCI8B-wN68
Marty’s charisma is his secret. Violated umbrellas swallow him whole, like South American jungle serpents. Alexa, on the other hand, has a free range heart (like the eggs?) but the kissing is missing.
Stefanos saw an accident the other day. Yara almost ran over an angel, so maybe that was it. Then again, Bruce saw what happened in Room 444 – site of the suicide, or alleged accident, of Sticky Bottoms the clarinet player.
Lauren Moore had a song about a boy who’s not her boyfriend. Shhhhhhh! Our lips are sealed.
Pauline opened a seasonal bottle of autumnal Baudelaire. Je n’ai plus de chagrin. L’absurde conquête de l’amour!
Sophie scattered ashes. Mr Dave pitted the haiku form against politics. Adam Will walked with no direction into the fog. To know is to forget.
Paulina thinks about death a lot. Helena masticates. Teacher’s despair numbs the dumb.
gNina, pour lui, je m’en vol. Ben’s is the garden that’s well hid. Michele ate crystal cornflakes. And finally Bruce launched into another story: It was 1969 and the colonel wore a dress… Nice opening line!

More secrets will be hinted at next time no doubt.

Cheers,
David