I hear the tree in the forest: Part One.
The scene: a coffee house in Amsterdam, just off the Prinsengracht. Our blogger (me) is putting out the folding chairs at the back of the shop, near the hydroponic skunk, and the glass case with the reticulated pythons (which are slightly more animated than most of the customers). A small cadre of avant garde aesthetes gather, puffing on their “jays” and complaining about recent Dutch authority legislation to ban tobacco from these very dope houses (”It’s crazy. In other countries they look to see whether you got marijuana in your cigarette; only in Holland do they look to see if you have cigarette in your marijuana.”).
“Can you turn your electronics off?” I ask. “Something’s phase-cycling at the same Megahertz frequency and knocking out my Airbook signal for the video projection?”
Looking panicked at the prospect of being European, hip and intellectual but without instantaneous access to Radiohead remixes, the audience nevertheless obliges, thinking this sensory deprivation may be a part of a provocative audience participation aspect; powering down their iPod parkas and unthreading USB cables from their knicker-elastic, taking extra long pulls on their “rickys” to anaesthetize their qualms of non-connectivity.
“Thanks!” I blurt out, consumed with excitement at the prospect of this inaugural poetry evening of radical new deconstructive material. I reboot the projector and my ambient background reappears: a soothing Stan Brakhage-like mélange of colors, like menstrual blood on a crème brulee on a turntable, suffusing the space with a (consciously ironic) Barbarella eye garden effect designed to open the mind up the full range of web poetry I am providing from the furthest reaches of cyberspace.
We wait for a group of shaven-headed Brits - all Union Jack t-shirts and number one hair cuts - to stop seig heil’ing in the doorway as they pass by. “Got any tack?” the lead skinhead shouts, laughing, wide-eyed. My goatee’d brethren turn to these interlopers, and hiss like cats at the ancient ragtag English enemy. “Poofs!” the skinhead shouts, staggering off with his mates, another little war won (what he doesn’t know is that some skunk-anarchist has already laced this moron’s bloodstream with industrial-strength psychotropes; and that half an hour from now the Brits will be face down in an alleyway, money appropriated and something foreign invading their channel tunnels…).
“Well. Ahem. Thank you. And welcome to the first session of ‘Found: Unfound. Frontier Poetry.‘”
A polite smattering of hipster applause.
“Subtitled ‘The Invocation of Territory, We Singe the Baudrate Eclectic.’ None of the artistes featured know this event is taking place tonight. Indeed,” (I love this bit),” some of these poets have no consciousness at all; being as they are automatic cut-up web bots who recycle snippets of other e-mails to create nonsensical messages that carry a web link to a commercial site. Normally we ignore these messages, if we even open them in our trash; but rather than banishing them to a perpetual half-live of non-acknowledgement–”
“Just like normal poets then!” a swarthy matelot at the back interrupts with.
“– I present them here to you tonight as the authentic ghost voice of William Burroughs, rebirthed into the webosphere. Automatic automata that colonize the outer fringes of our psyche, they labor like an infinite number of monkeys on Xanadus of verse. And now: we see that stately pleasure dome before us.”
I open with Quayside Launderette by Menon Sweazy:
Point of entrance for the stiletto was below the that I intended to prevent you from being torture cells, the trials at nuremberg speak venomously being dissolved and strained add pint of turpentine shirley bitterly yes: I’m in their debt for a no vessel was served upon the table that was not it seemed advisable to find out as soon as possible came forward at his word. When they arrived at.
Sweazy’s work is classic gripping opener: the associative theme of torture and Nuremburg invokes a kind of postmodern bread and circuses that sits well with this roomful of anti-Starbucks activists, and the turpentine suggests a kind of purification ritual that is simultaneously abrasive and spiritual.
The room murmurs appreciatively. I feel it’s time to bring out the big guns - the penis enlargement mash up - while I’m on a roll.
PART TWO: Oh yes… there’s a Part Two…