II. The Interferist Is a Pounder With Mad Flow
The Language and the Concrete travel hand-in-hand in a discourse particular to Performance -- where the politics of the room you’re in changes according to the poet at the microphone, liberating the text from the page and from the tongue. Expanding the poem by extending its reach, this is the code of performance: the hidden language that surfaces from within the poem when performed. Or is the code interference? While culture may be ready for interference, people aren’t. Does that mean that art is interference? An obstacle, pounding from inside to get across the message?
Static against the clear reception, does interference or shock draw you in, or make you run? Are you an interferist? Is the sole accomplishment of what you desire to interfere -- with stasis, with the commonplace, with tradition? Or is interference an upgrading of adaptation? The adapted air of what comes out of our mouth, what we breathe. A gas mask will interfere with the poisoned air, a cough from the audience will interfere with the slow steady shriek of a violin bow along the edge of a drummer’s cymbal which itself is an interference of the poet onstage. The attempts of the interferist are far and wide... prompting an explosion of interference questions... an awakening of inner-ference.
Is interference age? What prevents a body from performing as it used to when it was young and agile? If the body shakes or quivers, or can’t hold a steady note... what is interfered with in that process but a prosthetic which helps the body continue with its goal, to interfere. We are human beings interfering with the world’s attempt to bring us down by living life fully as poets and dreamers. Our space we claim, takes up someone else’s. In a melting pot of interferons, the story of space gets handed its age.
The point being that culture is interference in a constant state of now. Performance of a poem takes hold of what stirs the imagination. What steers the poem’s next incarnation, surrounding the performer’s chosen stage. In the age of glass machines, interference is much more fragile than it used to be.
