SPEECH ACTS: POETRY IN PERFORMANCE
Curated by Matvei Yankelevich

Filip Marinovic got things going with pre-show antics, dressed as a clown frolicking through the wine reception in the lobby. Then David Shapiro opened the show. He didn’t read his poetry but instead performed part of Bach’s Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin on a classic proscenium stage in a 250-seat theater -- a union hall with vestiges of the old Lower East Side.

Bill Luoma followed, announcing that he was happy to be performing in a space with so much anarchist history. He spouted lines like, “…to the zilog of the elliptical integral of the second kind / of the population collocation to the UN of Seth,” and read a series of poems full of surreal and unexpected word combos.

Then The Yogurt Boys (Todd Colby, Marianne Vitale and Michael Portnoy aka Soy Bomb) created their own tiny theater of the absurd dressed from head to toe in shreds of cloth and aluminum foil. They delivered their lines in hilarious character voices dotted here and there with a broad range of yelps, wails and labored breathing.

Next I read my piece, “Rose Window, or Prosettes.” I moved around a huge window frame hung at the corner of the stage while Joel Schlemowitz projected his film loops through the window: cityscapes interspersed with texts from the piece I was reading. At times, I stepped behind the window creating silhouettes of my body against the images as I littered the stage with pages from my serial poem to an atmospheric soundscape created by Marc Sloan.

Then the stage went black as flashlights roamed the space. The lights came up on Edwin Torres as he seemed to transform into a kind of post-apocalyptic shaman. He wrapped himself in a sculpture entitled “Scorns of slings in my slip,” created by Nancy Cohen out of Edwin’s poetry with painted wire, salt, and bicycle inner-tubes. It resembled a wire and rubber shaman’s cape, a poet’s armor, or a shield of words as he barked an incantation of spliced syllables.

Next up was Eugene Ostashevsky with his shouting piece, “Group Portrait with Massacre,” originally written for Misspoken Wheel, a performance in honor of the 13th century Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia organized by the San Francisco performance group Vainglorious. At various points Michael Portnoy and Todd Colby also chimed in, vocalizing fractured musical scales from an open microphone backstage.

The “formal performances” concluded with David Shapiro once again playing the violin beautifully. I never knew he’d been a child prodigy. The performances were all varied and well received, but the real fun came during the panel at the end. It was a blast. It was billed in the program as a panel discussion with Charles Bernstein as panel coach, “Is Poetry a Performative Utterance?” plus a Q & A with the performers. But after a few tongue-in-cheek questions by Bernstein it degenerated or flowered, depending on your perspective, into a strange Dadaist performance including some rowdy guys in the audience yelling out questions as the audience got impatient to participate. Edwin Torres requested that we all contemplate the empty hooks hanging from wires on the stage from which he had taken his “shaman’s cape,” and surprisingly we all complied and fell silent for a moment.

Then Bernstein asked Matvei Yankelevich (the curator of the event) what was an “Anti-Reading,” since he knew that Matvei helped organize them. And James Hoff (head honcho of the Loudmouth Collective and co-organizer of the Anti-Readings) yelled out from the audience, “Don’t do it!” Then spontaneous simultaneous speaking broke out so that the secret of what an Anti-Reading was remained a mystery.

I had a brief argument with Bernstein about what constitutes a performance while alternately squeezing the honking red nose of Filip, our resident clown, who was conveniently sitting behind me. I suggested that an overheard conversation on the subway could be considered a performance as could the panel discussion we were having. Just then, as if on cue, while Bernstein playfully chastised a few rowdy audience members, the whole Doughnut Crew, I mean Yogurt Boys gang (who had absolutely refused to answer any questions) stormed offstage shouting “This isn’t right, they won’t let the audience speak, this isn’t right!” -- only to return seconds later yelling “The stage manager of this place is an asshole!”

A delightful pandemonium ensued, with David Shapiro holding a chair over Bernstein’s head, then putting the microphone up to the mouths of the stage manager and Matvei, who were having a heated discussion in the wings. Matvei then came onstage and announced, “They’re trying to kick us out because we ran over our time, but we can stay if we pay $50 more bucks.” There was a huge negative roar as all the performers stormed off the stage grumbling, “No way…” and “Let’s go to the bar!... Let’s go drink!”

I have to say I had a ball amid all the anarchic histrionics. And I talked to several people afterwards and found that the performances and the panel had evoked a range of emotions, thoughts and mental states: anger, worry for the welfare of the panelists, speculation as to whether the “performance” of the panel was planned or not, irritation about the nature of Bernstein’s questions, anger at misogynistic heckling, enjoyment of rowdy audience participation, irritation on the part of some of the performers that there had been an attempt at a serious panel at all, sexual arousal, embarrassment, awkwardness, frustration that there wasn’t time for the audience to ask questions, confusion, shock at the sexual content of some of the pieces, and pleasure....

What more could you ask of an evening of poetry?

Wanda Phipps

Next page > “Rose Window, or Prosettes,” the poem Wanda Phipps performed at Speech Acts > page 1, 2

Wanda Phipps is the author of Zither Mood (a Faux Press CD-rom), and the books Your Last Illusion or Break Up Sonnets (Situations), Lunch Poems (Boog Literature), and After the Mishap (Faux Press e-chapbook). Her poems have appeared in over 60 magazines and literary journals including Agni, Exquisite Corpse, Hanging Loose and The World. She’s a contributing editor for the Internet artszine Big Bridge, on the editorial board of the NYC-based journal LUNGFULL! and has coordinated several reading & performance series at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. You can check out more of her work on the Net:

• Her Web site, Mind Honey, has poems, articles, interviews, sound files of her music & more.
• “A Fable” is in Canwehaveourballback?
• “Zither Mood,” the title poem of her CD, was published in the first issue Jack Magazine.