I had a lot of fun with a ten minute slot as part of the Ten by Ten night at the Bridge Hotel, Newcastle.
After appearing on the Verb in October, I sent the link to their Listen Again section to a huge list of arts and poetry organisations. One response was to join in a Ten by Ten night.
Ten by Ten is linked to the Poetry Slam tradition, but is, as Jeff Price the organiser promised me, a very friendly and open crowd. A packed top room of the pub, a lot of students.
The MC gave me a slot, first on after the interval. This gave me time to gauge the room, and the atmosphere, and decide what ten minutes of material to give them.
For example, I dropped any work using covers, because all the other contributors were doing their own material. I’d been practising Ned Rorem’s 40 second setting of Gertude Stein’s “I am Rose” but sung in baritone instead of soprano. Something to grab the attention. And I’ve been practising Bob Dylan songs on my ukelele, which sound a little Bluegrass-thrash and are camp but also express a love of America, which I like to express in these (hopefully as of yesterday’s Midterm elections, changing) days.
The MC introduced me as a “wannabe vicar” which he’d got from my blurb for The Verb. I got to the mike and said “I wonder what you’re expecting now? I wanted to be a vicar, but I’m doing this instead.”
Then, I started with a new piece, Counting Up in Words, which I wrote to be printed on dice for an event later this month.
Everything in the poem is a mishearing of a number eg “won, to, free, for, thrive...” all the way to “nicey nice, humdrum”. I like this kind of game as it juxtaposes expressions that are on my mind eg “hostile force” for 44 and slang eg “dirtified” for 35 with multi-syllable rarer words eg “curlicue” for 32, and an overall sense of love of numbers.
It gets good laughs (I discover) and also sets some expectations.
I did a double-column double-voice quickie, then a long poem from my 1997 chapbook Loving Phase Transitions. The latter is 9 pages long, with 9 lines a page, each line 9 words long, and all the words different lengths from 1 to 9 letters long.
I read it to keep with my number theme. But I took it at a very quick pace in this performance to stay inside the 10 minute time limit. This rapid pace emphasised some of the word-jumble clustering of the poem. It was fun to try it at that speed, and to allow myself to mulch into ungrammatical and strange expressions for a while.
Then I did a new narrative lyric poem about dice, and two verses of a song from my songwriting days - not getting to the middle 8 before my time ran out.
One of my models is Andy Kaufman, who (I’ve only read about this, and extrapolated from his Taxi cameos to imagine it) came on stage as someone telling bad jokes incomprehensibly then built to a completely unexpected very slick Elvis impersonation at the end.
I think of that as mulch, and then lyric/narrative/song.
From time to time, I held my mobile phone up to the mike, and played one of my found Pi poems, a Swedish pi mnemonic
“Ho”r I alla i kva”ll Arkimedes ju lovade komma”
by Gustaf Lindborg. It means “ Listen you all tonight, Archimedes promised to come” and (in Swedish) follows the rule 3 (hor) then 1 (I) then 4 (alla) then 1 etc, just like Pi.
I made an MP3 of Polly Glottal (see previous entry in this blog)saying both the original and the translation in its Swedish voice. I mis-spelled the English translation to make it come out clearer and clearer (accented) English.
Good response to my set, not least from the students who’d come with one of the younger Slam poets.
Mind you, no sooner do you establish a “mission statement” but It gets you out of an argument, and forces a new phase in your life.
By which, I mean: a regular, Aidan, overheard me talking to someone I know a bit and admire, the poet Valerie Laws. Val and I had been talking about poetry and maths, and I wanted to say what the mobile phone voice in my set was all about.
Aidan overheard and said, forcefully; “You should give your audience the respect to have told everyone that, from the stage!”
I begged to differ, as it takes away the enigma, the effect, of the made object - something I’d written in my first blog entry, a night before this gig. I explained to Aidan that I’m keeping a blog to explain what I do afterwards, not at the time.
Val then said: “Well, tell them, that you’re keeping a Blog to explain it.” Good advice, I think. But how to incorporate statements like that - when you like to parody explanations in the actual work? How do you still get the dream behind the thought, a notion which I take from the poet Robert Grenier’s “I hate speech” essay?
Thursday, 9 November 2006
