There have been great many enviable
positions engraved in the annals of history. From absolute rulers considered to
be gods down to the professional prostitute testers and selectors of days more
recent. But none can aspire to touch the prestige and power that come with the
job of a volunteer bookstand guy at the Prague’s Microfestival.
Backtracking a little bit, I am
waiting at Havel airport to pick up Michael Farrell, an Australian poet who is
to read at the festival. As he comes out of the gates, he strikes me as; short,
serene and amiable. On my flourishing a Plzeň instead of a handshake by way of
truly welcoming the poet in Bohemia, he politely refuses saying that he doesn’t
drink beer. My beard drops.
Steven Fowler, a British avant-garde
poet and another artist I was picking up, ecstatically received Mr Brown, the
canned ice-coffee, and immediately tweeted it. Maggie O’Sullivan who is a sweet
Yorkshire lady and a visual artist, walked out of the arrivals’ gate right into
a minimalist bottle of champagne and some car hi-fi jazz which incidentally
alleviated the conundrum she had been having; how the world does not appreciate
its poets. We agreed that it is the people who make the world and I assured her
that the unworldly people of Microfest would welcome her with flung-open arms.
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| image credit: Robret Carrithers |
The poetry festival itself opened
with the reading of Boris Ondreička who has gone to extreme lengths exploring
normativity. Vanessa Place, the star guest, conceptualist poetess and a lawyer,
delivered on her promise of a funny, thought-provoking and controversial show
as one of her bits, as in comedy bits rather than poems, involved saying ‘I’m
gonna kill you bitch’ over and over. She accompanied the rawness of the content
read (‘content’ being a concept she would appeal against, however, as well as
against any allegations that her work has any whatsoever) with soothing,
swaying motions of her body. She explains herself as a mere mediator or
appropriator and anything stirred in the audience’s bosom, she says, was
already there—the fact that some of it seemed funny to me is an impression
wholly constructed by myself. Place insists she doesn’t add anything, moral or
message neutral. She appropriates and selects to shake and make the
listener/reader falter in his world.
The musical numbers of all the
nights trumped many a performance. The most remarkable was Jörg
Piringer’s (pictured above) visual poetry
performance with free-flowing individual letters that were appearing on the
screen as soon as the poet spoke them into the microphone. They were arranging
themselves into peculiar structures often interacting with each other like
living larvae. This was hands-down beautiful. Jennifer K. Dick’s witty
engagement with the world of science captivated one’s imagination and all the
three concluding artists—Michael Farrell, Maggie O’Sullivan and Linn
Hansén (pictured below)—delivered amazing readings as well. O’Sullivan, who also had her visual
pieces screened, hit an exemplary balance between tedious recital and artless
shouting, which unfortunately appeared in quite a few numbers – she insisted
without imposing, yet in the end it were her words that did the insisting, as
it ought to be. The Swedish poetess had one of the most mesmerisingly anxious
peers, which together with her poems’ witty playing with history made for a
riveting performance.
All the readings were bilingual with
translators from the faculty (much respect to my colleagues for managing to do
a great job with the often ‘untranslatable’ pieces). This added an interesting
clash/merger-of-cultures note. Experimental poetry there was and it was handled
with craft and innovation (Jorg), yet one asks whether in some cases the
experiment wasn’t there just to patch up lack of content – kind of ‘shockism’
to abuse the political phrase. Nevertheless, it was a unique literary event.
Microfestival proved itself to be the leading experimental poetry festival in
the Czech Republic and all the kudos for that goes to its delicate and driven
director, Olga Peková.
Jaromír Lelek
