The Revue Theatre on Granville Island
fills with eager lovers and writers of poetry. Tonight is the Vancouver 125 Poetry Cabaret Evening One,
part of the 24th Annual Writers and Readers Festival. The evening was held by Brad Cran,
Vancouver’s Poet Laureate, essayist and photographer. His collection of poetry The
Good Life, has been hailed in the Vancouver Sun as a must read. The host of
the evening, Poetry Is Dead Editor-in-Chief,
Daniel Zomparelli (bow-tie and suspender clad!) was consistently adorable and
charming, nearly stealing the show with his not-so-subtle flirtations with the
performers. He begins the evening by quoting the Globe and Mail, that “hopefully more than 15 people come to this thing…that
is if there is not the competition of paint-drying the same night.” Despite
this, wine glasses and red velvet seats are filled, and the first performer
takes the stage.
Catriona
Strang, Vancouver-based poet, read a piece from Proust and memory, accompanied
by Francois Houle on the clarinet.
The words of Spill Kit rose
and fell with both Proustian abstraction and lofty expressions, but it was
matched well by Houle’s haunting and distant melodies (at one point, he was
playing two flutes at once!). Strang’s elusive poetry didn’t so much as grab the listener
with what was being said, so much as how. It demonstrated how language can be just as impervious as a
complicated math equation.
The
next performer, Jordan Scott, discloses his performance with “This is the paint
drying version of the evening.”
This was certainly grossly inaccurate though. Scott is a stutterer, so every word was a battle, every line
needing to be combated, and appropriately his poetry was woven with themes of
body versus speech and the procedures of interrogation. He wonders, “What words are you putting
in my mouth?”
Our
third performer of the evening, Wayde Compton, read from all new works,
entitled Loxodromic. His travel narrative was actually
written on the plane, on the way to Taiwan, exploring such themes as the riots
in Paris and Hogan’s Alley (the old black neighborhood in Vancouver). His treatment of race, “race is a
verb. It takes place,” is
incredibly reminiscent of a Harlem Renaissance era Langston Hughes. I was impressed with the infusion of
jazz-like qualities in Compton’s poetry.
Next
up was Kevin McNeilly, accompanied by trumpet player Taylor Bo Hynum. McNeilly’s piece, entitled Embouchere, dealt with impersonations
and the varying careers of jazz musicians. Jelly Roll Morton and Thelonious Monk gamble themselves
broke, perfectly paired to Hynum’s incredibly impressive trumpet improvisation. Hynum goes red in the face and sputters
his final notes, just as McNeilly does.
Mugbait,
an ambient noise duo from Alberta, picks up right after the intermission. Sitting cross-legged on an Arabian
carpet, the duo used various tools and electronics to create the slightly
abrasive, high-decibel volume that filled the theatre. Copper sheets were scraped together and
a guitar was manipulated. Sandra
and Ben Doller walk up to two microphones on stage and begin their performance-based
spoken word. Repitition of “shirt”
and “baby” serve to confuse the audience as to where the focal point of the
performance is, and yet there is a comedic element to the confusion of
language, as words collide and meanings are altered. The performance ends with Ben Doller, dryly punctuating with
“applause,” a mere suggestion.
One
of my favourite performers of the evening, Matthea Harvey, warns us that her
poetry deals with “mermaids, terror, and aliens.” The petite brunette begins with a tale (catch that pun
there?!) of Frankenmermaid, a mythical creature doomed with being in love with
her creator. The two of them
identify the resemblance of two fries with ketchup to her two severed
legs. Yes, there were gasp/laughs
in the audience abound. Her poems
about aliens were inspired by a headline in the newspaper, claiming that “Using
a Hoola Hoop Can Get You Abducted By Aliens!” Harvey reasons that “they want the creative ones, those that
dream of another place.” If this
is true, everyone in this room is at risk of being swept off to Saturn.
The
final performance of the night was super charged with energy from Christian
Bök’s reading of Xenotext. The Giffin Prize Winner explained
the piece as an allegory about the nightmarishness of poetry, and this
creature-of-word certainly defied the ordinary daydreaminess of Wordsworth’s
poetry. Bök is actually, literally, trying to find a way to encode
the verses into an extremely resilient form of bacteria (extremophile bacterial
DNA called Deinococcus radiodurans), so then art imitates life imitates
art. He explosively describes this
indestructible being out of one side of his mouth, his face flushing with
intensity. This bacterium will not
perish if submerged in the Antarctic Lake Vostok and it can withstand 392
degrees Calvin. Basically, it will
survive billions of years after humans are gone. And thus so will Xenotext. This guy is nuts (brilliant!).
This
was just a taste of the International Vancouver Writers and Readers Festival,
and if this eclectic collection of Canadian writers is any indication of what
else Vancouver has got to offer, sign me up!
- October 2011
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