Or “Le cadavre / exquis / boira / le vin / nouveau”
As the opening act of David Kirchenbaum’s marvelous Boog City Poetry and Music Festival this August, Elinor Nauen and I concocted a variant of the rolling or exquisite corpse. The form comes from the Surrealists of course – a form of disruption, an invitation to party with Master Random. We asked most of the people who had read in the series we’ve been running for five years to send us a squib: as short as a few words, no longer than a thick paragraph. (For list addicts, their names are at the bottom.)
The contributions were liberally shuffled and leavened by squibs we appropriated from a group Elinor cheerily named “the perfessers.” (Crazy bunch, from Noam Chomsky to Gerald Burns.) She and I somehow made a voice play, crammed with changes — in the midst of no little sense of crisis: Johnny Stanton was hit by a Hummer earlier this summer. He (and Elinor) have been beating a path through the wilderness of our non-system health care system since then. I can happily report he’s amazing and is on a good but long road back.
Thus, on Thursday, August 2, we hit the stage at Side Walk Café on Avenue A: Elinor, Martha, Mike DeCapite, and Francis Levy.I won’t deign to describe it. I’m hoping to post an MP3 file (it’s about 25 minutes long) as soon as I learn how! Stay tuned.
There were no photographs. These are all lifted from earlier events.
Texts were from: Francis Levy, Stephaine Dickinson, Sanjay Agnihotri, Mischa Merz, Joan Silbur, Sharon Mesmer, Hettie Jones, Susan Sherman, Martha King, Leonore Skenazy, Carmen Firan, Basil King, Pierre Joris, Burt Kimmelman, Mitch Levenberg, Sparrow, Andrei Codrescu, Bob Holman, Tony Towle, Mike DeCapite, Terence Patrick Winch, Diane Simmons, and Winston Herschel, deeply masked, with Donald Smith, Michael Palmer,Edmond Jabes,Gerald Burns, Ford Madox Ford, Donald Phelps, and Noam Chomsky.