On Sunday, May 11,
the sleek-funky Club Club in Montmartre provided vibe and stage to "Lyric
Recovery", the event originated in New York by poet, Maureen Holm, to
countermand the incursion of prose into poetry with a celebration of lyric
excellence featuring performers of the art, together with an open mic
competition for cash awards.
Blake Dawson, a
well-known voice on the Paris circuit, and poet-publisher, Elodia Turki,
joined Holm as co-features, performing in English, French, German and 'Suvicnai',
an invented language. Open mic poets read to a panel composed of poet-essayist
Yves Ros, singer-composer Géraldine Ros, and Kerouac scholar Jean-Marie Rous.
The first prize
award was shared by Jon Thorpe and Alex Middleton. The second went to James
Moe Seager's bilingual lament and the third to Francis Géraud's lush French
lyric. Hannah Taïeb's playful bilingual poem received special mention. Pieces
of diverse sensibilities were heard from Erik Rutherford, Tim Wood, Mira D-J,
Bill Strangmeyer, Terry Duval, DeeAnne Gorman, Claudia Sperry and Susan Ossman.
André Des Forges capped the final open segment with "quelque chose de
whacked out".
"Most of
these voices were new to me," says Holm, "and I was delighted at the
level of artistry and vitality I heard. With a view to encouraging more lyric
writing like this, we've decided to do another Paris session in October when
we come back from Prague."
Lyric Recovery
adds a Summer session in Montreal and Saratoga, then appears in Prague on
October 12. Planning is underway for sessions in London, Vienna, Florence,
Barcelona, and Munich. The anthology which results from all of these events
promises to be an extraordinary multilingual, multicultural compendium of
poets, all dedicated to recovering, revitalizing and reorienting the lyric.
Club Club sponsors an open mic for
French hip-hop and other genres on Tuesdays at 10:30. (3, rue André-Antoine,
metro Pigalle, 42.54.38.38.)
(Fusac, May '97)
Lyric Recovery
scheduled for Paris
The poet is
engaged on the frontiers
of consciousness where words
fail, but meanings still exist.
- T.S.
Eliot
A recent
article in The New York Times Book Review observes that poetry on the page
is being dislodged by fiction, fiction supplanted by biography, and
biography overwhelmed by how-to’s for the human psyche.
Otherwise
thoughtful Bill Moyers conducted an entire career as socio-political savant
for PBS before awaking in a hospital bed to observe a leaf buffeted by the
wind and hit on a metaphor for the powerlessness he felt. His delayed
insight quickly led to a book and a multi-part PBS documentary film of
readers and enthusiastic audiences at the Dodge Poetry Festival. Exultant,
Moyers announced the "explosion" of grassroots poetry nationwide. "Most
such poetry is monolingual; most is prose." So
says poet and translator, Maureen Holm, who originated Lyric Recovery
in New York to counter the incursion of prose into poetry with an event
which celebrates lyric excellence by featuring masters of the art and
drawing others in an open mic competition for cash awards.
Holm is not
alone in observing the prosaic phenomenon. Alice Notley, a Paris resident
and the author of 20+ volumes, notes:
In poetry,
it’s the musical glue between words that’s important. But, there’s
a lot of poetry around that sounds like prose. Most poems I read in
The
New Yorker sound
like prose. They tell of prose-like experiences, about walks and fathers
dying, in a very prose-like way. Prose doesn’t use words to go below
the surface as poetry does.
Lyric Recovery
is dedicated to the intimate bonding of sound and meaning, image and
texture, rhythm and rhyme that Baudelaire said, ‘answers in man to the
immortal need for symmetry and surprise." The event offers a
carefully synchronized program of featured readers, a session essayist, and
an illustrious judge panel. Holm describes the Lyric Recovery
experience:
Lyric
Recovery
is not an ad hoc, East Village poetry ‘slam’ that rewards
performance poets for bawdy house entertainment. Its judges are not
tapped randomly from among vocal walk-ins to hold up scorecards for
contestant stunt dives. Participants at our events visibly relax when
they realize that we are committed to enhancing the artistic and
emotional effect of the poem, not to aggrandizing the performer.
Because the
lyric poem is mesmerizing whatever the language in which it is conceived,
multilingual work, even poetry in invented languages, is programmed into
every Lyric Recovery session as an indispensable element of the
experience. Music and pure sound also find a role.
Lyric poetry
is cross-cultural. Successful in New York in three semi-annual sessions
since Spring 1996, Lyric Recovery comes to Paris on Sunday, May 11
from 8 p.m. at Club Club, 3 rue André-Antoine 75018 Métro Pigalle (20F
cover charge, 2-drink minimum). Blake Dawson, a poetic voice frequently
heard on the Paris circuit, joins Holm as co-producer. Open mic readers may
offer work in English or in French before a bilingual panel of judges.