Maybe poets and literati should take a leaf from the libertine meet-up sites and start organizing everything according to preference group. Under a preference topic, say, sadomasochism, a libertine can access a wide range of apparently unrelated interests, say, voyeurism, spanking and humiliation. Libertines thus stay both focused and expansive, free to experiment. Access and experimentation are very important for poets and literati, too.
The preference group idea came to me when I visited the third annual Extra! “living literature” festival at Centre Pompidou. Created in 2017, Extra! features the visual and sound aspects of literary endeavor. It suddenly became clear, to me, anyway, that the genre called “literature” is about viable and useful a guiding descriptive as gender is for human beings and that a move to a preference group system is imperative.
The people participating in Extra! all seemed to have a marked preference for words, a preference shared by a wide range of people, including Poetical and just plain people who like to read a lot. So, under a preference group approach, word would take the place of literary. Extra! becomes a “living word” festival, with literature, performance and installations as specific festival offers.
With activities over several days in different locations around central Paris, the opening night of this new an intriguing annual living word festival at Centre Pompidou featured, among other installations and events, English-using poet Alain Arias Mission’s 60s era happenings around “concrete poetry”. The poet uses physical typography, (meta)political urban topography and partly spontaneous performance for effect. Mission’s show reminded me that “happenings” and “situation” are playing a strong part in dance performance creation these days.
Last June, for instance, choreographer Joanne Leighton situated a valedictory dance performance at the Musée de l’immigration to point the issue of rising anti-enlightenment political views; Nina Santes, who took up the residence at the Atelier de Paris that Leighton was capping with her in situ performance, creates or is searching to create (interactive) performance from the happening formats that opened out in the 60s, the time when Mission, among others, was bringing out situational, public, spontaneous poetry.
Mission’s concrete poetry exhibit was in echo with a hilariously cynical interactive game involving managing author-provocateur Michel Houellebecq’s future literary legacy, along with a projected compilation of iconic film images and talk-show-format discussions.
Extra! organizers capped the evening with the award of the Prix Bernard Heidsieck to polyglot sound and translingual poet Cia Rinne. Rinne has linguistic feet in Sweden, Finland and Germany, as well as in her translingual poetry, which, she told me, was suggested by ordinary conversation in the multilingual household where she grew up. Just as Nina Santes’ work reverberates with energies inherited from happenings, Rinne’s work winds around and binds together concepts exemplified by sound-tech poet pioneers such as Laurie Anderson and traditional, page-visual-Ogden-Nash-book-of -practical-cats-style poetry formats.
Prix Bernard Heidsieck, which rewards non-book word creation, memorializes poet Bernard Heidsieck (1928-2014), a French-language champion of multi-media literary endeavor.
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