When did what begin?
And vice-versa
60. The performer, with a bottle or glass balanced on his head, walks or runs about the stage singing or speaking until the glass or bottle falls off
61. (The performer may use an interpreter if the piece is presented in a foreign land)
62. Performer touches everyone in audience, counting aloud
63. Eliminate the composition from the program
62. Spell “love” by smoking a cigar, blowing a silent dog whistle, eating a chocolate éclair off the floor on all fours doggy-fashion, and tooting a little ditty on the flute
or
By blowing a toy horn, gazing at the audience through the hole in a cored apple, ripping a piece of cloth, and eating a hard-boiled egg extracted from the womb of a medical-school model of a pregnant woman
49. Tristan Tzara. We were introduced, we SHOOK HANDS, and I forget what I said to him, and I even forget what he said to me
65. haw ero yue / hew oru yea / how ure yaa / huw era yai / hew ara yio / how ari you / haw iro yee / hiw ore yea / how ere yao / hew era you / hew aro you / haw oru yoa / how uro yao / huw ora yoa / how aro yae / haw ora yea?
59-60. The search for the missing subject, the dot of an i …
*
I forget how many beer-pisses old I was …
*
63. While I was spotlighted on the stage, with top hat and fat cigar, there appeared at the rear of the auditorium a beggar wearing a black eye patch, a well-worn cap pulled down over a straggly head of hair, palm stretched out … He made his way slowly down the aisle, soliciting the audience as he headed for the stage, and pocketing a few hand-outs. … I made him a generous proposition: if he would sing for his supper, I would make him … a millionaire … I measured off the stage with bank notes – German inflation currency in denominations of millions and billions … all this can be yours, I told the poor fellow, if you will make me a rhyme for each bank note. [New paragraph] The one-eyed beggar-poet crawled along the line of bank notes on his hands and knees, and, as he pocketed bill after bill, wrote rhyme after rhyme on slips of paper. I read them aloud to the audience. [New paragraph] At the end, he jumped off the stage, making a fast getaway with his newly acquired millions. I called after him, “Hey, poet, what are you going to do with all that money?” And he called back, from the rear of the auditorium, “I’m going to rush right out and buy myself a Spaghetti Sandwich”
82. Co-invention No. 6: The Performance Without a Name
63. Try and Stop Me
*
Zenzen. Zenzen allows you to have it both ways
Totally
Entirely
Quite
Completely
Not at all
*
“Zagreb? We’ll end up in Mongolia, the way he’s going”
“Don’t think it’s not in the back of his mind”
…
More laughter
…
*
63. So what happened? I came out and snipped the ribbon. Whaaaaaaaam! The auditorium was jam-packed, by the way, and no one walked out
57. 62. Five performers, five voices, five words
you
just
never
quite
know
58. 62. A Cellar Song for Five Voices. A moral allegory – or so wrote a friend from Texas many years ago – concerning the one hundred and twenty permutations of these five phrases, during which the extinct blackbirds change places with the high-flying bluebirds
65. I have a pretty good notion what this performance looked like
*
While I was typing out the text that occurs here, I discovered that all existing versions are missing the most important message in this poem … How this unpardonable error crept in, I do not know. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
*
66. The Ultimate Poem. Something like
the price of red is going up
going going going
gone
the transaction is perilous
like sex yes
…
68. It was a kind of game perhaps, but so is life … blessed with a disunity that unshackles it from the aims and aesthetic principles of the many manifestos it has engendered; a mixed blessing, to be sure
*
SENSE SOUND
SONSE SEUND
SOUSE SENND
SOUNE SENSD
SOUND SENSE
*
69. I was introduced to a female descendant of the Baal Shem Tov
70. The effect was startling, with multiple silhouettes expanding and shrinking against a white background
71. Wednesday, March 10, with the moon in Virgo, a spaced-out fan said to me, ‘Your poem blew my mind, man,’ and I thought to myself, it wasn’t the poetry that did it, brother
50. In the original version, the only intimation of eternity is expressed in the misplaced word after. This displacement places a heavy emphasis on the word. It gains an ultimacy that says to us: after this, again, after this, again, after this, again, after this, again, after this, again, after this, again, after this, again, after this, again, after this, again, after this, again, after this, again, after this, again, after this, again, after this, again, after this, again
76. Japan. I shall never forget the ill-starred day when I stumbled into a deep ditch in the precincts of a Shinto shrine, uttering curses that celestial translators must have reported to the local deities. For that night the spirits took their revenge. [New paragraph] An eighty-year-old Buddhist nun, whom we had met earlier in the bath, told Ay-O to tell me it was one of the funniest and happiest things she had seen in her long, long life
87. Ah, the details of living
75. TEN NYE ATE SEM SIX FIE FOE FUM
74. 81. Genesis … sexual madness – shouts, grunts, hisses, babbling and screams. Slowly … words … and the words finally achieve their text …
85. It can stretch, swell, puff up, overinflate, burst out and blow up right in your face
81. We plan to install eight vertical sheets of glass, 2 feet by 8 feet, with the poem sectioned among those eight panels. The words will be applied to the glass using stencils and clear acrylic spray, thus remaining invisible in the ‘dormant’ state. [New paragraph] … when a jet of steam is released onto the glass, it condenses at a much more rapid rate on the glass than on the acrylic, thus revealing the words. … the poem appears, the letters disengaging themselves quietly from the mist …
81. The poem appeared ‘as if traced by a finger on a misty window,’ and the strobe lights ‘froze the stream and poetry against the dark sky’
90. Hereby-thereby-whereby
87. ETC
90. I saw, not a hundred feet to my left, one of the fabled dohiri trees
(to be continued)
When did what begin?
And vice-versa
[Note: all text taken from Emmett Williams, My Life in Flux – And Vice Versa, and his Anthology of Concrete Poetry]