The open mic at Cafe Kafka on 4 June was a wonderful mix of presentations that ran the gammut from close to Ginsberg to Estonian sound poetry, with English and German in betwe
en. 4 June was also Estonia’s flag day to commemorate the day in 1884 when Estonia got its first flag, so it was serendipitous that the special guest was Jaan Malin from Estonia, or was it the other way round? MC, Peter Waugh, provided the English translations of Jaan Malin´s (or Luulur, the crazy one) surprisingly moving poems, that is when they were words and not purely terrific word sounds. Listen here for a clip of his words / sounds.
Then there were renderings of poems by Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg’s partner who passed away end May, by CornwAustrian, Evelyn Holloway, and Peter Waugh, Hazel Winter and Paul Malone from Vienna Writers. Dr Paul read H.C. Artmann, and Jean Almeida, Toby Fischer, Dieter Berdel, Janusz Zeitstein, Evelyn Holloway and Felix Mendelssohn read from their own work. There were nursery rhymes on bankers, magnetic genius poems, Viennese dialect and sounds. I couldn´t stay to the end, but it seemed that it went on till very late. What I saw, though was a really great evening.
It certainly was an enjoyable evening. I’m curious about those sound poems. I caught a glimpse of what jaan and Peter were reading when they read their sound poem together. Each held a sketch of what looked to me like a series of squiggly lines. I wonder how such an abstract sketch can be interpreted into sound. Fascinating!