Adventures in Belgium: Zaoem, Day Two

April 26th was an enchanted day for a poetry reading: warm weather, bright sky, lots of sleep, and savoury pannekoeken with Leila. Following an afternoon stroll, I prepped for the evening's performance at the Minardschouwburg. Pre-event dinner was comforting, and provided an opportunity to chat with Rozalie Hirs as well as the music performers of the evening, Ghalia and Moufadel.


Jelle Meander introduced Spanish polypoet eduard escoffet to kick off the night, and midway through his set I knew I was in love. eduard's poetry is studied and self-aware, providing performative buffers of humour between poems direct in their chaos, generous in their depths, swirling with repetition, insistence, languages rubbed into agitation/excitation. Every gesture from eduard was timed to punctuate moments in text; every movement proved necessary, careful, poignant... slow, engrossing, exact. I video-taped the end of a poem I assume was about rural cabin life, which eduard embellished by spraying some flowery air freshener. I also caught a snippet of him eating a newspaper. I missed snagging my favourite of the night, though -- "por," a list poem that ended his set. With the final lines of

por a no ser tu
por a no ser tu
por a no ser tu

eduard then stood stock still, the hiss of his tape players feeding the microphones. To stare at him in this moment had me with a rush of thought, how naked he became onstage, how potentially confrontational or open or courageous an audience member might read this gesture. And just that: like a word, eduard invited, possibly dared, each audience member to read him, to read into him, into his lit existence on that stage.

Well, that had me! Whoever programmed the evening deserved kudos for leading with eduard, a consummate performer committed to his work and so inviting to his audience.


I nearly needed a breather then, but Dutch poet and composer Rozalie Hirs was introduced, and she offered a counterpoint performance to eduard's. Rozalie focused on longer texts, looping her voice multiple times with her computer. The Dutch lyricism wove its oneiric threads around the audience, an alchemic lullaby, dulcet. I managed to snag a longer video clip of her performance, so please check below.


We'd all been invited to perform a cover text, and I'd had some last-minute hmming and haaing over what to read. Given that it was a spring night, I thought I might read my favourite Hagiwara Sakutaro poem (Hiroaki Sato translation), but indecision gripped me after Rozalie's set, as I thought how nicely Ted Berrigan's "Sonnet XXXVII" would segue between our bits. I took the intermission to wrestle with the cover, and eventually decided to go with Jordan Scott's "What is the utterance?" from blert, which had been my initial plan for some weeks. Both the cover and a favoured rendition of Wide slumber for lepidopterists went well; video clip of the slumber below.


Leevi Lehto anchored the night, proving a crowd favourite with his morphemic and lipogrammatic sound poetry. I've been looking forward to meeting Leevi, as a fan of his Google Poetry Generator and also curious about his writing practices and ntamo, so it was a pleasure to not only see him perform but also share the stage with him and chat about many things during the festival. Truly a lovely person. I started to get a little more adventurous with the video at this point (fear of running out of recording power kept my clips short early on), and so have four snippets of Leevi below. Enjoy!!

To close the evening, Tunisian musicians Ghalia and Moufadel performed Arabic music. Just gorgeous work.