OR "Hey You: Get High and Go See Kiss Punch Poem"

I don't like improv comedy and I don't understand poetry.

I am not proud of these two facts about my mind, but I am compelled to admit these things if you want to understand how perverse it is that I am utterly fascinated by a show that is a combination of both improv comedy and spoken word poetry.

Don't get me wrong: I love poetry. I love the music and the flow of words. I love the intensity of the experience and I love the weird world you enter when you listen to it or read it, like walking into a church and taking a deep breath of incense and then suddenly realizing that the incense is actually airplane glue and !!!!!oh fuk yoru brane iz awn fier wit fierwrkz and oh no here cumes lightz and god!!!!!



Poetry arouses me, and not just in a sexual way.

But I don't think I understand poetry. Nothing scares me more than being asked what I thought of a poem. It is like being asked what I thought of a dream.

"I was very glad when the mermaids put their faces back on and it turned out that my skeleton was not made from fluorescent markers? I was so glad on basically every level?"

To fight off very alarming insights I have on a regular basis regarding the essential meaninglessness and "total pain" of reality itself, I am compelled to turn everything into a narrative that makes sense to me.

I think most people are like this, but big narratives like religion, politics, or relationships don't work on me, so I basically just try to get through every day with my sense of continuity intact.

"Spectacles, testicles, watch, wallet...and...the identity property! Oh good."



Writing fiction also helps, adding or subtracting a little bit each day from a narrative that stretches further than waking to waking, like one of those ropes that cartoon characters use that defies gravity as long as they don't notice that it is cut.

NOW. Maybe you are like me, and maybe you aren't. Either way, now that it has been established that I am a hater, let me tell you about a little show that is the best show in New York City to see if you consider yourself a fancier of literary experiments or entertainment that is:

1. Cheap ($5!)
2. Professional
3. Surprising
4. Challenging
5. Communal &
6. As Creatively Satisfying (and Spiritually Exhausting) as Actually Making Something Yourself For Some Reason


***


Watching Kiss Punch Poem is watching the creative mind in macrocosm, slowed down and expanded, like watching a drunk, genius illustrator toss off a caricature on a napkin that is much better than any drawing you could ever make in your life.

Here's how the show goes down. First of all, while the audience is milling around under a vaguely-creepy sign that just says "Yes!" (one of the rules of improv is to say "yes" to everything, which is exactly what I also tell people I am trying to exploit (I learned this from the Beatles ("Ooo girl -- being uncritically positive -- oh yeah -- about trying new experiences sure is -- yeah, yeah -- attractive! Girl! Hey hey hey!"))), the audience is asked to contribute lines to a communal poem.

The poem is then read out loud on stage.

A group of improvisers then picks facets of the poem as departure points for short, comedic scenes. These are called skits, or sketches, or skuts, or skifflings, or something. I do not know what the standard unit of improv is called. There is a certain sort of person that spells "laugh" with two f's, and I try to stay the hell away from them.

The scenes that work and to which they audience responds are filed away in the minds of the improvisers for later recall. Particularly effective characters and concepts become instant leitmotifs.

Every ten minutes or so, a poet interrupts the improvisation and delivers a short, five minute poem. These poets are damn good. Some of the best poetry I have heard in this city I have heard at this show.

The improvisers work the themes and concepts from the poems into new scenes, creating an expanding web of semiotic touchstones that stagger toward some greater meaning, hinting at some feverish psychological revelation.

A final poem is delivered, but this poem is also improvised by a poet who has been concentrating in the wings the whole time. The poem ties together all the preoccupations, themes, recurring gags, and emotional excitement from the other poems and from the improvised comedy, turning the whole performance into a piece of art that truly resonates, mainly because we have all been a part of its production at this point and so we collectively long for closure, meaning, and transcendence.

It is hard to describe how effective this whole thing is. It is like spoken word poetry and improv comedy have been doing it, and when they get off, their climax is a fusion of forms that shouldn't work, BUT THEY DO!!! Maybe that is what the "Yes!" sign is for.

The show has such an elegant architecture to it that simply watching the performance unfold is extremely exciting if you like narrative.

It is also exciting to watch improvisers betray deep psychological dilemmas on stage without much interiority or panic. If you are a bad person, it is fun to watch people reveal too much without knowing it, especially in the company of poets who are sensitive to this sort of thing and who make a career out of revealing too much on purpose.

The brutal structure allows the performers involved to unleash their strengths while the excesses of both art forms are put into extreme conflict, grinding against each other to create friction:

1. The marshalling of imagery and metaphor in order to prove a point or to provoke in poetry is mimicked -- in fumbling anecdotal narrative form -- by the decisions of the improvisers.

The improv reveals that poetry is not incidental in its choices and preoccupations: the deliberate choices that poetry makes create a satisfying tightness that improv can only ape by callbacks and ad hoc structure. The poetry is thereform balm to improv's existential provocation.

Another way that the poetry corrects the improvisation is the way in which it drags the improv into dark, strange places that broadly-minded comedians who are trying to get laughs do not necessarily like to go on their own, even though these depths are where real humor hides. This makes the improv better. The improvisers have permission to talk about crazy shit, because someone more politically "good" has already gone there first and the audience did not try to kill them.

2. Spoken word poetry has a tendency to take itself extremely seriously. There's nothing wrong with this. If literature were an army, poets would be snipers -- haughty, serious people with the highest kill-counts (fiction writers, obviously, would be drunk cowardly officers who mysteriously always manage to eat steak and drink champagagne in the trenches).

Poets make demands on the heart. I love identity politics, just like anybody else. But I get bored, you know?

But improvisers are not serious people. They have to "action" these poems, immediately. They pick the meatiest, most concrete bits and build scenes out of them, unpacking them in real time and keeping the poems from fluttering away, making sure they stick to you by pinning them into your chest with a sword.

The improvisers are wicked Festes to the poets' Malvolios, though in the case of Kiss Punch Poem, it is ultimately the poets who have the last word. I like watching the steel cage match between poetry and improvisation. I like the ginned-up, sublimated competition. I like seeing literature come out on top. I like seeing comedians do their best as bad guy wrestlers.


This was the best picture of Malvolio and Feste from "Twelfth Night" I could find. I am disappointed in you, internet.


***


CAMERA 2, PLEASE.

A word about why I usually don't like improv comedy.

I don't care for the welcoming, YMCA feel of improv theater. I think it is manipulative and has taken over underground theater in a cult-like fashion that makes me nervous.

All the tools and tricks of other effective cults are in play in the improv theater community: the money comes from classes that are taught by "professionals," charismatic leaders create arbitrary groups to destabilize and control willing acolytes, the emphasis is on uncritical positivity, those in positions of power abuse their authority for petty gain, the plurality of the audience comes from other people who are involved in the cult, etc.

If I were Tom Wolfe, I would write a withering ten-part essay about the improv world for "Harpers" and you would be forced to reckon with my keen analytic mind, but I am not Tom Wolfe.



I think people who are good at acting have natural abilities (pathologies?) that are specific to their craft. I'm not going to say that "art cannot be taught." Sure, you can learn how to express yourself in new ways. But America's heaven these days is "temporal fame," and improv theaters sell the promise of this fame with the same methods that churches sell actual heaven.

It is a pyramid scheme where the product is temporary chuckles.

All that great, lasting comedy that you have enjoyed over the years was written down by somebody, and then edited, honed, and practiced. The thrill of improv comedy is that it is spontaneous, and it is interesting to see what people can come up with without thinking very much. Most of the time, however, watching this process fills me with so much sympathetic embarassment that I get sort of ill in my seat, squirming around, wishing to die.

I think the act of total failure on a stage binds improv comedians together like drinking the blood of Jesus. I don't like paying money to see this. My friend Isabel in Austin invented a genre of music called "friend rock," and I think improv generally always fall into this category.

In the beginning of Kurt Vonnegut's "Bluebeard," he talks about how all art is people turning things that are supposed to be fun into complicated rituals, and about how any time a new art is created, something vital to the human experience is lost to all the rest of us.

The thing about improv is that it seems to me the "art" of it is just a bunch of people having a good time with their friends. For a small fee, you get to experience the vicarious thrill of this good time, judging the performers on their ability to "KEEP HAVING A GOOD TIME NO MATTER WHAT, NEVER LETTING THE BALLOON OF ARBITRARY IDEAS AND SPONTANEOUS PIZAZZ HIT THE GROUND."

A bunch of pals just hanging out may be the 21st century's contribution to eternity, but I don't have to like it and you can't make me.

CAVEAT: I used to make sandwiches in this un-air-conditioned, underground basement in Manhattan for a restaurant whose wait staff were all one single irritating improv troupe from Florida. I hated them; they hated me. It is possible that I am still harboring unresolved resentments to their craft.


***


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However,

The improvisers at Kiss Punch Poem are really fucking funny. Take my word for it as a hate-filled raincloud: they were probably all abused as children in just the right way. I am from America's desert and grew up around dangerous people with guns and apocalyptic imaginations. Give me a psychotic situation, or an unwinnable game with the threat of actual violence, and I feel right at home. New York, despite what seventies movies led me to believe, is much more tame and civilized than you might expect, like the court of a French King, where everyone is trying to outdo each other with subtle class distinctions and politicking that are ultimately lost on me.

I don't really understand California, the Midwest, the South, or the East Coast, so I look at the performance as a psychological education into the world in which I now live.

These ladies and gentlemen are fantastic, on-the-fly satirists. They unload very intriguing baggage in a thoroughly amusing manner. I enjoy sifting through it. You will, too.


***


There is a medium-to-large cultural revolution happening in NYC these days, specifically with respect to literature shows, which are making actual money and drawing actual crowds.

Except for a few places in Brooklyn, the "conventional literary reading" is dying off to be replaced with something half-way between hip-hop and theater.

Storytelling shows, like the Moth, and poetry slams, like the Poetry Slam, have been popular for a decade, but the problem I have always had with both of these institutions is that so much of the craft on display is dependent on the personality of the artist, like stand-up comedy. Quiet geniuses get ignored. Subtlety is lost.

But this dynamic is changing. Very loud, strident performers are being coupled to very quiet ones. It is not a revolution of performance: the poets of Kiss Punch Poem read complicated work and do not stoop or pander. It is a revolution of context.

There are examples every night of a new show where literature is massaged into the meat of other performance spectacles, to varying degrees of success.

For years now, The Fiction Circus has been exploring the ways that frame narratives and multimedia can situate live reading in a way to make people pay more attention. We have held seances, group marriages, dance contests, Satanic rituals, speed dating contests, reunion shows, stag film screenings, and robberies.

In its highest aspirations, fiction is supposed to be a synthesis of philosophy and poetry. More often than not, fiction is instead a synthesis of journalism and porn.

That's fine, actually. Philosophy, poetry, journalism, and porn. Throw them all in the blender and hit liquefy and add some vodka and let me have a taste.

But Kiss Punch Poem is by far the most successful implementation of this framing concept that I have seen. It is fun. It is art. It is emotionally jarring, without being maudlin or crass. Meghann Plunkett, the creator of this show, is a damn genius.

The improvisers are also fantastic comedians, and most likely, fantastic people. Alex Marino, for instance, always seems keenly aware of the ridiculousness of what is going on, drawing you into deeper realms of absurdity the same way that a good friend convinces you to get late night pizza in a bad neighborhood, and then buy coke from a guy outside the pizza store, and then do the coke with some strangers from Iceland you just met, and then go ice skating. Marino sells shitty ideas with sheer gusto, dragging you into impossible depths with a manic grin and pore-level likability.

Jared Singer, who often performs the improvised wrap-up poem with chilling grace, is able to flow spiritual epiphany with the same alacrity that Tech-N9ne flows murder advice and drink recipes. Edge of your seat type shit.


***


So get high and go see Kiss Punch Poem. You can buy beer there. It will be a good time and you will hear some poetry and see A New Thing. A New Art Form, Bigger Than the Sum of Its Parts.

It is the Exquisite Corpse made Electric, Reanimated and Set Loose, Sewed Together with Parts from Diverse Worlds and Shot Through With New Life for New Times.



It is exactly the sort of thing you moved to New York to see, so get the fuck out there and see it already.

And if you are a poet (or prose-poet) -- slam or otherwise -- this is surely the best venue in town for your wares.


***


Kiss Punch Poem happens the last Sunday of every month at the Magnet Theater on 29th Street in Manhattan at 9:30 PM. That is this Sunday. I have also been told that they will be performing in Boston soon.

Posted by miracle on Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:20:20 -0500 -- permanent link

Today we bring you an exclusive story smuggled back from the very front lines of fiction called "I am Silver and Exact," by Rae Bryant. Brave men, in uniforms, with good mustaches, clutching pictures of their sweethearts to their chests, probably died for this story.


"I fight for fiction and for the Queen and I don't care who knows it! HAW HAW HAW...I say!"

The trenches are rough! Bryant did what she had to do, up there in the vanguard.

There was a trend with the McSweeney's crowd a few years back when everybody was writing flash fiction.

McSweeneys! It seems like a bad memory from an antique time. Those were the Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall years.

All this shit they were publishing back then was just as cute as could be. We were powerless to stop them, dear readers. We were selling xerox copies of short stories for a dollar on the drag in Austin, Texas. Don't blame us for all those wasted years when you stopped reading.

I couldn't stand any of the writers they were publishing, either. Luckily, I think they all went on to careers in film, advertising, and "non-profits," so I won't ever have to encounter any of them professionally. East Coast chokes on its own vomit and so do our movements die. West Coast finds crystal healing and stops "needing to write."

It seems like the genesis of most of this fiction was "people don't like to read anymore, so we have to give them something short to hold their attention spans and something inoffensive that will keep them from having anxiety attacks."

Unfortunately, McSweeney's was so incredibly loud (and so incredibly close) for so long that everybody started to think that all fiction was supposed to be politics, that literature was supposed to have some sort of moral agenda. Good people = good writing.

Nah.

Music is for dancing, and fiction is a hallucinogen produced in the pineal glands of good writers. what is the politics of a good drug? A good drug is for everyone!

For far too long, people stopped trusting the power of fiction itself to coerce and enlighten (or destroy! yes!). Fiction was supposed to be nice and diluted: smooth, like Barbie's white brow and not very deep, like Ken's white asshole.

Here's the deal: very short stories can actually be excellent. Very short stories make absolute sense when they are punk songs.

Rae Bryant's short story collection "The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals" is a punk album.

THE

...INDEFINITE...

.....STATE....

..............OF....

...IMAGINARY....

MORALS!!!!

A clarion call! What the fuck is up with all those morals we don't have, or only experience afterward, like contrails from the jet of our souls? I wish I knew, I really did, I wish I knew. I know a little more now that I have read this collection.

It even has kick-ass album art with liner notes.

You can buy this book from Patasola Press...and you should, immediately...to begin your fine collection of all Patasola products...lovingly cared for and dusted...on the floor of your squat...next to your stolen box of chewing gum...and your big bodega bong...and your sparrow's nest of NYC condoms and unwashed dishes...

This is pop punk, with symphonic breaks to clear your palate. It is a thousand different voices screaming together. I've got my favorite track, the one called "Intolerable Impositions." But I am pretty basic and I like up-tempo syncopation with a good beat and a simple message.

We are extraordinarily lucky to bring you one of Bryant's new, unpublished tales. Bryant experiments. This is an experiment. If you experiment, she also has a literary journal out of D.C. called "The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review," an allusion you will remember from skool.

The title for "I am Silver and Exact" comes from one of Sylvia Plath's poems called "Mirror." Sylvia Plath was, as we all know, punk as fuck. Rageahol got her, which always gets my favorites.

Bryant has also turned her short story into a short film, with jazz, dance, and kaleidoscopic sexuality. This is spoken-word burlesque, the natural evolution of burlesque: sex not through clenched teeth, a vaseline smile, or a ball-gag, but with the floodgates of language wide open.

This is burlesque for the blind.







Over the past month, we have brought you two pieces of fiction that are very different from one another. We brought you "The Bitter Priest" by Andrew Gabriel Rose, and also this fine tale. Though different in intent, they are both punk songs.

Both stories are available as videos on YouTube. The performance adds a new level to the story and helps us reach a different audience. We are trying to sell this idea to other fiction writers and poets; the idea that a good performance does not cheapen the work itself.

Not everyone is a performer. Not everyone writes punk songs, or jazz songs, or rock songs and that's a good thing. But I love a good punk song, yes I do.

Posted by miracle on Tue, 24 Jan 2012 01:11:01 -0500 -- permanent link

Today we bring you a story about capital punishment and revolution. It was written by Mr. Andrew Gabriel Rose and it is called "Father Amargosa, the Bitter Priest."

You should read this story immediately. Don't "bookmark it" or "make a mental note to read it later." It is short! It will take you two minutes!

Check it out, though: if you don't have the energy to read a two-minute short story, Andrew wil READ IT TO YOU, and I will work the magic lantern machine.

ACTION TEAM GO-SQUAD READY SET GO!



This is our first attempt to publish a story using all possible internet vectors. We have text, audio, video, art, and every ebook format. In an age where anyone can put anything up on the internet any time for free, this seems like the minimum responsibility for a "publisher."

The internet is a will machine. Publishers these days must be will amplifiers for controversial voices.

"The Bitter Priest" is a story about control and spite. It is about how injustice creates more injustice. It is about how evil comes to life sui generis, like Baron Munchausen pulling himself out of the water by yankng on his own hair.

"The Bitter Priest" reminds me of one of my favorite true stories about death in prison, the spectacular death of William Kogut.

From "10 Strange Death Rows":

"William Kogut was on death row at San Quentin, but was never actually executed. In a note, he stated that only he should have the right to punish himself for his crimes, and so he committed suicide in a remarkable way."



"He had decks of playing cards, a pipe, a broom, and a kerosene heater in his room. He tore the packs of playing cards to shreds, taking the pieces with red ink. At the time, the ink in these cards contained nitrocellulose, which is flammable when wet. He stuffed these into his pipe, then crammed a broom handle in behind them to plug the pipe."

"He then poured water through the other end of the pipe, which soaked the card pieces at the end into an explosive mixture. Finally, he put the plugged end against the kerosene heater in his room and the empty end against his head, creating something not unlike a shotgun. The heat from the heater turned the water to steam, causing an explosive pressure build up that helped ignite the nitrocellulose solution. This in turn caused an explosion that actually shot pieces of playing cards through his skull."

Some people always have to do things their own way.

These people write good fiction.

Posted by miracle on Fri, 06 Jan 2012 03:06:13 -0500 -- permanent link

YouTube has completely renovated their website, and as a result, they have added several new categories for videos, including "Pets & Animals," "Autos & Vehicles," and "Nonprofits & Activism."

They have not, however, added any kind of category for literature, spoken word, poetry, book trailers, author interviews, audio books, or language education.

We feel this particular category is vital for the fortunes of publishing and for the fortunes of literature in general. Check out this long rant for a more in-depth analysis of why a YouTube "Literature" category is absolutely necessary for the rapidly-evolving future of the language arts.

Therefore, we are urging you to add your own "Literature" videos to the "Pets & Animals" category. If you do not have a video camera or "time," you can use this simple animated .gif as your background for a simple .mp3 recording of your favorite short story, poem, or essay:


This hypnotic cat will never give up. What haunts this cat? What has it seen and done? What tales does it have to tell?

Our goal is to flood the brand-new "Pets & Animals" category with miscategorized movies until Google takes notice of just how many "literature" videos there are out there. We are putting our entire back-catalog of recorded stories on YouTube this way, and we encourage other literary magazines, individuals, concerned citizens, audio book lovers, and spoken word enthusiasts to do the same, or at least help us agitate and mobilize.

If you already have "Literature" videos up on YouTube, we encourage you to recategorize them as "Pets & Animals" instead of what other category you might have already chosen for them, such as "Entertainment" or "Education." Since there is no good place for "Literature" videos, we might as well put them all in one place.

Here are some videos we have recently dumped into the "Pets & Literature" category. Here is "The Difference Between My Girlfriend and a Sea Captain," by Katie Coyle:



Here is "Eleventeen," by Nicolette Kittinger:



Here is "One Life," by Kevin Brown:



And here is one of my own tales, "Fear Boys With Dolls":



WITH STOUT HEARTS, AND WITH YOUR HELP, WE WILL PREVAIL!!!






Posted by miracle on Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:00:10 -0500 -- permanent link