Publikacija SEP 2011 - Vilenica

To Give or Not To Give a Voice to Poetry
(Poetry Reading and Its “Value“ Today)
Pavel Brycz
You may surely know about the cruel definition of poetry, as quoted
by my now 44-year-old contemporary, a classmate during our high
school days, and one of the smartest people I know: “Poetry is what
everybody writes and nobody reads.”
Yes. He, born in 1967, now engaged in fractals and computer animation
for NASA, actually wrote it, as secretly as I did, yet we had
discovered each other when we were already 17, when we, inspired
by a wave of Czech pop singers from the 1980s, tried to back up our
songs with a guitar, long fingers on the strings, and a freakishly highpitched
voice.
To reveal the soul and to blurt it out into the world was a bit easier if
any of the aggravated young men or ladies had turned into musos who
mastered three chords, with songs, based on ripped off melodies and
rhythmic slips, yet accompanied with words to which they definitely
owned the copyright.
In this short essay, I do not want to dive into any sort of nostalgic,
literarised memories. Oh, God no! But I would still like to take
the time to mention the context, from which I – who was born in
1968 – experienced the lyrical years during the 1980s, and entered
my 30 th with the realisation that the 1990s in the post-socialist Czech
Republic had been the “hippiest” of eras, for the Bolsheviks had cut
and run, while the capitalist market and the supremacy of money over
morals and ideals still had not started to ruin everything – will value
the “value” of poetry and its voice, if it still possesses any, at poetry
readings and public presentations.
Let the Guardian Angels or other Aliens be my guide, so I won’t
speak about poetry like the village gossip, but like an old friend, with
which it sometimes went places where one is not supposed to go.
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