Poetry Scores Art Invitational logistics for May 18

"The mind of hungered innocence must turn to strange cuisine - kebab of houseflies"

by JoAnne Houle

for Ever-Ready Bank Accounts

Poetry Scores has invited 50-plus artists from St. Louis, Hawaii, New York and Texas to make art to the same Wole Soyinka poem. Come see their work at Ever-Ready Bank Accounts, a one-night-only art exhbit and auction this Friday, May 18 at Mad Art Gallery, 2727 S. 12th. St. in Soulard,

This will be the 7th annual Art Invitational for Poetry Scores, a community-based arts organization based in St. Louis that translates poetry into other media. Our shows have a few quirks that take some explaining.

First, the basics: it's a free event, open to the public, with a cash bar operated by Mad Art and some free snacks. The art is all for sale on silent auction.

We say the event runs 7-10 p.m., but people will start wandering in before 7, we will start closing bids before 10, and we will continue to party after all the art is sold.

It is a one-night-only event and sale on Friday, May 18. If you can't make it that night but really wish you could support Poetry Scores and local artists and buy some great new art, we have a proxy bidder program. Contact creative director Chris King at brodog@hotmail.com and he will appoint you a proxy bidder to conservatively manage your money under a bid ceiling set by you.

It's a silent art auction where the artist sets the opening bid and people are welcome to bid against each other. When we see a bidding war break out, we will move to close it out, make the sale, and let the people who got outbid know they still have some cash in hand.

There will be no live auction component this year. We have experimented in the past, and couldn't make it work.

We accept payment by cash, credit card, PayPal and Square. No checks.

We split any money from art sales evenly three-ways: artist, Mad Art and Poetry Scores. Mad Art is an artist-run gallery we consider our community partner. We use our income to print multi-media projects. Any money we make Friday will fund an LP release in Istanbul of bicycle day's poetry score to Ever-Ready Bank Accounts.

Poetry Scores is a Missouri non-profit corporation with 501(c)3 federal tax status. All donations are tax-deductible. It has an all-volunteer board and staff. For more information, email creative director Chris King at brodog@hotmail.com.

Wole Soyinka and Poetry Scores live on KDHX

Poetry Scores has two live radio exeriences with KDHX this Monday, May 14 in connection to Ever-Ready Bank Accounts, our collaboration with Wole Soyinka.

* 11 a.m. Monday, May 14: Three Fried Men scores "Ever-Ready Bank Accounts" by Wole Soyinka on Mystery Train 

* 9 p.m. Monday, May 14: Wole Soyinka interviewed on Literature for the Halibut.

Listen to KDHX live online or at FM 88.1 in the St. Louis metropolitan area. Also, follow the links to the respective programs, above, where these shows will remain archived on audio for two weeks.

Wole Soyinka is the Nobel Laureate in Literature from Nigeria.

Three Fried Men is Poetry Scores' in-house band. This version of the band is all new: Chris King (voice), Josh Weinstein (double bass), Sunyatta McDermott (glockenspiel).

(The real, official score of Ever-Ready Bank Accounts is being composed on commission by bicycle day of Istanbul for an LP release in Istanbul later in 2012.)

The Poetry Scores Art Invitational for Ever-Ready Bank Accounts -- featuring more than 50 artists from St. Louis, Hawaii, Austin and New York -- will be held 7-10 p.m. Friday, May 18 at Mad Art, 2727 So. 12th. St. in St. Louis.

Poetry Scores thanks KDHX for a long, exciting partnership. It only makes sense that an internationally minded community-based multi-media project like Poetry Scores would work well with an international leader in community multi-media like KDHX. Both being in St. Louis, and all.

It's also fitting that our project with Professor Soyinka would involve radio. Poetry Scores evolved from the field recording project Hoobellatoo. Hoobellatoo's most important project was producing rebel radio for the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People on Radio Kudirat, London. Our connection to the Soyinkas originated in Radio Kudirat.

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Image: "By Wole Soyinka" by Dana Smith, for Ever-Ready Bank Accounts (2012)

Ant as "father forager" in Wole Soyinka's prison cell

For the Poetry Scores Art Invitational we are hosting next Friday, May 18 at Mad Art, 2727 So. 12th St., a number of our contributing artists are working to some of the more disturbing images in Wole Soyinka's poem Ever-Ready Bank Accounts. Soyinka attacks the problem of child hunger aggressively, unforgettably:

Children slay the cockroach for a meal
Awaiting father-forager’s return
The mind of hungered innocence must turn
To strange cuisine – kebab of houseflies
On a broomstick prong; beetles broiled in carapace
Slugs are scientific stores of high protein –
They tell me – I never tried it yet. 

These seven lines have inspired pieces by 12 artists with titles like “Children slay the cockroach for a meal,” “Awaiting father-forager’s return with empty sack,” "The mind of hungered innocence turns to strange cuisine,” “Kebab of houseflies,” “Slugs” and "Scientific stores of high protein."

It's important that the poet says of this strange cuisine, "I never tried it yet." He is an angry observer, rather than a raw sufferer. His point of view in the poem is the self-mocking, salaried intellectual who whines about a royalty check being late while children in his country are eating slugs for food.

“I take a mordant look at the huge gap between what one longs to do for the less privileged, and one’s material capacity to do so,” Soyinka told The Alton Telegraph in an interview about our project. “Self-mockery is part of it.

Soyinka wrote Ever-Ready Bank Accounts in prison, where he was detained in solitary confinement for 18 months during the Nigeria Civil War. In his prison notes The Man Died, we see where this vermin imagery may have been inspired: his flying cellmates.

The predatory rounds begin with the rains. ... From a long hibernation they emerge, beetles, flying-ants, sausage flies, moths, a violent flock of fragile wings battling the lone bulb on the pole. It is a blind and fierce riotous whirr from the long silent sleep.

Inter-species predatory warfare occupies long stretches of Soyinka's prison notes. In this case, the "father forager" is an ant carrying insect prey home to the nest.

Finally the last corpse is borne away on invisible shoulders to unseen larders, a lone wing is dropped on the doorway pile for later building schemes.

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Image is "Scientific stores of high protein" by Michael Marshall, a silverpoint drawing (color-corrected badly by me to be visible in this post)

Wole Soyinka christened them poetry-sculptures

Our first project for 2012 is Wole Soyinka's Ever-Ready Bank Accounts, which we are subjecting to what has become the Poetry Scores basics: an Art Invitational (Friday, May 18 at Mad Art) and a poetry score (by the three-man orchestra bicycle day of Istanbul), with a silent movie to be named later.

That's what we do: We translate poetry into other media, Though now I am thinking me missed an opportunity to add a new, highly appropriate medium to this project: namely, translating poetry into a mobile. Because that's what Professor Soyinka did in prison.

He wrote Ever-Ready Bank Accounts while unjustly imprisoned during the Nigerian Civil War. We know an awful lot about what he was thinking when he wrote these prison poems, because he had a lot of time to do little else than think, languishing in solitary confinement, and he managed to keep a journal of his captivity, written in the margins of books and the insides of cigarette cartons.

He is a very brave man. He gives us the imprisoned mind unvarnished. He shares, not just the fact that he nearly loses his mind -- as one would expect, over 18 months of enforced solitude -- but the loopy, embarassing, often childish things he did to hang onto his sanity, or some semblance of it. This makes for some quietly terrifying reading. We talk casually of the mind "playing tricks with itself," but Soyinka shows us what this really means.

One of these childish tricks, one of the least crazy of them, is a Poetry Scores modulation: He translated poetry into mobiles.

It started with just the mobiles:

I began to work on Mobiles, the most soothing single creation in that dark place. From first making them spontaneously I began to design them first. The weighted end was the empty shell of my toilet roll closed and filled with stones and gravel, covered in cigarette foil to glint in the sun. They functioned smoothly on several points, finely balanced. They danced and bucked in the wind. I was never tired of watching the delicacy of the movements.

Then the poet worked poetry into the new medium:

And after the plain sculptured forms? The entire artistic gestalt! Light self-contained verses to fly in the wind. Single-verse lyrics plus invectives on my tormentors (in Spanish, the latter was always written in bad Spanish) I christened them poetry-sculptures, muse-on-the-air, poetrees, sculpture in verse, etc. I made chaplets of wood and paper, wrote out verses and watched them fly.

Wole Soyinka has been remarkably engaged in our project, for a Nobel Laureate who didn't need to be bothered. He told The Alton Telegraph that Poetry Scores is "a very special celebration of creative collaboration," and he is doing a local radio interview on KDHX (9 p.m. Monday, May 14). This is a clue as to why. He is an old hand at this stuff!

Now, I guess it's up to us to translate this prison poem of his into a mobile. Or maybe we just just add the mobile to the standard Poetry Scores inter-mediary treatment, in honor of this courageous and playful poet.

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Picture from Juniper Books.

Wole Soyinka, hunger artist

Poetry Scores is hosting an Art Invitational to Wole Soyinka's poem "Ever-Ready Bank Accounts" at Mad Art Gallery (2727 So. 12th St.) 7-10 p.m. Friday, May 18. Soyinka is the Nobel Laureate in Literature from Nigeria.

Andrew Torch is guest co-curator for the invitational, which is also a silent art auction. We'll use our share of the proceeds from art sales to release bicycle day's score of Professor Soyinka's poem.

Soyinka wrote this poem while incarcerated during the Nigerian Civil War, a period also covered by his prison memoir The Man Died (1972), which I have been rereading, looking for clues to the poem and its imagery.

Ever-Ready Bank Accounts is a poem about poverty and greed. He takes greed all the way up to the abstract concentration of wealth in banks, and he takes poverty all the way down to child starvation. But this is not child starvation in the abstract; rather, Soyinka leaves us with unforgettable imagery (we might prefer to forget it) of children eating vermin to stay alive.

Rereading Soyinka's prison experiences in The Man Died, I could see why hunger was on his mind. Already a well-known and influential public intellectual, Soyinka was a political prisoner of the Nigerian military government, and he repeatedly employed one of the political prisoner's few tactical moves: He went on hunger strikes. Soyinka's prison diary is a hunger diary; indeed, it's as good as a how-to manual for engaging in and surviving a hunger strike.

He embarks on his first hunger strike the first time his legs are shackled:

Well, just in case it was real, just in case other realities such as going to the toilet, stretching out my legs in the middle of sleep or jerking them involuntarily at night from a mosquito bite, just in case all these other hazards of extistence would be manifested, would accentuate the feel of the pendants at my feet, I commenced without any internal debate a hunger strike. It was one obvious antidote to a mood which half-mocking, half-earnest raged: Ogun, comrade, bear witness how your metal is travestied!

Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron, war and politics, is Soyinka's tutelary deity. The leg irons -- iron used to shackle an acolyte of Ogun -- is a travesty that drives him to starve himself in protest.

Art Invitational May 18 for Soyinka's "Ever-Ready Bank Accounts"

Poetry Scores' Spring 2012 project is Ever-Ready Bank Accounts by Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate in Literature from Nigeria. As Professor Soyinka told The Alton Telegraph, Poetry Scores is "a very special celebration of creative collaboration."

On "special" for you this spring:

* Andrew Torch is guest co-curating an Art Invitational to the poem at Mad Art Gallery (2727 So. 12th St.) 7-10 p.m. Friday, May 18 (it's also a silent art auction)

* meanwhile, the three-man orchestra bicycle day from our sister city Istanbul is scoring the poem on our commission. We plan a vinyl LP release in Istanbul, with digital downloads in St. Louis and everywhere else.

"Ever-Ready Bank Accounts" began its life as a prison poem, first published in Wole Soyinka's collection of solitary detention poems, Shuttle in the Crypt (1972). Soyinka endured a very peculiar, sub-legal incarceration in the turmoil surrounding the Nigerian Civil War. This story is told for all time in his prison memoir The Man Died (also 1972), to my taste one of the 20th century's most bravura performances in prose.

I reread The Man Died recently on an exploratory Poetry Scores mission to Hilo and Honolulu, Hawaii. I'll aim to blog about it while we're producing the Soyinka project. Here's a first post:

The Man Died reads as a composite text, where a free man has drafted new thoughts over the often desperate and at times crazed scribbles of an unjustly detained man. I remembered that he scribbled new thoughts between the lines of the few books he had with him during his captivity, but I was amazed to see one of the books in which Soyinka wrote his prison poems and journal was Primitive Religion by Paul Radin.

Paul Radin! Paul Radin has a spot on the shortest short list of Poetry Scores' ancestors. Radin did all the original ethnography on The Winnebago Indians, whose migrations used to include the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the source of our home city, St. Louis.

The Winnebago's startling trickster cycle concludes at the river confluence. We know about that today thanks to Paul Radin, who in The Trickster left us (in my personal opinion) America's greatest prose (ethno)poem. I borrowed my first copy of The Trickster from Heather Bascom, who had an enormous influence on the rocks bands from which Poetry Scores evolved.

I have read most of everything Paul Radin did on The Winnebago. You could poetry score all of it, actually. Our rock band Three Fried Men scored a fragment of The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian, Radin's as-told-to Sam Blowsnake memoir. Here is that song.

Mahalo for a beautiful Olaha for the visiting artist

Leonard Kubo, Dawn at Kewalo

My first morning in Hilo, Hawaii, where I am a visiting artist in the Art Department at the University of Hawaii, I walked a few blocks into downtown from the quaint inn where I am staying. My host, Art Department chair Michael Marshall, encouraged me to see the Spring show up at the East Hawaii Cultural Center in downtown Hilo.

I thought it was a terrific show, and when I reported for duty at the Art Department later that day I had a list of artists from the show to run down with Michael and his faculty. We went down the list -- she's a student, he's a former student, we know her, he's a lecturer here -- and ended up with only one blank. No one knew who Leonard Kubo was.

I really liked his painting. It was simple, spare and representational, with images of everyday, workaday Hawaiians. The Hilo Art Department and Poetry Scores are embarking on a longterm collaboration translating the work of Hawaiian poet Wayne Kaumualii Westlake into other media. We will work on Westlake's 1972-3 poetic sequence Down on the Sidewalk in Waikiki, which deals with the poet's year working as a janitor on Honolulu's tourist strip. Moving into a major multi-media treatment of perhaps the world's greatest contribution to the literature of janitors, set in Hawaii, we are going to need some artists with a respect for the subject of workaday Hawaiians.

The Art Department at Hilo is currently housed down the hill from the main campus, where the department is administrated. When we went up the hill to the main campus and Michael checked his mailbox, there was quite a surprise. Hawaii is famously the land of Olaha, the home of the warmest welcome in the world, and here was a beautiful Olaha for the visiting artist.

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Chris King
University of Hawaii - Hilo
Art Department

I saw in today's Hawaii Tribune Herald that you will be working on a project featuring a poem by Wayne Westlake.

Leonard & I knew Wayne from UH-Manoa poetry class days, and want to say thank you for paying tribute to him. He was a wonderful person, a gentleman and a poet. You hear of people saying about someone, "Everyone loved him" and wonder how that can be true, but Wayne really was a kind and decent and loving person, and very devoted to poetry.

I don't know how you chose Wayne's poem, but I hope when your project is done you will advertise it so we can be sure to see the finished project.

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The letter was signed "Mari Kubo". The "Leonard" she referenced in the letter was Leonard Kubo! When I called them at the number on the letter, this was indeed the Leonard Kubo I had been looking for. Aloha!

I invited them to my public presentation on campus for Thursday, April 19. Leonard said maybe Mari could attend, but he had a gig. A gig? Yes, a gig -- he plays guitar. I rushed to explain the Poetry Scores model of translating poetry into music, visual art, movies and whatever media will have us, typically starting with music, because the people who founded Poetry Scores happen to be musicians.

Will you send us some of your music? I asked Leonard. In addition to being in our Wayne Westlake Art Invitational? Yes, he will send us some of his music, in addition to being in our Wayne Westlake Art Invitational.

Once you get to Hawaii, you learn a word in addition to Aloha, which we all learn on the mainland. Here, you also learn Mahalo: thank you.

Mahalo.