Poetry of Sound

November 11th, 2018 @ The Czech Inn

Poetry of Sound was the first language happening curated by OBJECT:PARADISE, taking place on November 11th 2018 in the red-brick cellar of the Czech Inn, Prague. At the time, OBJECT:PARADISE was an idea rather than a collective, and the curation set out to put the sound of language before its meaning — poetry read to improvised piano so that a poem would arrive first as rhythm, staged for whoever the happy hour happened to bring downstairs. Throughout the evening, participants witnessed spoken word, projected image, and typewriter percussion fall in and out of sync with the keys.

A friend of a friend: a recount of Poetry of Sound

^{Written by Tyko Say, July 26, 2026}

Happy hour on Krymská, the 11th of November. Upstairs the Czech Inn is doing hostel things, boys who traveled in stacked into their bunkbeds, and downstairs is a cellar of red brick where the happy hour runs six to eight, a Brežnak costs 20 Kč, and the woman pouring them is mean in a nice way. The floor is sticky before anyone has spilled a thing. On the raised stage sit a red piano, an Aristocrat typewriter with no assignment yet, and a projector aimed at the brick.

The brick moves first. Jeff Milton has edited and stitched together twenty minutes of video — a woman giving birth, the universe expanding out of her — and projects it as the backdrop to everything the stage is about to do. It has something to do with his piece Wild Buffalo, or the other way around.

Jenda Pudlák sits down at the red piano and plays it loudly proudly to the hostel strangers, who are probably only accidentally there and who stay anyway. Most of them came down for the 20 Kč pint; the piano doesn’t check.

Tyko Say takes the stage and reads Kačerov, a piece named for the South Town neighborhood, mispronouncing all of the Czech words on accident and then, later, on purpose.

Kačerov,
Kačerov

You’re a tired pavement
walked on by outskirt
city buses full with
kebab boxes and
wrist watches

Mid-reading, Ásgeir H Ingólfsson comes onto the stage with no announcement and no need for one, takes up the Aristocrat, and begins ramming it like a percussion instrument to Jenda’s keys, the clanks and the glugs in and out and somehow in sync with each other while the poem keeps on —

and monday maso market
meetups
with the girl

who gives out
only ham
and never
her name

Somewhere inside the poem a man fiddles under his hat like a table tennis champion shouting platit! platit! — and the room pays.

Jaromír Lelek and Autumn James take their turns on the raised stage.

By now the cellar has worked up a deep-throated cackle that keeps the boys in the bunkbeds upstairs awake. There are people you know and people you want to know. Men stand at the bar in long coats clapping their long softened hands, and from the counter drifts a form of language unfamiliar, then silence, then a wink.

A Spanish man appears in the doorway holding an orange with an oval sticker that reads #1003. “What is this?” he asks. “I heard about it from a friend of a friend,” Jeff tells him. Neither of them explains the orange.

At eight the happy hour ends and the cackle doesn’t notice. The universe keeps expanding across the brick, and the clanks and the glugs keep slipping in and out of sync — on accident, and then on purpose —

Kačerov,
Kačerov,

you took my hand
under an umbrella
& showed me from
where all the cobble
was stolen

Then the street, and the night tram home going, this once, the right way, with the question from the doorway riding along the whole route — what is this? Nobody in the cellar could have answered him exactly, only that they had heard about it from a friend of a friend, and that leaving, they were already becoming the friend somebody would hear it from next.

Participants