Sound of June

June 15th 2019 @ Zázemí, Praha, Czech Republic

Sound of June was the third language happening curated by OBJECT:PARADISE — the first to call the audience the poet, and the last that Jeff Milton would co-direct — taking place on June 15th 2019 at Zázemí, Prague. The curation set out to stage a circus not for watching but for experiencing: eight readers, two musicians, and seven performers sharing one room, with no reading offered as a duty and no seat that asked to be stayed in, so that whatever the audience did in response would belong to the composition. Throughout the evening, participants witnessed readings, ink, brass, and bicycle chain converge into a single improvised score, written as much from the floor as from the stage.

Poets off the stage: a recount of Sound of June

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

At 8pm the doors open at Zázemí, a bar in New Town that looks like the basement of an art school that went bankrupt and was then rejuvenated by people who smoke cigarettes professionally and not just for fun. There is an upright piano, out of tune, a microphone on its stand, an Aristocrat with paper in its tongue, and, for a backdrop, footage of Prague in the 1930s as opposed to a woman giving birth. The room fills slowly. This is no sit-down-be-quiet-and-listen poetry show, and people seem to know it, and the ones who don’t soon discover it — the energy spills straight back out the door, where the commotion of the crowd bubbles on the cobble over sebou pivo from the potraviny down the street.

The bench at the upright belonged to Jenda Pudlák until the day before, when he called in sick. Jaromír Lelek, asked for another pianist, came through with a sixteen-year-old named Honza Zhang, who sits down and bangs the out-of-tune upright just-right piano while Heyme Langbroek settles in alongside with his trumpet, and the bop of the pianist comes in smooth with the room. Half the orchestra, it turns out, is sixteen.

The momentum takes over. Florence Williams steps to the mic, her British English cutting through the smoke, and reads about love-making and the politics of folding blankets, and beside her Adéla tips her head forward as a tattoo needle begins setting an ant into the back of her neck, its high-pitched whine bleeding directly into Heyme’s horn.

A fixie cuts through the crowd and into the space — Jeff Milton, who takes the bicycle apart and swings the greasy chain right there on the floor to the rhythm of Honza’s detuned, diluted keys.

Tyko Say sits on the edge of a chair with the Aristocrat, ripping wish-list grocery lists from its tongue, folding them into paper airplanes, and launching them blindly into the audience, and the audience writes on them and throws them back around the room.

A veteran poet takes the stage — first wave, the kind that came to Prague just after the Velvet Revolution — the reader who had telephoned that day: “What do you mean there’s going to be someone getting a tattoo while I’m on stage? No one’s going to listen to my poetry…” Now he introduces himself, introduces the poetry he is about to read, and no one listens to him, because they are at the circus.

And the drone of the tattoo needle reverberates in the clank of Jeff’s bicycle gears, and the thug piano berates his sentence, and no one is listening to the singularity, because the poetry is not being read — it is happening. The room is speaking, the airplanes are flying, and there are no poets on the stage because there are poets off the stage.

Then an airplane lands back on the lap it was launched from. Unfolded, in big green letters, it reads “Ahoj!” — and Tyko Say holds it over his head as a dancer twirls around the microphone and a woman in the corner paints the immediate feelings. “Ahoj!” he shouts. “Ahoj!” the room shouts back. “Ahoj!” he shouts back.

Then the street, where the commotion has been bubbling all evening, and the word follows everyone out. In Czech, ahoj works coming and going — hello, goodbye, depending on the doorway — and walking off into the June night it is hard to say which one the room meant, or whether the poetry knew the difference either.

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