Went to the Ahadada reading at Beyond Baroque tonight with Neil. Jesse Glass’s adorable son Yoichi opened the reading with a brief speech on the origins of the press’s name – when he was one-year old, he would say “Ahadada.” Jerome Rothenberg suspects that that he was trying to say “Hahadada” which means “mother and father.” But Daniel Sendecki saw a happy accident in this turn of phrase, relating it to the surrealists, and thus Ahadada was born. The press is run by Jesse Glass in Tokyo and Daniel Sendecki in Toronto. The reading featured Daniel, Bruna Mori, Catherine (Cassia?) Daly, Jesse, and Jerome Rothenberg.

Daniel first read poems from his book Strange Currencies – a travelogue of time spent traveling in the Far East, opening with a piece written upon traveling down the Yangtze River and contemplating the abandoned villages surrounding the 3 Gorges Dam.

Bruna Mori followed with a distracting reading – she got up on stage, took off her full-length coat which she draped over her seat, and rearranged the podium area so she could read while seated on a stool, using a music stand. After a short struggle with the mic, she opened with a Cid Corman poem and followed with homophonic translations of an Argentine poet. She closed with a poem by Corman called “La Bruna” referencing her own name. Bruna seemed to flirt with the audience a bit and to subvert a bit of the evening’s programming – the main event was to be followed by a Cid Corman tribute (which I did not stay for) so her early reading of the Corman work seemed preemptive.

Catherine Daly followed Bruna with a reading of poems from her Secret Kitty manuscript. Catherine is intense – in this particular light, she looked like kari edwards and was extremely serious in her presentation. I was confused by a name change thing, also distracting – she was being introduced as “Cassia” but people were referring to her as Catherine (as on her blog). To write the Secret Kitty poems, Catherine extracted source material from a Hello Kitty coloring book which she then fed into internet search engines like google. She then translated them thru sites like dictionary.com, ask jeeves, and babelfish. Several of the poems were interesting and her turns of phrase even reminded me at times of my own work – particularly my Nutritional Feed poems. But what frustrated me about this work is that in reflecting on my own labor intensive process, I am aware that I work really hard to write poems. It bothered me that the creative process could be so automated/mechanized to remove the energy of the creative process from the making of the poem. In the end, though there were some interesting lines, I felt that Catherine’s longer sequences went on a bit. And apparently, she has more than one project in this vein – perhaps with different search engines/techniques, but the automation of the poem writing process.

Jesse Glass followed Catherine’s reading with poems from his new book – wonderful pieces – a poem after 9-11, a piece on the war in Iraq and a long poem on Phineas Gage, a historical character who was subjected to a horrible, life-altering head injury. Jesse was dressed very sharply and professorial in a grey suit, giving a solid presence to the reading, as did Daniel – I know Mark Lamoureux often wears neckties to his own readings – makes me think of what Chogyam Trungpa wrote about dressing to promote drala and to raise one’s spirit, which I definitely subscribe to.

Jerome Rothenberg finished the set with a performance of a Hugo Ball sound poem and a reading of his own work The Dada Strain – which is derived from a jazz song. After he performed the poem, he read the original lyrics which made for a great performance. Jerome also read from a series of poems written after seeing images of buddhas in the Dong Huang caves of China – the final piece in the sequence he dedicated to Anne Waldman and wrote and read the piece in the style and fervor of Anne’s work. This was a fantastic and diverse reading with Jesse and Jerome giving the strongest readings and a friendly and convivial spirit pervading all.

The Beyond Baroque space itself is an interesting black box theater with a first rate bookstore stocking all sorts of small press publications, and apparently there is also a small press room/archive. Viggo is a member of the board for this little independent space which is located in a residential neighborhood in Venice Beach.