Surprise!

I'm in Cairo. Back to Paris and poetry and various other happenings on Monday. Not that I updated regularly anyway...

Learn some French

I'm going to share some phrases/ expressions that I like. It's a way to fill space, since I've been bad at posting, and hopefully interesting.

The first one is actually from a story my roommate told :

" J'te coupe la tête, j'te chie dans le corps"

I don't know if I would call this a threat or an insult. It literally means "I'll cut of your head and shit in your body," but I think it sounds better if you say " I'll cut off your head and shit down your throat." This is not something that French people actually say, at least I've never heard it. I think this is more just a creative/angry person expressing themselves in a grocery store.

Wowza, maybe should have chosen something more pleasant to start out with. Oh well, bedtime.

Adventures in Poésie, the beginning

I swear it must be true: there is poetry in the air we breathe or this crazy wind we're having or something. This is how I explain my newly developed interest in poetry--more specifically in open-mic, slam type poetry events. I go to them all the time. It all started a while back...

A few months ago, my friend Saskia discovered this Meetup called Spoken Word. It's a group that meets weekly at this sweet bar in Belleville called Culture Rapide.

I must have started going well into my hater phase (actually, I confirm, I did), because most of the time I was just cringing or trying hard to pretend to pay attention. I tend to get nervous and embarrassed on behalf of friends, family, and strangers reading poetry, apparently.

I can't deal with a poem that's too self-aware and has to prove that it's a real live poem.

I get annoyed with that clichéd spoken-word style. Hopefully you know what I mean, I'm good at imitating the cadence, but I can't figure it out in blog form. This one dude tricked me for a second with his repetition, rhythm and emphasis, then at the end my friend and I both realized that his entire poem was nothing, it was just about sounding like spoken word. Maybe that's the point, but whatever it annoyed me.

Then there was the zaaaaany guy who called himself an italian surrealist toaster poet. I just made that up, but it was something similar. His poems were just like "zap bam I ate the stars, pizza" type of stuff.

The only thing that I really remember liking was this girl with an incredibly husky, deep (and not so great) voice who sang the Tori Amos song "Leather" and a song I had never heard of, but loved. I remember roughly the way her voice sounded, but it's another thing that I can't imitate in blog form. If only I were more poetic...

I really tried to be more open-minded, and I am seriously impressed that people are brave enough to go do that in front of a lot of strangers who could be secret, hypocrite jerks, like me. Cause I'll criticize until I turn colors, but I'm definitely not brave enough to write poetry.