Further proposals for demoralizing your local literary community
A Discordia guide to ruining everything.
The first edition of our Modest Proposals for Demoralizing Your Local Literary Community has already gone through six printings (in zine format), and has been responsible for an estimated 13 people quitting the arts entirely. In that spirit, we asked the Poetry Heel to provide another batch of suggestions for radical social surgery.
Starving Artists Night: Forbid writers from eating for 12 to 18 hours prior to the reading (water is fine). Attach a contact mic to their stomach while they read that is connected to a much more powerful amplifier than their vocal mic. Progressively crank their stomach volume until it completely drowns out their voice.
Interrupt the night’s featured poet mid-set to ask them their star sign. Look extremely troubled by whatever their answer is, and begin whispering animatedly to the co-conspirator sitting next to you. Ask the poet more detailed questions about the date, hour, and place of their birth. Pipe down and allow them to get through their next poem or two, and then stand up, unfurl a large chart, and announce that, according to your calculations, the poet is heterosexual.
Whose Bloodline is it Anyway? Book a panel of writers of dubious Indigeneity for a discussion on the importance of authentic identity and traditional ways. After they take their seats on stage, announce that the evening’s moderator will be a representative of the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds.
Wait until a poet jokingly announces their next poem is about their ex. Have their “ex,” wearing a full suit of medieval armour, storm onstage halfway through the poem and chase the performer out of the room with a broadsword.
Show up to an event with a huge backpack and a folding table under your arm. Act upset and say you came from across town to table at a charity makers market, but you mixed up the dates. After the organizers sympathetically agree to let you set up anyway, have a dozen of your friends suddenly appear with their own tables, all of them selling literal garbage (used condoms and syringes, broken vapes, hillocks of wet newsprint). When nothing sells, grab the house mic and angrily declare that the event will not go on until $1,000 has been raised for The Cause.
Too Many Cooks; or, The MFA Workshop Method: Project a Google Doc of the material the night’s writers will be performing on a large screen. Share a link to said document with the audience so they can all make live line-edits on their phones as the authors attempt to read their work.
Start an online journal called something like midrif or as skinny feels or ‘absolute territory’ that exclusively publishes the terrible poetry of an endless series of scantily clad self-described art hos (who are, of course, pictured in said state of undress). Launch a glossy print anthology with full-colour photos but ‘forget’ to include any of the poems.
Charge readers reparations in cash before they are allowed to speak. Redistribute the funds directly to the audience by stuffing the amounts in small change into Ziploc bags and firing them out of a T-shirt cannon.
Show up to a book launch dressed in a large mascot outfit of the book being launched. Continually call into question just what authority the author on stage has to speak about you. Claim any read excerpts are being taken out of context. Loudly explain the book (explain yourself, rather) to the author and the audience.
Mise en scène: The audience sits on a towering stage. A microphone is lowered on a very long cable into the dank pit below, where the poet must perform.
Open Mic Presented by FanDuel Night: Partner with an online betting app to allow an audience watching at home to place bets on the readers’ subject matter, whether they’ll run the light (and over/under on by how much), ill-advised parlays on if a certain number of poets in a row will talk about the residency they just did, etc. Project constantly shifting betting lines on a large screen behind the readers, and have the host shill various prop bets during their intros.
Advertise a “live writer’s residency experience.” Seat a writer alone onstage with a desk and a plant. For two hours the audience then watches them check their phone.
Start a new chapbook press and host a competition with a sizable entry fee for your debut series of releases. Publish six chapbooks. Do not tell the authors you will be printing them with the “single-folded-sheet-of-paper” micro-zine method. Show up to the launch wearing an ostentatious new watch.
Poetry Eugenics Night: Set up a speed-dating type scenario in the lobby of a hotel where participants rotate tables and read one another a piece of their own poetry. Whenever a proctor hears two people whose writing is good at the same table, the duo is to be provided a key to a room in the hotel and a water balloon full of lubricant.
Bring together your city’s most tastelessly edgy hacks for a reading. At the end of the night, tell them their schtick is embarrassing. When they attempt to defend themselves, have an actor in the audience stand up, identify himself as Dennis Cooper, and confirm that they do actually suck.
Purchase a copy of your city’s most popular lit mag. Reach out to the first writer in the issue, asking if you can re-publish their piece in your lit mag. Authors love to be re-published. Repeat this step for every piece in the popular lit mag until you have recreated the issue in full under your own name.
Eat an excess of chili and show up to a publisher’s wine and cheese mixer. If anyone seems cross with you, lecture them about ableism and claim you have IBS and deserve to be catered to in this space. Do not leave until you have been offered a book deal.
Include a line on your show’s poster that the wine bar will be curated by some fancy-sounding mononymous French guy. Charge $12 to $15 a glass for old corner store wine you poured into fancier bottles.
Ask a theory-dropping poet to concisely explain the theoretical work they just offhandedly referenced.
America the Beautiful Night: If in a non-US country, invite a New York- or Los Angeles-based magazine to town to do a launch. When they arrive, they should find that every person at the party is dressed head-to-toe in red, white, and blue, with a variety of patriotic songs playing over the house speakers. When the visiting guests go up to the microphone to introduce the show, quietly unfurl a banner with a giant photo of President Trump behind them and snap as many photographs as possible before they notice.
If in the US, proceed as normal.
Adopt a poetic alter-ego represented by a puppet. Make the puppet read intentionally dreadful poems. When your act becomes a hit, slowly start incorporating lines from other open mic regulars until you’re just doing their whole schtick.
Require every reader to begin their set with a trigger warning. After each warning, ring a bell and ask for clarifications. Continue drilling down until their entire time slot has been consumed by groveling self-criticism.
Beatdown Hardcore Night: Conduct a reading exactly like a beatdown hardcore show. Do it in a legion basement, put a shitload of reverb on the mic so the readers are both unintelligible and deafeningly loud, periodically instruct the audience to “open up this fucking pit,” have random dudes stagediving, end the night abruptly after two factions in the audience get into a brawl over whether Chuck Palahniuk is a supporter of the Azov Brigade.
Set up a trap door on stage in front of the microphone. Use as needed to drop performers into the dunk tank hidden below.
Overrepresentation Night: Offer to publish a chapbook by the most zealous, censorious white undergraduate student voice on issues of representation in your scene. For their launch, invite only non-college-educated people of colour you’ve paid to attend and, after the set, have them give the poet their honest opinions about what they just heard.
For the second issue of your lit mag, employ a guest editor. For every issue going forward, request this guest editor do one more issue. Stop responding to emails.
With many thanks to Gwen Aube for conceptual assistance.
If we are questioned about the nature of The Cause that the charity makers market is for, should we prepare a fake cause that sounds real enough that we can respond with in advance, or should we just roll our eyes and sadly shake our heads while muttering about how unbelievable it is that some people can be so privileged that they are able to remain blind to the obvious suffering around them?