After more than two decades of bringing poetry into clubs, festivals, jam sessions, and rooms that were not expecting it, Adam Gregory Pergament explains how FlowPoetry learned to make its own place.
Spoken poetry is not usually where I spend my listening time. That is exactly why “Bridge of Light” got my attention. The music came first for me: keyboard-like tones, strings, loops, and a soft wash that sounds almost like white noise. Then one line stayed behind: “Serenade me a circle of light.”
FlowPoetry calls its form Lyrical Jam Poetry, placing spoken language in musical settings that can move through jazz, blues, and jam rock. “Bridge of Light” gave me an entrance into that idea without asking me to become a listener I am not. The written poem offered one path through the piece, while the recording created a much larger atmosphere around it.
Poetry and live music have shared public rooms before. Kenneth Rexroth read with jazz musicians in San Francisco clubs, and Jack Kerouac recorded with Steve Allen at a single piano. Coffeehouses, bars, and small stages gave poets places where a voice could work beside an instrument instead of remaining alone on the page. That history offered one place to begin this conversation, but it did not tell me where Adam Gregory Pergament would place his own work within it.
Madison also had an active poetry and music culture before the first documented FlowPoetry performance on August 6, 2002. Adam’s archive begins there and continues through bands, solo appearances, rotating collaborators, music and arts festivals, books, recordings, and an unusually detailed collection of set lists. It shows where he performed and who joined him, but an archive can only tell part of the story.
The questions that remained were about what happened inside those rooms. How did a poet find space in music scenes where the audience had arrived for something else? What changed when the words and the players did not balance? What did a fixed band make possible, and what became possible after that band ended? How does an artist with so much live experience understand an online audience? And after more than two decades of continuing, what does success look like now?
Adam answered those questions generously. The conversation reaches back to the Madison scene where FlowPoetry began, then moves through touring, collaboration, audience resistance, the end of Venice Gas House Trolley, and the enormous archive left by a working life. It also enters the poems themselves, including “Bridge of Light,” “Chasing the World,” “Ariadne,” “Garden,” and “The Ticking of the Earth.” Those stories and meanings belong in his answers.
The Interview
Your set-list archive dates the first FlowPoetry performance to Madison on August 6, 2002. Around that time, the city already had coffeehouse open mics, spoken-word events, and a university slam featuring Saul Williams. What was the Madison poetry and music scene really like from inside it, and which rooms or people helped you see where FlowPoetry might belong?
Adam:
“Everyone’s looking for something they’ve already got. / Walkin’ around town talkin’ that way, it’s lucky we don’t all get shot. / Now I’ve said it in the past, guess I’ll say it once more. / If they lock it in our face, we’re gonna kick down that door. / Get up off the floor and punch ‘em in the face./ Get up off the floor and shower them with grace. / Get up off the floor and punch ‘em in the face. / Get up off the floor, you’d better get up off the floor.” – From Off The Floor by FlowPoetry
Well, OK… let’s start by going back 1700 plus shows and close to 100 music and arts festival appearances ago.
In the early 2000s in Madison there were three basic camps of poetry. In no particular order, the first was the poetry that revolved around the University of Wisconsin English Department MFA Creative Writing Program. This was an academic scene and it was closed physically and, in no small measure, by dint of an assumed superiority to those who weren’t studying for a degree. They would have readings featuring MFA candidates, supporting creative writing students from other universities, and hosting professors, and it was all buttoned up. A room, a podium, people sitting in chairs and a pretty dry scene.
The second, a Poetry Slam scene was also starting to gain momentum in town, coming on the heels of HBO’s Def Jam Poetry show. Slam poets on tour would visit from time to time and they did shows for the university students at the student union and things of that nature. Local slams were popping up and that all culminated later in the National Slam Championship that happened in Madison in 2008.
Finally, there was a kind of catch-all local poetry scene which would happen at poetry open-mics around town every week. The one that I started going to was at the Cafe Montmarte just off the Capital Square downtown and was called “Cheap At Any Price Poets“. I’d show up on a Tuesday night there and join 20 or so poets and everybody would get 3-5 minutes to do their thing.
I quickly realized I fell between the cracks with those scenes. I wasn’t welcome into the academic rooms, being viewed with more than a bit of disdain as too musical and theatrical than the sober readings taking place. I had memorized a lot of my poems, and that in itself was viewed with suspicion, because I wasn’t necessarily reading them off the page although they were presented line by line accurate to what I had taken time and labored over during the writing process. The Slam scene, on the other hand, was a drag for me personally as I really believed (and still do) that poetry shouldn’t be competitive and a Slam was something where poets would sign up, people would be picked randomly from the audience to be “judges”, and the poet would get 3 minutes on stage to impress them. Then the audience members who had been picked to be judges would hold up cards giving poets a score from 0 to 10.
I went to my first Slam and I did my thing and I wound up second to last and was actually quite pleased with that. I didn’t want to be last but second to last was OK with me. The person who won told me backstage before he went on that his goal was to make the audience cry because he knew if he could make them cry he would win. And sure enough, he went on stage and told a graphic story about child abuse in a three minute dramatic monologue with a very recognizable rhythm and cadence that was almost universal in the Slam scene nationwide at that time. My rhythms and cadences were jazz and rock-n-roll and psychedelic jam flows and my poetry wasn’t self-confessional monologues based upon my childhood. Anyway, he won and bragged about his mastery of poetry as an oral art and decided I was uncool when I mentioned that I wrote my poems on the page and even edited from time to time. He told me I was part of the repressive establishment for that fact. Ironic, as the establishment didn’t want anything to do with me either.
I remember deciding to go to one more Slam in order to poke and prank at the scene and so with a bit of a boulder on my shoulder, I chose to perform a poem with a lot of internal rhyme that, if read off the page, would take about 5 minutes and 30 seconds to get through. As they only give you 3 minutes (and if you go over time they start ringing bells and scowling and yelling at you to wind it up), what I did was I memorized it and practiced it so that I could do this 5 minute and 30 second poem in about 3 minutes and 15 seconds at a speed that rendered it almost unintelligible for the judges. I went up there and I did that and right at the 3 minute mark they started ringing the bells and yelling and I knew I had 15 more seconds to go and I smiled at the Slam referees and plowed through and ended just as they were standing up to physically haul me away. I finished 2nd to last again (after a “points deduction”). The winner this time was performer who did a 3 minute dramatic monolgue about how he was Jesus and had been nailed up on a cross by societal forces and oppressors.
So that left me with the various poetry open-mics around town. And I would go and spend the whole evening waiting to do 5 minutes of poetry. And then I would sit there for three hours until the event ended. Don’t get me wrong, the other poets were fun to hang out with, but I was really yearning to practice a longer form, to be able to start to jam and musically express myself through chanting and playing with the lines, and exploring rhythm, slowing things down and speeding things up in a musical sort of way.
I guess what that all taught me is that I didn’t belong anywhere and I was somewhere lost in the liminal spaces of the available poetry-centric scenes in town. And so I decided that I would go to the musician open mics and jam sessions because I had heard that in those open mics they’d give you 15 minutes. And so I went and the first one I walked into was a blast. A stage with a decent enough PA, a good mic, and an actual sound-guy. It was at a place called the Liquid Lyrics Lounge and they had bands and they had singer songwriters and I signed up and went up and did my spoken word poetry and when I got off the stage the musicians surrounded me. They clapped quite a lot after my set and they were excited and happy and they said “Man this is wonderful! We’d always hoped that some poets would come by because we have all this music and we need words.” And that was really exciting and it was affirming.
I walked out of that open mic high and happy and as I got to the door there was a fairly gruff bouncer, a big guy all dressed in black and in a bad mood I guess. I said “Hey man this was wonderful I’m so glad and thank you for having me down you know I was new to the scene thank you for having me down and ummm welcoming my poetry and do poets often come to these things?” And he glared down at me and said “Well poets come sometimes, but they better never fucking come back”. So right there I decided that, well guess what brother, I’m coming back every week. I also kept going to the poetry open mics to get the work in and learn the craft and in 2004 I performed that way 178 times around town. Read More
And so I did that and I started to get in good with the musicians and bands and things formed out of that. I also used to go a lot to the jazz jams as Madison was an active off-shoot of the Chicago free jazz and avant-garde scene. We were close enough to Chicago and a lot of the free jazz cats from there would come to town to jam and gig. Roscoe Mitchell of the Art Ensemble of Chicago was teaching at the university, bassist Richard Davis who played with Miles Davis on some of his albums was also teaching there and jazz was really happening. And to my joy, the free jazz cats were really happy to have me sit-in and so I found my spot with the singer/songwriters, the rock-n-roll bands, and the free jazz cats.
People may connect poetry with live accompaniment to the Beat era, including Kenneth Rexroth’s jazz-club readings and Jack Kerouac working with Steve Allen at a single piano. Do you see Lyrical Jam Poetry as part of that lineage, or did your approach grow from a different history?
Adam:
“And I pay my respects to the poets who have come before / Kerouac and Ginsberg and Snyder and the ones who had to sleep on the floor / And the ones in the alleyways downtown and all around / If they hadn’t walked it first I’d be lost and never found. / And all the other midnight riders who spit words in the dark / And cried tears of sorrow and tried to strike a spark. / And those who lived hard time decisions and revisions and revisions / Not like bobble-headed pigeons who cluck walking around a park.” – From I Know I by FlowPoetry
I read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road as a kid and I still read Ginsberg’s stuff. But it was Kerouac’s Dharma Bums that really turned me on. I remember reading about Gary Snyder and Zen Buddhism and his travels to Japan and it kind of set me on a path. At one point I lived for six years in Taiwan smoking hashish, drinking oolong tea, reading and taking trips in India and Nepal and fashioned myself a Dharma Bum with my backpack traveling around and writing poems. When I later decided to dedicate my life to Poetry, I set out to disentangle myself from those Beat influences and remember clearly wanting to try to avoid as much as possible the whiff of “Beat Poetry” in my work. I had a classical Japanese sense of the arc of discipline that entailed total immersion in what had come before and then a sloughing off of all of that in order to create space for new creativity to burst forth. I wanted to do something new something different something musical and something that was not readily identifiable as Beat. I love it and respect it but “counterfeit Kerouac” and “cheap Ginsberg” as an imitation kind of thing isn’t my bag.
I’ve since made my way back around a bit and now embrace all forms from the ancient to the future. I mean an American poet can’t really escape the Beats and my history as a Deadhead (I saw 108 Grateful Dead shows with Jerry) and my love of and involvement with the Merry Pranksters (I rode on the Further Bus in 2014 as part of Zane Kesey’s 50th Anniversary Further Tour always leads me back around into that mode and I do love it.
But with that in mind, I try to allow my poetry to be in ways that isn’t necessarily Beat as one might find it frozen in time in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Spontaneous OK, Jazz influenced OK, but I’m not an imitator. I am an innovator. The stuff with Kenneth Roxroth, Lawrence Felinghetti’s recordings (I cover “I Am Waiting” both solo and with bands) and Kerouac with Steve Allen is all wonderful, don’t get me wrong. However, for me, as I got more involved with musicians, I learned a lot about sound and I learned a lot about frequencies. I learned about balancing sound on stage and tonality and when I listen to those recordings, those early recordings of of poets with musicians, it seems to my ear that the musicians were very consciouly taking a back seat to the poets and serving the poetry, which is which is great, but the musical collaboration itself between the poet and the musicians was not necessarily privileged. The collaborative synergy and the creation of something that is more than poetry over music is what I’m after.
Lyrical Jam is part of that Beat lineage but it also skips in around and through musical genres from Cosmic Cowboy Spaghetti Western modes to Americana to Freak Folk to Psychedelic Rock to Blues and Jazz and follows a Jamband ethos of poems that segue seamlessly into other poems. It’s cognizant of the classical South Asian Indian notion of rasa and the creation of bhava, it can be shamanic at times, is not afraid of allowing ambient and environmental sound to shine, brushes against experimental soundscapes, and always aims at the heart while still trying to get the words across. Poetry is Music is Sound is Music is Poetry.
A 2007 Wisconsin poetry publication described Venice Gas House Trolley as trying to make space for poetry where it might not have been welcome previously. Was reaching people who were not looking for poetry already a conscious strategy, and what did an audience’s resistance look like when the idea did not land?
Adam:
“We are outcasts in exile / A people without a land. / Nomads crazed by miles of roads/ On a mission without a plan. / And it wove us through the air, / And it warped us past the moon, / On wings stretched thin with silken threads / Spun by ten thousand hands on ten thousand looms.- From Outcasts In Exile by FlowPoetry
Prior to Venice Gas House Trolley (https://vght.bandcamp.com), I was in a band called StoneFloat (https://archive.org/details/stonefloat2006-01-19.flac16). StoneFloat was the first band that arose out of those music open mics that I mentioned and I wound up with four guys who had an Alice In Chains grunge slash hardcore Americana kind of band and they were very welcoming and loved the poetry. It was crazy fun and the musicians adapted to channel some of the energy of the approach that I had at that time. The lead singer was an accomplished vocalist and a percussive rhythm guitar player and he would belt out these kind of grunge like songs and then those would fade and I’d step up to the mic and start doing my poetry and they would improvise behind me. And then at some point we’d jam into a another grunge song. It was a real whiplash of a group that lasted about 14 months.
We had residencies around town and did some regional touring. That was how I started to learn the business. The band ultimately self-destructed being built for aggressive speed and not for longevity. And as weird as we were, we felt like we had to knock down doors to get our gigs and that stengthened a mindset I had internalized of a real mission to open space for poetry within the currrent music scene.
That mindset actually was birthed from an incident a year or so earlier related to the Bush Administration and Laura Bush in particular seeking to do a Poetry reading at the White House to memorialize the 9/11 attacks that occurred in New York. According to a story I read in the newspapers at the time, Lauara Bush contacted the US Poet Laureate and said, Hey gather some of your poet friends, bring them to the White House Rose Garden in DC and let’s do a reading. And then someone in the Administration thought that you know, maybe we better take a look at these poems before we unleash these poets at the White House. And so evidently, the poems came in and there was a range of poetic responses from very nationalistic poems to those that were critical of nationalism and patriotism. At that point the White House poetry reading memorializing 9/11 was canceled and I remember reading that and getting very emotional and thinking, you know, if poetry is perceived as a threat to the powers that be then that means there’s something very independent and important about poetry.
This was also around the time when free speech and censorship on TV was a hot topic and some of these issues were bubbling up and these came together in my mind and I thought, well the poet is really one of the last true independent voices in the land. And that invigorated my mission to advocate for poetry in the scenes that I was in. I believed then as I still do now that the times we live in demand a vigorous creative response and I feel strongly that radically creative self-expression in the Arts is how we can all move forward.
During the mid-60’s and the advent of the hippie scene, poets were part of the conversation. The 1967 Human Be-In Festival in San Francisco in Golden Gate Park was opened by poets on the stage. Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg did poetry before the bands took over there. A poetry reading at Albert Hall, two years prior to that in 1965 drew 6000 to see Allen Ginsberg read and I wondered why poets were no longer part of the scene some 45 or so years later. Poets had somehow gotten themselves placed in their own little cul-de-sac of sorts and you didn’t see poets on bills with musicians and poet fronted bands. Of course you had Lou Reed out there and Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan and Laurie Anderson but where were the rest of the poets on bills opening for bands? And I thought well I want to do this and go into these places with the bands that I work with. It’s gonna be Poetry and we’re gonna open up doors and create space so that the next time a poet tries to show themselves as a viable entertainment option, maybe they won’t be looked at askance.
And to be sure, I was fighting not only talent buyer resistance but also audiences that weren’t sure what was going on when I performed. Some people weren’t able to really listen you know as the shortening of attention spans was already starting back then. Sometimes people would get confused because I’m not a singer and so I’m up there and I’m doing my poetry but I’m not singing. I would walk off stage with my head held high, walk through an audience and they’d all look down at the ground. I would say wow this is interesting and later I came to realize that the words that I was using were maybe words that people didn’t know. For example, I have a poem that I’ve done many times called Withinindra. Indra references the South Asian Indian God who created a net/web which connects all points of the universe and at each intersection a jewel is placed that reflects, through its many facets, all things. It’s metaphor for interconnectedness and the way that we are all intertwined. If a person does something at one part of Indra’s net, it ripples all the way through and it’s a beautiful image. My poem starts with the line “Withinindra’s net a thousand jewels reside, of this we are sure” and I realized one day, you know as soon as I said “Withinindra” I’ve lost an audience…they don’t get it. These days to try to bridge that gap, I’ll chant “We are all connected” before doing that poem, and hope that sort of vibe knits things together.
But I’m stubborn and I would persist and we would go to bars in Northern Wisconsin and the Packers game would be on and so our gig which was supposed to start at 9 pm would be pushed back to 11 pm because of overtime at the game and we would be told to sit and wait. In a tavern in Eau Claire, WI, we played our first set and then got 2 songs and poems into the second set only to see the bartender come over and say you guys got to wrap it up, the people want to listen to the jukebox . So I’d face things like that.
I have chosen not to explain myself about 90 percent of the time before I perform a poem. Standing in front of an audience and saying this next poem is about XY and Z centers the poet and decenters the poem. An audience hears a song or a poem and they hear what they hear and I’m OK with that. I don’t want to freeze that experience or be presumptuous and dictate that experience.
Ginsberg is famous for a story about a reading where people knew his poems so well that they came up after he finished and said hey Allen you read that poem tonight but you messed up some of the lines. And Ginsberg would say well you know when I wrote it on the paper that’s what the line was but tonight I’m reading it and that’s what the line is tonight. And that resonated with me. I don’t want to explain. I want the poetry just to be out there and to live and for an audience to take it on its own or not take it on its own.
I did a poetry reading in Portland, OR and there was a fellow in the audience named Walt Curtis, a very famous Portland poet who’s now passed away. He was part of a movie by Gus Van Sant I think and that was part of the myth of Walt. Walt screamed in the middle of my reading “Context! Context! “Give us context!” and I really struggled with that. I mean should I stand up there and explain the context and the historical background of the poem and how it came to be and then read the poem? I mean I can do it, no problem, but what if the poem is only four lines long? The explanation might be 5 minutes compared to the poem’s 30 seconds? So I try to avoid that. Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist, said that people hear what they hear and that’s OK. And so as long as the lyric resonates somehow then that’s fine me. I can’t imagine doing a 50 minute festival set of poems flowing into other poems musically and organically and having to stop each time and try to explain myself.
I tell my audiences that they are always welcome into the Deep End with me. Come on up close to the stage because the Deep End is where I dive. If you want to just wade in the water and splash around, the shallow part of the pool is in the back of the room. I’m cool with all of it.
When you walk into a festival, club, or between-band slot where most people came for something else, how do you read the room? What have you changed over the years in the length, pacing, delivery, or musical density of a set to earn those first few minutes of attention?
Adam:
“How can I describe the lying in wait? / In a room dark with silence and windows all closed? / And how can I describe the sun waltzing in splendour? / Like a gold flake drifting through a moat of desire?” – From Swirl Elixir by FlowPoetry
I think I’ve been lucky enough to have performed in rooms and for audiences where people are there for an overall “experience”. In addition to multi-band and multi-genre bills, I also appear at a lot of music and arts festivals and jamband hippie kind of psychedelic shows. Those audiences seem receptive to all types of music and expression so I guess I’ve never thought too much why people are there or what they’ve come for as anything more than a generality. At other times, I’ve performed at Bluegrass Festivals and Hard Rock Metal Festivals and have whole sets of poems and approaches at the ready for those events.
Having said that, reading the room is not about necessarily for me trying to please an audience. There was a time when I really wanted to take an audience out of their comfort zone and reify the notion of Poet as Rudra, the “Howler in the Wilderness”. The one who causes the branches to crack just outside of the warm and safe light of the campfire and a singer of songs to the cold moon. I still draw on that notion from time to time and it is part of my DNA as a poet but my approach has been significantly more welcoming as the years have combined. My intention includes widening the range of creative expression in the spaces and places I perform while still providing an experience from which an audience can walk away thinking you know, that was that was pretty cool and that Poetry is all right and wow that was very interesting and fun and maybe even inspiring. I’ve even been fortunate enough to have had sets with bands where I’m doing poetry and the band is playing and people are dancing! Dancing to poetry! Now what could be better than that?
The way I pay attention to the room is that I’m all about listening. I let the conversations flow around me and then in performance I seek to be a part of those faintly overheard snippets of speech. I might have been asked to appear as part of a memorial to one in the scene recently passed or at a celebration of a venue’s anniversary. Different festivals have different vibes and I try to tune in and respect those currents. I’ll catch different words or different sentiments and a poem will pop into my head, part of my poetry, and I’m like oh that one is meant to be spoken tonight. I’ve had interesting experiences where people are talking about a trip or travel encounter they’ve had or talking about a recent event and I have a poem that is not a direct reference but that echoes that. And so I’ll move those poems into my set and play with folding time for some of those in the audience.
As far as the length and pacing and all of that kind of stuff, I allow the poem to lead. I’ve had good response to a very short kind of energetic poem to start a set and I’ve had success with a very long stream of consciousness to start a set where people slowly kind of fall into that flow. I will say that I’ve consciously made an effort to slow down across all aspects of my poetry and performance. I mean I can speak my poems at an almost unintelligible speed for the listener. Sometimes the musicality of those blurring and zooming and buzzing words is fun for me and intriguing, but I I’ve slowed down quite a bit and really try to get the words across in ways that people can follow and vibe deeply.
In regards to the musical density, that’s also naturally adjusted over time. Venice Gas House Trolley started as a three piece (upright bass, percussion, voice) but by the end we were a six piece full on jam rock band. When that music got very heavy and very loud it became difficult for me given that the range of the spoken voice is a lot narrower than a singer. I would get drowned out by the kick drum or buried by the bass. The volume of delivery and the presence of the spoken voice in a room sonically can become a conundrum within a loud band setting. A whisper can get lost (and whispers are so wonderfully emotive and sound so beautiful) and trying to get loud and over the band can become very declarative, almost as if somebody is shouting at you or heavily commanding. A louder more present spoken voice also can become nasal and harsh in the mid-level frequencies. In the scenes where I work, people might be very high or floating around the room and so creating an immersive atmosphere with a thick but not jarring soundscape has now become my aim. Of late, the players I’ve worked with have become more sensitive to a lower stage volume that’s afforded me a greater range of expression which translates to a greater range of emotional content. For example, I can now speak my love poems in ways that are evocative and wistful instead of ways that are forceful orations and I love that.
Poetry is a fragile thing and and a poet can lose an audience in the first couple minutes. And once they’re gone it’s hard to get them back. I used to do things like really shout at the beginning or a set or blast a conch shell into the mic. I had bamboo clackers to clickety clack and draw attention.I had a kind of metal trash can that I found and I’d start at the back of the room and bang on that and do my poem as I walked up to the stage. These days however, I seek to invite attention and humbly welcome the ears who are open…I’m not afraid to stand at the microphone and breathe silently and slow myself and the room down in hopes that the audience will tune in. And once they’re tuned in I feel like I have a chance to hold them and then we can connect.
Contemporary reviews trace a real artistic progression. In 2007, the words were sometimes heard as dominating the instrumentation. By 2009 you had rebuilt Venice Gas House Trolley to strengthen its musical voice, and by 2010 and 2011 critics were hearing more integration and restraint. How did you learn when the poem should lead, when the music should lead, and when your voice should leave space entirely?
Adam:
“Shape the stones into a keyhole / Unlock what keeps within / Wait all night for the way to say it right / Plant seeds in the winter to bloom in the Spring” – From Shape The Stones Into A Keyhole by FlowPoetry
When I work with musicians it usually happens in two ways. Maybe they’ll come with a groove or a song without lyrics and I can flow along and jam. My listening background has put me in a place where I’m rarely lost in the music that the people around me are playing. I’m able to to to anticipate and to follow along and I’m fearless. And so bandmates might come with a bass groove or a drum groove and I can find something to that works over that or I can adapt something over that. That’s where the music leads the conversation.
Or two, I can start with the poem and describe the feeling and the images to musicians who will then think about it and consider it and play. That’s where the poem leads and inspires the musical world. What doesn’t seem to work is if they say to me OK, you read the poem now and we’ll just fall in. Because if I’m reading the poem just as a poem it might be a 2 minute piece and then I’m like I’m done. So that doesn’t necessarily work but if there is music happening then I can play. I’ve got poems that are very percussive and I can add as a percussionist might. I can comp as a keyboardist might comp behind a solo with a chant or live loop a vocal bass groove and I can solo in open spaces. And so I view myself in those instances as a musical element and I’m jamming and I love it.
The other thing that’s nice is that with the bands that I’ve been working with, I emphasize musical improvisation in the live sets. Now sometimes musicians will be a little bit hesitant and say what if I forget to play or I don’t know what to play? And and I say to them that’s not a problem. If you stop playing completely I’ve got poems and then you’ll hear a voice in that space and that voice will hold the audience and that poem will hold the audience and fill those spaces. Silence from a musician is a valid musical choice and I’m OK with that. So we can get a hugely amazing dynamic range from full on music to just a voice or breath and that’s a really beautiful thing when that happens. The opening of spaces in those moments and the idea that silence is a valid musical choice is something that the musicians that I work with begin to understand overtime and that eases anxiety around the act of creation.
You have worked as a full-set performer, opener, between-band performer, emcee, Artist at Large, collaborator, and event organizer. In 2011, you were also advising artists to think about promoter fit, mutual expectations, and return engagements. Which of those roles opened the most doors, and how much of your career came from repeat relationships and referrals rather than constant new outreach?
Adam:
“Ask, ‘Where does the Morningstar glow?’ / I’ll swear it glows everywhere. / Ears bend low: Spread ashes over cobblestones, / Ride home. / Fold steel and knead clay, / Stamp on every gunwale, / Bale bale upon bale of hay. / Twist shiny hemp / Rend rip from rip / Run blind. / Trust no longer held at bay: / Bless gently every head held high as high can see, / Pour for each a loving cup.” – From Morningstar by FlowPoetry
A I make my way along, I’ve learned the simple truth that “a rising tide lifts all boats”. For three years in the starting in 2003, I hosted three open-mics a week at three different venues in my hometown and I must have created a stage for at least a thousand performers that way. And when I look back at that, I really smile because some of those performers were so beautiful and we all poured out our souls making music and poetry and dreams.
When I first started touring, most of my gigs out of town came on the back of gig-swapping arrangements. I’d find a cool band in a town I wanted to play and invite them to Madison in excchange for a gig in their town. I met some of my best friends this way and heard a lot of amazing music too.
On Venice Gas House Trolley or solo FlowPoetry bills in my hometown, I’d pack a night with 3 additional bands, 2 solo artists, an emcee, another poet maybe, live painters, a vendor or two…whatever it took to create an event (not just another show). And those shows resulted in, over the years, not only opportunities, but more importantly relationships that I cherish. I don’t guard contacts or knowledge. I’m an open book and have been for more than a decade as I learned the business. If I can help you I will. Because at the end of the day, it’s not about anything more than artists helping artists grow and that gives me a ton of pleasure and satisfaction.
Anway, the original goal was to work as a poet and be able to perform full length festival and music club sets. Opening for bands, weaving through a show as a tweener, collaboratoring as an Artist-at Large (I feel I have the ability to sit in with a wide range of musicians and bands and I love doing that) all give me joy.
The emcee stuff is a little bit of a of a different kind of animal. When the Venice Gas House Trolley boys bucked and were like “Well we’re kind of done for now”, I simply continued to step. I didn’t have a choice in that. This is who I am and what I do, I’m a poet. And so I contacted festivals and and tried to interest them in booking Poetry and they weren’t interested. I mean across the board. And so then I realized, well you know I’m decent on the microphone and what I can do is go up and introduce the bands and deliver the public service announcements. I can communicate clearly. And what I found was that I could get away with doing a very short poem as well, a one minute poem say, and I would pick a poem that would somehow resonate or be relevant to the band that I was introducing. So if you were a country western kind of outlaw band, well I’ve got a Spaghetti Western outlaw poem for you. And if you were more of a psychedelic musical experience take you to the moon kind of band, I’ve got poems that that go to outer space no problem. And that started to work.
But over time I found that the emcee work was not serving Poetry in ways that it needed to be served. Those little 2-3 minute hits once every hour were just not where it was at for me and I’d spend 10 hours behind stage waiting to go up for 3 minutes every hour and at the end of the day I’d be wrecked. It’s hard you know and I’d go up and the clock was ticking and like a school teacher I’d mention a sponsor and shout out the vendors and remind folks not to park their cars in certain areas and then I’d have to switch into Poetry mode and flip a switch and then whiplash into a shouting hype man and bring on the band. I’d get off stage feeling schizophrenic and physically shaking with anxiety and look at my watch and see it counting down towards the next hour.
But slowly what happened was that I became a known and trusted quantity. I wasn’t somebody who was going to go up in front of the audience, like maybe a poet they’d seen before somewhere, and you know bum out an audience or do something overtly political or something that was referencing things that might make a festival audience uncomfortable or triggered. And festival organizers started to realise that I was sensitive to their audiences and that my poems were in line with some of the music that they had programmed. So that became an opportunity to say, “Hey now, why don’t you give me 45 minutes and let me stretch out on a Saturday afternoon or something like that”.
The recent more ambient flowing musical presentation now is providing me with opportunities for late night sets, silent disco sets, and and things where an audience has spent the full day getting blasted by bands and now might want to come under the tent and be soothed and float a little bit. Lie under the stars and hear some atmospheric soundscapes with words floating over the top.
Being difficult to categorize seems to have made the project harder to place early on. Later, that same flexibility let you appear in many different roles and musical settings. When did the lack of a clean category begin to feel like an advantage, and where does it still make the work harder?
Adam:
“Mea cupla mon amour / But there is something I cannot ignore. / No way to get around it / No way to be free / Can only just surround it / Colored silks just to see / The shape it comes in / The shape it might be.” From Surround In Silk by FlowPoetry
Bar Owner A: I really felt sorry while you were up there. Everyone was so loud and they didn’t listen. I mean it looked like they were having fun and they did buy drinks during your set, but I still felt bad they didn’t quiet down while you were performing.
Bar Owner B: I felt bad while you were up there. During your set no one came up to the bar and bought any drinks. Everyone was so quiet and listening so intently you could hear a pin drop and they didn’t move. You really need to move more drinks during your set.
The lack of clean categorization definitely is difficult and I still struggle with that in my promotional materials. I’ll send my press kit and if I’m very clear and say it’s a guy speaking poetry, well the doors will slam shut a lot of times just by using the word poetry. And I get that, you know people will come to me and say for example, “I had a poetry class in high school and hated it and that’s the last thing I want to hear is poetry”. I read my poetry for spare change on the streets of Chicago outside a big nationally touring jamband show and a guy came up to me and said, “I hate poetry, it’s like pissing barbed wire!” And I said well hey man that’s a poem! I might take that line and use it, thank you kindly. So it’s a little bit tricky.
“Lyrical Jam” seems to helps communicate with talent buyers. I want them to know that I’m not going to sing but that I emphasize the musicality of it all and that I can jam with musicians. Poetry is where it’s at for me but you know if I have to get in the door through categorizing the musical set-up as a psychedelic rock band or a jam band or you know an ambient thing, then I’ll do that. And I don’t have any problems with that because I’m sending talent buyers samples of the music and poetry and video and they can listen and watch and then decidde. I just want them to give me a minute to listen. I’m confident that they’ll dig it or at least have some fun trying!
And having said all of that I’ll still get responses like, this looks very interesting but we don’t know really what it is, and then we have that discussion. And I try to explain what it is and sometimes it gets across and sometimes it doesn’t. I will say though that when people get a chance to see it live and to experience it, I get invited back. I’m Sisyphus, rolling the rock up the hill for eternity and nothing worth doing comes without an uphill battle through time. And that’s especially true when you try to do something new.
Your archive eventually shifts away from Venice Gas House Trolley toward solo work and rotating collaborators. What brought that chapter to an end, and what did the more flexible model allow you to do that a fixed band could not?
Adam:
“You’d better hope that you’re getting back / Running out the door and you never know. / You’d better hope that you’ve left some slack. / And just so you know / It’s not how you go / But how you flow.” Dowse by FlowPoetry
So Venice Gas House Trolley came out of a time after that first grunge/poetry band had ended and I was doing a lot of poetry at the Madison Center for Creative and Cultural Arts. I was leadng weekly improvisational music and poetry workshops called “Chime Collective” and that was a lot of fun. I learned a lot from some of the elders in the scene who would say things like: “first thought best thought”, and “music is about listening not playing”, and “the best music is a conversation among the instruments” and “no wrong notes…only notes in wrong places”.
I met an upright bass player and then we had a bongo player and I thought well I’ll have a side project of a little something that’s Beat, sure why not. And at least I can say to the bookers and talent buyers, “Hey man you know book a Beat Poetry Trio”. Now that didn’t necessarily mean that I had to do Beat poetry, I could do whatever kind of poetry I wanted but at least they would know a little bit or have a reference for what they were booking. And maybe I could get into Jazz clubs and things of that nature.
Well that project slowly morphed into a 6 piece jam funk band over the next 7 years and we did 400 shows and recorded I think 7 or 8 albums including three live albums. People said we sounded like “the illegitimate love child of Frank Zappa and Steely Dan”. And we were starting to get onto the regional jam band scene playing with bands like The Big Wu and appearing on festivals with Leftover Salmon and stuff. We were an outsider and a wild card but we had enough of the sniff of the hippie jam band that we were welcomed into those places. We were also touring around the Midwest and doing tons of shows in Wisconsin to pay the rent on our rehearsal studio and keep our van and trailer road-worthy.
Wisconsin was not easy for someone like me to gig at that time fronting a band. But we would go to bars and do 3 hour shows and we could do that somehow and we were grinding away. I think our biggest year was 2012. We did 120 shows nationwide but it was a strain on the band and there was no money outside of expenses. And so at one point the band started to buck, “You know we need to work smarter not harder and get paid more” and they were right about that. “We’re not going to be doing the shows during the week anymore, and we’ll just do the weekend stuff” they said. Well I never set out to be kind of a weekend warrior with this and so it was just time and we had run the course.
And that’s when I plucked up my courage and said well here I am. I’m just gonna go solo and try to place myself as a supporting act and I’ll emcee festivals and I’ll see what I can do from there. And so I did it and I kept going.
The model that I’ve got now, because I’ve been doing it for so long and continue to stride, is that I know musicians around the country who I enjoy playing with and they seem to enjoy playing with me. And so now I can book a show in a place like Toledo OH and there’s four or five amazing local musicians who are lining up ready to play with me. We can get together and and put on a show, you know they can play just about anything and I can hang. So alot of the pre-composed songs dropped by the wayside but the poems that those songs were based upon still sing out.
The poem exists and the poem continues on and I can do a poem that was previously recorded with a band in a completely new musical context. The flexibility of those poems allows me the comfort to jam and I don’t have any problem with that. I mean the the poems exist and I think they need to be heard and so it’s not about trying to cover the old band’s songs, it’s about getting the Poetry out there.
Few independent artists document their working lives as thoroughly as you have. Your archive connects set lists, books, recordings, dates, venues, and collaborators across more than two decades. Why did you begin keeping that record, and at what point did the archive itself become part of how you understood the work?
Adam:
Setting mind to / task step first step, / Stepping mind to / set step second,/ Setting way to / task step third step, / Stepping way through / set step fourth, / Minding set through / way is fifth. – Set by FlowPoetry
I began keeping the record right away when I started and it’s an obsession. I was like I said heavily into the Grateful Dead you know whatever 108 shows in the late 80s and early 90s and I would go all the time and dance from Jerry’s first note to his last. I was a setlist guy so I I loved writing down the set list after the show and thinking about the order of the songs that they were doing and I was fairly diligent in that. At night I would read a setlist compendium called Dead Base and dream about the shows in the 60s and 70s. I really vibed with Robert Hunter’s lyrics and the words and all of those kinds of things and that kind of idea of archiving and keeping track of what was going on was something that was and is very important to me.
So when my creative stuff started happening I made it a point to archive everything as much as I could and that was another role that I would play in my bands. I was always the archivist and the guy keeping track of the set list and being able to reference the old shows and things of that nature. And it was really important to me to always note the collaborators. I mean everybody that I’ve ever played with, whether it was just one song or whatnot, winds up in the set list and I’m really so very grateful and respectful of the musicians who have wanted to work with me. I’ll do anything I can to help them rise as well and that means giving them credit where credit is due.
I had a Graduate School experience which taught me a lot about keeping track of records and being very detailed and being able to footnote things and keep track of all of that I I love and I enjoy it. I recently left my home in Madison WI after being there for quite a while and part of my struggle was what to do with with a lot of the physical archives because I sold everything and got rid of everything. I’m down to basically a backpack at this point in my life and one of the things that I managed to do, which was very fulfilling for me, was to distribute that archive to some of the musicians that I had played with.
So all of that physical and digital archive exists but I don’t have it all in my possession anymore. It’s spread out among my collaborators at this point which is wonderful and that act has taught me a lot about letting go. Some of my former bandmates have kids now and they’ll be able to open up the archival folder from 2010 and show their kids where they were on such and such date and the poster from the show and the digital video tape and all of that.
I guess it’s interesting to look back on but you know I I understand my work as existing in the present even though some of the poems have been around for a while. Like I said, they’re always changing in their rhythms and their musicality. I have vowed to never look behind but to always exist in the present with my work and my poetry, but having said that, I’m grateful the archives are there. I resonate deeply with the thousands of hours that I put into it and you know maybe at some point somebody will stumble across some of that stuff and look at what it means to be a poet in the USA.
A 2010 review described you as a poet who did not want his verses to live only on paper. You have since built a substantial catalog of poetry books, and some of your Bandcamp releases connect the recorded work directly to print. Do you write differently for a reader than for a live audience? Has the page become a different kind of stage for you?
Adam:
“Look / dust / keeps / lightly/ falling / Our lives / at peace / with / ashes” – Left Over part III by FlowPoetry
To be quite clear, the poems that that you hear on the albums and in live performance are the poems as they were written on the paper. I’d always hoped that as I moved along, at some point people would come up to me and say man I’d really like to buy a book of your poetry. And that has happened a bit more recently finally.
So the recorded work has always directly connected to the print work and it always has been that way. I think I’ve published 10 books at this point (https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/flowpoetry). I’ve got 16 more that have been lined up for 20 years and they’re just sitting on my computer in folders. I’ll continue to slowly roll those out and new books will arise but I don’t write any differently for a live audience than for a reader.
The poetry, the songs, and the music are all a continuum and a unified kind of thing. Now having said that, the page is different by definition than the stage in a couple ways which are important. On the page I layout my poems in a very intentional manner. So I’ll put one line at one quadrant of page and another line in another quadrant for example. I’ll increase the number of spaces between lines or words to try to slow down the reader when they when they look at it on the page. I might float a letter above a word or even try to to animate a word or a line similar to the Shiva Nataraja statue (The dancing Shiva where he’s got a thousand arms. I’ve always seen that as the arms moving in some sort of animated kind of way). And I’ll write poems on the page that move in those ways or poems that ask the reader to move their eyes in different routes around the page. Not always from left to right and up to down. You can’t translate that onto the stage and that becomes very difficult. I thought about at one point trying to do a series of shows where the poem would be projected behind the band on a big screen so people could see that and then see how I play with it musically, but I I haven’t been able to accomplish that yet. It’s a logistical and financial difficulty for me at this point although it would be something that I would love to do.
“Bridge of Light” keeps returning to a deck of cards, a maze, wild jokers, and a speaker who does not know the score, while holding onto the certainty that two people may be made for love. Is the relationship at the center of the poem a gamble, a rescue, or both? Where did the card-game language begin?
Adam:
“I’ll deal you in when the jokers are wild” – From Bridge of Light by FlowPoetry
The card game language comes from a fascination with Old West poker culture, con-men, tricky dealers, and lore surrounding the deck of cards. As a grade school kid, I used to play poker for nickels with my friends and we’d say things like, “Ok, for this game, the wild cards are aces-deuces- one-eyed-jacks-suicide-kings-and-the-queen-of-spades”. It’s musical right? I love those long distant echoes of childhood rhymes and songs although I don’t know where I learned them. We all had things like, “Sally had a Steamboat, Steamboat had a bell” etc etc. It’s all part of the spoken word poetic tradition to me.
Bridge of Light from the Deep Vibe album was written after an show in Venice CA. I was asked to perform at the Venice Spring Fling Music Festival by a Merry Prankster friend named Turtle who had me out there to perform. It was wonderful and I’d always dreamed of being in Venice, CA. My former band Venice Gas House Trolley was named after the old Venice Beach Gas House which was a converted service station into a coffee shop beatnik center for art and music during the time that the San Francisco beat scene was happening. There was a CA Southern Beat scene too and the Gas House was part of it (check out the book The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton). From this LA beat scene grew Jim Morrison and The Doors and so it was really cool to be able to go down there and and perform on Venice Beach.
So when I was hanging out there after my set, I saw a beautiful woman walk across the beach and everywhere her foot landed the sand melted and turned to glass. And it started me thinking about my past relationships and loves. I guess I’m asking some questions regarding the certainty of two people who may be made for each other yet exist not knowing exactly what’s going. Hey what’s the score (meaning in 1950’s slang, “what’s the truth; what’s going to happen”. Love is always a gamble and a maze and you know we can try to find a way to help each other out but sometimes the rescue just won’t work and not knowing what’s really going on is part of it.
“Chasing the World” keeps balancing experience against absence: places visited, lessons missed, relationships remembered, and poems still unwritten. How much of the poem comes from literal travel memories, and where does the traveler become a character you shaped? By the end, is he pursuing the world, poetry, or a version of himself?
Adam:
“Flashing the roads that I took / And the ones that I forgot, / Traveling the world just to see. / And the lessons that I learned / And the ones that I didn’t, / Chasing the world for Poetry.” – From Chasing the World by FlowPoetry
I’m on the road now all the time and “Chasing the World” was written when I was traveling. I spend 4 months of my life every summer in the US helping take care of my aging parents, they’re both in their 80s. I tour some during that time and if festivals are interested I’ll do those too. The rest of the year I’m backpacking around Asia, performing here and there (last year I did 5 shows in Thailand, 1 in Cambodia, and 5 in India), down to basically a backpack and my bag of poems. I don’t need much to live on. So these travel experiences inform my poetry and part of being adrift and floating that way in the world brings up, from time to time, the idea of absence. Lessons missed, relationships gained and lost, what I’ve sacrificed and what I’ve fallen into just chasing the world for poetry. I float and I move and I live for for Poetry and somehow, even though I’m often alone, with my poetry at my side, I’m rarely lonely.
“Ariadne” repeatedly remakes its central figure as a spider, queen, hunter, and finally something almost monstrous. What drew you to turn the woman associated with the thread out of a maze into the creature waiting in the web? Is the web made from desire, repeated language, memory, or something else?
Adam:
“Cul de sac leaves scuttle on the street, / A gaslamp sizzles and sputters misty moon ray sparks. / Struggle as you arm stick leg wrap lost on a trampoline of paste, / Ariadne, Queen of the ice sheet, comes skating up slowly.” – From Ariadne by FlowPoetry
My relationships have always had a center of both deep beauty and elation and deep darkness and sadness. The feminine energy is filled with power and my readings into mythology and religions show the Goddess to be at once beneficently beautiful and nurturing and abundant and at the same time you know you there’s certain dark aspect to the Goddess that you don’t mess with. The Kali type goddesses and the the queen hunters and the spiders. Now with all of that being said, I don’t necessarily approach it from a real studied kind of way when I sit down to write. I just try to open myself up and see what comes out from what I’ve previously put in. And so here we have the venemous spider and the idea of its prey. It’s a dark poem and it’s mode is Gothic Horror. I think it’s in line with a kind of Deep Image Poetry in that whatever images are present or floating in the poem can lead the poet, and by extension the reader or the listener, to some deeper almost Jungian kind of archetypal places. These are the things that that lie in the dark spaces of our psyches and all of our desires and hopes and our dreams.
“Garden” is built from mirrored images: summer and winter, opening and closing, revealing and concealing, bare feet and shoes. Then language itself appears to create the world. Is the garden a remembered place, a mental refuge, or the poem itself? Why was it important to let it contain both abundance and cold?
Adam:
“See I have fashioned a world out of words. / And hung it from a trestle bridge / Out over a valley.” – From Garden by FlowPoetry
Psych-O-Pomp, the 3rd full-length volume of poetry. This one is filled with poems and lyrics that ascend up the axis mundi, soar through the sky, and then descend to the depths of the underworld only to return again. Poet, shaman, and prophecy combine here to take you on a journey of ecstasy, exaltation, sorrow, longing, and ultimately peace.
Garden creates a world. I’m interested in the idea of topographical approaches to poetry and stories so the idea of walking through a story or walking through a poem in the sense that maybe if you were to take a bird’s eye view of the story or the poem it would actually be a structure of some sort. And the creation of those worlds in an architecturally imagistic manner through words is something that’s very exciting to me. For example, exploring in one’s imagination many different rooms or landscapes and the exploration, while maybe not explicitly describing the place, outlines an image of the structure or map.
And so creating a garden in that way and then by extension a world is interesting. The garden is the poem itself; containing both abundance and death, it increases and decreases and grows and decays. This is part of my core; the idea of all experiences containing both the dark and the light. You can’t have a rainbow without rain, the Yin without the Yang, nor valleys without peaks. I like to explore the empty spaces carved out by those filled in and the way an image creates empty space around it. A teapot is only useful because of the hollow space that exists within it and that emptiness allows the tea and water to mix.
“The Ticking of the Earth” places daydream beside nightmare while something keeps ticking beneath a damaged landscape. What is ticking in your mind: a clock, a pulse, a warning, or a bomb? Do you want the Earth to sound endangered, alive, or both?
Adam:
“Well the polar caps are melting / And the glaciers moving back. / In my daydream silent sunbeam / In my nighmare, nature’s cracked. / And the desert’s blooming gunpowder / The seas are choked with oil. / In my daydream crystal sunbeam / In my nightmare, blood and soil.” – From The Ticking of the Earth by FlowPoetry
The ” Ticking of the Earth (https://vght.bandcamp.com/track/the-ticking-of-the-earth-2) is definitely a clock and a heartbeat pulsing, a warning, and a time-bomb. We’ve managed to mess things up on the Earth pretty quickly within the last couple hundred of years and it’s getting worse. The Earth is both endangered and alive.
My stance as we as we find ourselves here in the Anthropocene is one of great sadness and also great hope. I’ve read and absorbed Arne Naess’ thoughts on Deep Ecology and I’ve explored Gary Snyder’s reflections on the same. The idea that the fundamental shift in the way that we view the earth and our environment has to include things like understanding the sentience and the interconnectedness of all things including rocks and trees and waterways and learning a reverence for a co-existence with the land in line with the Old Ways that came way before us resonates with me deeply.
Sonically, that poem itself is an important one for me because I managed at that time, and it’s something that I’m always working on, to get both a very slow pace through the first part of the poem and a real staccato thing happening after the “There’s something ticking in the ground” chant. And that part of the poem was one that I really worked on and explored percussively. I practiced a lot to try to get my mouth to be able to move at that pace and enunciate that and playing with a drummer and doing that as a percussive instrument through my voice and connecting with a drummer is a treat. And the musicality of that was just incredibly pleasing to me, to make that leap was a a benchmark in my ability to to be musical within a band.
Many independent artists now try to build entirely online and may never tour at your scale. Which part of what you learned from entering other people’s rooms and audiences still transfers to an online career, and which part only works when artist and audience share a physical space?
Adam:
“Before I accept wholeheartedly, / Visions of virtual reality, / There’s just one thing needs proving to me: / You’re not who you pretend to be.” -From Really Virtual by FlowPoetry
I’ve been doing it so long now IRL that when I started it was Myspace as the only on-line option. So there was never really a desire to build entirely online but I have I thought about that over the last 10 years. During COVID, I moved online and would sit in my room and turn on the camera and drink tea and read poems. And I think that might have been something but I found it personally complicated to be viewed in that way. I couldn’t see my audience and it felt so far removed from a human interaction that I grew cold upon doing it. The exchange of energy that happens in a room filled with people and the actuality of sharing breath is something very powerful. So physically sharing space is something that really is important for who I am. And it’s important for us as a community of listeners and musicians.
I certainly think the short form video translates and I might start to work on a series of sort of “selfie poems” where I hold the phone up and just read 30 seconds of a poem or something. And I’ve thought about trying to do a World Poetry Project (it sounds grandiose). I travel so much that I could take my cell phone into the backwaters of some of these countries I go to and see if any poets would maybe come out of their houses and share some poems and that might be fun as an online way of sharing and promoting Poetry.
Sometimes when I would be on the street doing my “FlowPoetry For Donation” stuff for spare change (Hey man, what are you doing?, they’d ask. Well, I’d say, this is FlowPoetry for Donation. That means you can donate a poem to me or I’ll donate a poem to you.), I found that people would come up and they’d throw me a few coins (I had a colander that they could put some coins into) and I’d stand up and look them in the eye and start doing my poem. And you know that eye to eye contact would be very powerful for both of us. Poetry live is an interesting thing. When you see a poet face to face and they’re doing their poetry sometimes a shift can take place. For me, I tend to disappear when my poetry happens and and I’ve learned to do that because if I can get myself out of the way, the poetry comes through better because I’m not there. I’m not part of that filtering kind of process and so it’s a very interesting thing. It’s an important human thing.
In 2002, growth may have meant another show, another room, or another collaborator. What does success mean to you now, and what do you understand about audiences that you could not have known at the first FlowPoetry performance?
Adam:
“A fuschia flecked snow flower in a meadow of fuschia flecked snow.” – From Swirl Elixir by FlowPoetry
I’m an artist of perseverance. I keep going left right left right left right left right and success has always meant just that to me. I’ve had the door closed in my face so many times because “Oh, it’s Poetry so we’re not really interested”, that success is continuing to put my poetry out there and continuing to open spaces for Poetry to flow into. I’ve played laundromats and 800 seat theaters. I’ve played museums and dirty basements. I’ve played art galleries and the corners of coffee shops. I continue to be the first poet to ever appear at a variety of music clubs around the country and that’s success. I’ve played dive bars where Poetry was never previously welcome and that’s success.
I’m not masochistic, I’d rather not continue to shout my poems in places where people don’t necessarily want to listen but I will always be an advocate for Poetry and continue to put my poems out there. I feel a responsibility to the Poetry that I’ve been given and I know that when I get myself out of the way, the poetry comes in. And I know that I have to do something with it and that something is to perform it out in public. And by doing that I found that I’ve become smaller and the Poetry has become larger. My ego over time has been ground into dust by all of this and I’m grateful for that. In fact, I tried not to use the first person pronoun “I” for years in the poetry because it privileges the ego. I refuse to center my identity in most of the poetry because it’s not about me. It’s about the Poetry and through that I’ve learned about compassion and gained a deep understanding that we are all in this together.
And when I got around to that, I found that I could still stand in who I am and still be able to honor the Poetry from a point of allowing it a life of its own. I don’t mean to say that I’m like some sort of transformational channeller, it’s not like that at all and if you hear some artist say that, well run the other way. I simply say that I serve the Poetry, the Poetry comes first, the Poetry must flow out, and the poet is one of the last independent voices in the land.
I want to disappear into the Poetry and that’s why when I started I didn’t use my name (Adam Gregory Pergament) for a long long time, sometimes to the dismay of my parents and friends. They wanted to know why I didn’t put my name on posters or show bills but it has never been about me. It’s always about the Poetry.
FlowPoetry is an imperative. “Flow” as in it must flow out. Poetry must flow out. And Poetry in the name was is necessary because it’s gotta be Poetry (with the plosive P!). Poetry is important and it’s necessary and the world needs more Poetry. I’m grateful to be able to stand in front of an audience and get out of the way and let the Poetry speak. And I’m eternally grateful for the open ears and big hearts of those who take the time to listen. Without that, I’d simply be shouting in the dark.
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