Tyko Say of OBJECT:PARADISE: Five Things You Need To Write Powerful And Evocative Poetry
An Interview With Heidi Sander
Make the language around you yours by recording it mentally and physically. There are poetry readings everywhere you go: the grocery store, your mom’s knitting club, the argument from the street outside. View all language as poetic and potential.
Poetry is growing in popularity and millions of people spanning the globe have a renewed passion for embracing the creativity, beauty, and art of poetry. Poetry has the power to heal and we make sense of the world through the human expression of writing and reading. Are you wondering: What does it take to become a successful poet? What is the best medium and venue to release your poetry? What are some techniques to improve or sharpen your skills? In this interview series about how to write powerful and evocative poetry, we are interviewing people who have a love for poetry and want to share their insights, and we will speak with emerging poets who want to learn more about poetry either to improve their own skills or learn how to read and interpret better. Here, we will also meet rising and successful poets who want to share their work or broaden their audience, as well as poetry and literature instructors.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tyko Say.
Tyko Say is the founder of the non-profit performance and poetics collective OBJECT:PARADISE which aims to celebrate poetry as a contextually-dependent, interdisciplinary happening. The objective of his works and curations is to deplatform the poet and to encourage more inclusive language happenings where audience members are the poets and the time & space is the poem.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share a story about what first drew you to poetry?
Hi and thanks for letting me be part of the series! I think my first interaction with ‘poetry’ would be in the back seat of my mother’s 93’ Nissan Altima which was dull white, smelt like peanuts, and was only a year older than me. I was an only child for the first six years of my life and spent a lot of time in the suburbs of Seattle just with my mother and father. My dad was an architect and my mother was a first grade teacher, so both of them worked in pretty stimulating environments — lots of colors, sounds, smells — which of course would later be translated into the layered memories of my childhood of crayons, leggos, classroom decorations, hardhats, and black coffee. But a recurring sound and smell was listening to the Evita soundtrack by Andrew Lloyd Webber in my mother’s car. I think I can sing every song from that play and being exposed to the lyrics over and over again introduced me to language being used in a separate way than just communicating — that is, language being used just for enjoyment. Later in junior high (around age 13) I’d keep notebooks of song lyrics — anything from Hank Williams to Big L — and I think this kind of language recording was my earliest form of writing. And by writing, I mean recording language around me because I liked the way I felt reading it, something I still do today.
Can you tell us a bit about the interesting or exciting projects you are working on or wish to create? What are your goals for these projects?
Well right now the biggest project I’m part of is the ongoing work with my collective, OBJECT:PARADISE. Inspired by all the things that happen during a poetry reading besides a person reading a poem, we try to highlight the context in which language happens so that audience members at our events are encouraged to decide themselves what is and isn’t part of the performance.
In a sense I think the majority of the poetry readings I have been to are too aggressive in trying to define what ‘poetry’ is and what should and shouldn’t happen during a poetry reading, so I’d like to work towards a direction where poetry is less literary and more accessible as a sociolinguistic happening. Why can’t a person get a tattoo while they are reading a poem? Why can’t there be a street fight in the venue where someone is reading and then the fighters start making out? Why can’t we read poetry off slices of ham? On stage in a controlled environment, we should be allowing all of these things to happen (and we have with my collective) so that in an uncontrolled environment i.e. real life, we can start to see the poetry readings already happening all around us.
Wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Let’s begin with a basic definition so that all of us are on the same page. What is your definition of poetry? Can you please share with us what poetry means to you?
In the United States, I think a lot of us have grown up to know only Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and perhaps Bukowski as ‘poets’, and I think it’s worrisome that we tend to see poetry strictly as a literary genre with prescribed form and content, and not also as linguistic happenings that exists freely outside of books in the natural world. Why is it that the word ‘poet’ brings up the image of the sonnet turtleneck and not the reflective vest garbageman howling hymes through the streets at six in the morning? I like to view poetry as performance, as something that is always happening for the first time.
Samuel Coleridge said poetry is “…the best words in the best order”, but I don’t think the best word nor the the best order exists — both because we can’t objectively classify a word as good or bad and because the words to describe how we interpret the world were made by other people and communities. Therefore, I think it’s a waste of time to write what others think is poetry; and, instead, we should view poetry as something that happens around us, something we can collectively read and interact with. One of my favorite writers, Richard Hugo, said, “writing has to do with being in love with your own responses to things”.
Poetry, then, to me, is a medium in which an individual channels their interpretation of the world, but because language is imperfect, then the translation from thought to word can never be direct. Therefore, the way that we read others’ works inherently leaves room for interpretation of interpretation. If this is the purpose of the poem then great, but closely matching author intention with reader interpretation calls for a closer look at how each side is interacting with the language of the piece.
How much control does an author have over the context in which a text is read?
For example, reading a recipe for blueberry pancakes in the kitchen versus at open-mic poetry night has a completely different effect (somebody should do this). When the reader of a text isn’t in the same context as the author had intended, the effect of the words changes. If we want to show readers our responses to the world, how do we close the gap of miscommunication? How do we create closer relationships between writer intention and reader interpretation?
To me, poetry is an experience that occurs in a shared context between the producer and a receiver of a text. When we are part of a shared moment with others, we start to view the function of language as something inherently different than as a tool just for individual expression, and rather as a medium for shared interpretation of a moment before us. So maybe I’d adjust Hugo’s quote above to be “writing is falling in love with the way language let’s you interpret the world with others”.
What can writing poetry teach us about ourselves?
As mentioned previously, I don’t think it’s possible to produce poetry; we can only interpret or receive poetry. This also goes for the language and feelings within our bodies. The methods in which we interpret our feelings into language is a way of listening to our bodies. I think writing, then, is not creating poetry, but instead (to quote Einstein) transitioning one form of energy to another. That being said, some feelings, images, or ideas may be easier to discover and others might be deeper and need to be triggered — the latter of which tend to be the most interesting for me.
One exercise I’ve developed is what I like to call the crazy room which is a form of meditation by chanting words and phrases over and over until they turn into something. This helps me create a flow of energy — images and feelings — of which I later mediate through editing, kind of like carving organs from a slab of marble. I find that freeing yourself of message and the restraints of ‘poetic’ conventions by letting the language come first allows inner feelings to come out naturally. Through this method, message and symbols usually reveal themselves through editing done later.
I think someone said once that we are always trying to write the same poem — I wonder if they are referring to the ongoing process of trying to understand ourselves? I think writing from a bottom-up emphasis on singular phrases, words, and sounds, as opposed to other forms of free-writing which stem from an idea or feeling can provide us an opportunity to listen to our inner language. The crazy room exercise allows you to start with the language and to trust that your body will use it to communicate with you.
See a video of the crazy room below:
Who are your favorite poets? Is it their style, the content or something else that resonates with you?
My favorite poets are the ones I see on the streets everyday — people who are giving poetry readings without even knowing it. But I am a huge fan of reading works from the Black Mountain College, the New York School Poets, Dadaists, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, and Rock & Roll in general.
If you could ask your favourite poet a question, what would it be?
I’d like to ask God if there is one, “whodunit?”
Poetry can be transformational. Is there a particular poem that spoke to you and changed your life or altered a perspective you held in some way? Can you share the story?
In 2014 while I was completing my bachelor’s degree at Central Washington University in creative and rhetorical writing, I went to the library’s poetry section and blindly picked up a book and it was one by Robert Creeley (I can’t remember the title now), and I was fascinated by the natural flow in his writing and the ease in which he brought images onto the page. I would spend hours in the library’s music section (they also had a huge vinyl selection) listening to Cage and meditating on the lines in that book. I think his inductive approach towards poetics is something that I will always try to work towards. See his piece, I Know a Man below:
Today’s world needs so much healing. Can you help articulate how poetry can help us heal?
In many ways, interacting with poetry can help us be conscious about the way we see the world; poetry is all around us if we’re open to it. A few years ago I got really interested in bugs — the way they create communities, communicate, and have their own cultures — and I would have these recurring dreams of being an ant trekking through grass forests to a village of banana peels where I would fall in love with a singular dandelion afro then watch it tumble away in a small gust of wind. I would spend the rest of the dream searching for Dandy but my legs could only run so fast. This was when I had just moved to Prague and had spent a lot of time in parks trying to write about how I was feeling, but the images were always too forced and immature. Poetry can help us interpret how our bodies are moving amongst the world around us and perhaps tell us if it is us or the wind that is moving in the wrong direction. Here’s a piece titled Bury me in Riegrovy Sady on a Spring Sunday that I wrote about those recurring dreams:
We’d like to learn more about your poetry and writing. How would you describe yourself as a poet? Can you please share a specific passage that you think exemplifies your style or main message?
I wouldn’t describe myself as a poet, but I think it is a great compliment to be called one — so thank you. In 2014 I published my first collection titled The Sound of Mouths through dPress which was a collection of works composed of language I had overheard and noted down from 2012–2014. While I’ve written many other works since then, the mission of my writing has always embodied a similar approach to that collection: to reappropriate language in new contexts for new meanings.
At our last event with my collective we put on a live language happening outside of a supermarket where everything was happening at once (poetry, music, performances, etc.), and it was so chaotic that when the police arrived to shut us down, some audience members actually thought the police were part of the performance. This was a big win for our collective, because the audience began to reappropriate the symbol of the police as something different because of the context. To me, this was a very proud moment because we fostered a space where real life poetry was happening, where people were applying their own interpretive readings to a text — the police!
Event Photo: Excuse me Žižkov, Police.jpg
What do you hope to achieve with your poetry?
The objective of my curations, writings, and performances is to show that writing can be fun and that poetry is all around us. In my opinion, poetry shouldn’t be defined by a select group of magazines or academic schools which are restricted to agendas or notions of political identity and message, but should be celebrated as something that is constantly happening, wherever we go. I’d like to see more language happenings that celebrate this notion of poetry, to celebrate a communication of something much deeper than just language, of a shared moment and dynamic understanding. Everyone can be a poet if we start to listen to each other, and poetry should be for everyone not just for the people who understand the ‘best words in the best order’.
TykoSay_event photo of Tunnel Visions photo by Julie Orlova.jpg
In your opinion and from your experience, what are 3 things everyone can learn from poetry?
- Personal experiences of others, self, or forgotten
- Methods and effects of Interpreting the world around us
- The metaphysical fruits of transferring energy from thought to word or word to other.
Based on your own experience and success, what are the “five things a poet needs to know to create beautiful and evocative poetry?” If you can, please share a story or example for each.
- Make the language around you yours by recording it mentally and physically. There are poetry readings everywhere you go: the grocery store, your mom’s knitting club, the argument from the street outside. View all language as poetic and potential.
- Dethrone, then demote the poet who came knowing: there is no such thing as the best words in the best order. Erase all notions of poetry. Write the language and images that come to you; and if nothing comes, go back to the grocery store.
- Find your crazy room and become your writing. Read your works out loud and listen to yourself and the language. Is each new line as exciting to read as the last? Orchestrate the chaos by feeling what works.
- Celebrate the party that language is. If you don’t have fun writing or performing your works, the audience won’t either.
- Embrace miscommunication. Language isn’t perfect, that’s what allows it to be poetic. Poetry doesn’t need meaning or message, just a love for how you see the world.
If you were to encourage others to write poetry, what would you tell them?
I think the most important thing to know is that we are all poets — everytime we produce language, we are creating a time and space specific language happening, something uniquely ours. We should all have more confidence with how we see the world — our minds don’t lie to us. All interpretations are valid. Whenever we use language, it has never been used in that specific context before — it has a new meaning and is happening for the first time. This is such an exciting thing to recognize and celebrate. Equally important is to know that there is no such thing as poetry — don’t try to create it because that would be someone else’s interpretation of the world. Record how you interpret the world and the poetry will come later.
How would you finish these three sentences:
Poetry teaches…us how to communicate beyond language
Poetry heals by…allowing you to learn from others’ experiences as well as your own
To be a poet, you need to…eat with your eyes and ears
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Entertainment , Business, VC funding, and Sports read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them :-)
I’d love for Patti Smith to read at one of our shows — I bet she’d have a good time!
How can our readers further follow your work online?
The best place to see my work is through my collective OBJECT:PARADISE at our website, Instagram, or Facebook, but you can follow more personal projects of mine at my Instagram
Thank you for these excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent. We wish you continued success.
