The Boy and the Bird
In a dark room lit by eighteen candles on a long table, Emmett Williams performed his ‘building’ poem The Boy and the Bird. The poem developed from variation to variation, from candle to candle, through a series of shifting linguistic relationships and improvisations.
The principal characters are 21 nouns: a boy, a girl, a cat, a mouse, a rooster, a hen, a ghost, a goblin, a friend, a foe, a sweetheart, a lover, a nun, a penguin, a cow, a cowboy, a dwarf, a giant, a soldier, a corpse and a bird. These characters are in flux throughout the course of the poem. From beginning to end, they undergo interrelated metamorphoses as progressions of modifying phrases and parts of speech change the activities and attributes of the ‘dramatis personae’. The transformations are exhaustive, from slapstick through intellectual games to a tragic finale.
Emmett Williams’ reading was quiet and calm leaving the drama to the surreal associations and poetical nonsense of the words.
List of materials
Thoughts and MemoriesThe Boy and the Bird
Torben Weirup - 1985
"Emmet Williams was the last of the performers. A rather quiet and non-dramatic reading of a nonsense text, which was very nicely delivered in an atmosphere of peace and relaxation and thus a gentle transition to the everyday – perhaps to a very un-poetical everyday awaiting after a week in fantasyland. The room was dark, and in the glow of the lit candles Williams was reading his strangely inciting, but very simple text which gradually was building up from single elements: a boy, a girl, a mouse, a cat, a nun, a soldier and finally ending as a kind of surrealistic poetry: Why does the fat girl love the dead fish, while the restless and incomprehensive little boy attempts to find his guardian angle behind the tiny giant. When you have figured out the structure of this system modernistic text, it at first might seem rather slow moving and predictable -but with his voice modulation - Emmet Williams gave the performance life."
Henry Martin - 1985
"It’s difficult to say whether his web of implications , vibrations and humors, waxing hopes and waning possibilities, was closer to Tolkien or to Gertrude Stein, but he clearly achieved his purpose. The last light vanished and he had done something very simple, and indeed beautiful. He had made it a little bit more difficult to say anything intelligible about Fluxus."
Ann Noël - June 1985
8PM EMMETT WILLIAMS Emmett red “The Boy and the Bird”, explaining that though he had something more strenuous in mind for his evening, his recent operation on his ear and the resultant loss of equilibrium he experiences from time to time, necessitated he do a reading. It was very beautiful anyway, hearing the words weave their web of associations and fantasy and watching the shadows produced by the candles illustrate the structure of the poem. Philip Corner, who has the book, but has never read it, was particularly impressed.
- Ann Noël in her diary, June 1985
