A larger than usual audience had gathered, even with some left standing, at this September’s Bardroom seance, on 19 September at Nyitott Műhely, where the usual suspects, Jeff Taylor and David Hill, host this regular English-language poetry revue. The show featured readings, and a special guest, a poetess hailing from New York.

The theme for this instalment of the Bardroom series was highly morbid: two recent celebrity deaths, with uncanny, ironic synchronicity. Renowned poet laureate György Faludy died on 1 September, and three days on, there was another tragic media death, that of crocodile hunter and animal enthusiast extraordinaire Steve Irwin. These two were paired up as our quiz show and poetry competition topics, with kitchy and numerous prizes. Black comedy for our thrilling and chilling pleasure.

The first open mic session goes down well, then we wait for Michele Battiste to start her act. There is a spool of black thread that Michele casually left on the table upstage - winding us up, leaving us fascinated before she said a single word.

She picks up from there with an opening piece called “Witch Speak”, unwinding the spool, which leaves us in a literal tangle. Her words are irresistible, energetic, electric and yet controlled, she speaks “of wicca or the voodoo intoxicant”, of Hecate, gypsies, the former life of a spider. She walks around with her black thread reciting. “I cast in measured threads”, she warned us all.

Then the words swim away from the mystical, becoming more and more physical, gliding on the aerodynamic exoderm of whaleskin (“Like a Sine Curve”, published in Willow Springs magazine, which received a 2005 AWP Intros Award). Then, they ascended into a verbal world of mechanics and abstractions. Subsequent poems take us on journeys of ambivalence, with a repressed eroticism that permeates each object with a dislocation of its own symbolism. From “Seeing My Neighbor Naked In His Kitchen” (in the Pavement Saw anthology). “He was embarrassed, resorting to force / when the rain came, that’s how he broke / my windshield wiper. That’s how he cut his thumb … Some parts are simple / attachments. I closed the blinds and he watched.”

There are callisthenic word processes in these poems, and even though she insists, “This is not a love poem”, they describe human relationships. “Required gear: compass, cornstarch, savory victuals for bait, / for slowing the ascent, for remembering the tongue / is a strong muscle”. Then, there is “Ode To My New Food Processor”, where Michele explicitly states “Appliances are commitments”, with quips like “I won’t make cheesecake ever again. / It’s like a forced march.” Harnessing her fascination with the interaction between landscape and body, solid technical terms and the underlying lyrical physics, she creates an intriguing environment that we are only too sorry to leave. She thanks the applauding audience, but I would not leave Michele just like that.

Later, she tells me about her monthly performances at a New York café, the Waltz Astoria, and how she got to New York from San Francisco. With written poetry influences like Gertrude Stein, she developed her lyric acoustics, turning poems into “little universes” of their own. She started her performance career on a spoken word and modern dance project with a broken foot, moving on to (the otherwise low-key) Wichita, Kansas to work with essayist and fellow poet Albert Golbarth. Despite her being an accomplished poet and a Fulbright Award finalist, she still describes the New York poetry scene as “overwhelming” with its countless overlapping cliques and circles and readings. Moreover, she describes herself as a minor poet there – not being in Manhattan –, but loosely associated with “Cornelius Street Café poets”. So what brought her to read in Budapest?

As it turns out, Michele’s mother and maternal grandmother were ’56 emigrants. This explains the lines “My mother was a gypsy / Imported straight from Hungary …” in her poem “Witch Speak”, as well as her early contact with the mysterious language of her childhood, the songs, the old Schenectady Hall Gypsy music shows, and the family folklore. This finally built up to a conviction that to be valuable as a poet, she should work with her own story, that of her parents, and ultimately, that of Hungary. Work on her current series of poems started in New York in 2004, telling the tale of a family and their 1956 defection in three distinct voices; yet, after a couple of months she saw a lapse into “generic war poems”. It took a lot of time and effort, but she is now here –through a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant – to collect material for the serious business of completing a book of authentically Hungarian poetry.

The book she has out now, a chapbook entitled “Mapping the Spaces Between”, is available from Snark Publishing or through Michele's homepage, as those copies she brought over for the Bardroom reading were all sold out during the ten-minute break.

After that, more Bardroom music and poetry followed. Bruce “Guitar God” Lewis’s performance included a rendition of Gregory Corso on the Atomic Bomb. Pilvax Magazine editor Aaron Hunter read prose – his engrossing and intricate story about Bob Dylan, an engagement ring, and the 9/11 tragedy conspiring to bring the guilt-riddled protagonist to Budapest – appropriately entitled “Everyone Who Knows Me Thinks I’m Dead”. David Hill read his amusingly commemorative poem “Ode to Faludy”. After Jeff Taylor’s finalé, a highly original slide-show analysis of Catholicism, this brilliant Bardroom session finally petered out, at least for now.

Daniel Dányi