Pragis
The spoken word pieces were inspired by the years I lived in Europe, and seriously considered staying there.The word “Pragis” is a mash-up: Prague + Paris.

“The Night Nixon Resigned”: I left the United States shortly after John Dean testified before Congress, and I watched the end of the Watergate scandal unfold from outside the country. D’ailleurs as the French say. The night Nixon resigned, I was in Paris. One of the odd things about that night was that I kept running into people who claimed to have seen ghosts.

“Prague Spring 1974/Riverrun” grew out of a trip I made to Prague. In 1968, Czechoslovakia–still an iron curtain country– had a brief period of liberalization under the government of Alexander Dubček. “Prague Spring,” it was called. On the evening of August 20, 1968 the Soviet Union invaded the country and brutally crushed those first steps toward democracy. In April 1974, when I visited Prague, Soviet Troops still occupied Czechoslovakia. I wrote the poem to capture what it was like to be an American tourist in an occupied communist country, and a friend of brave Czechs who had fled to Paris and Sweden in order to save their lives. While I was working on the poem, lines from James Joyce’s magnificent Finnegan’s Wake kept coming to mind. Finally, I allowed them into the piece. They are the recurring riverrun sequence. The first part of the title, “Prague Spring 1974,” is meant to evoke the dreams of the real 1968 Prague Spring, and to describe how badly and violently those dreams had been shattered.

I am honored to be able to present these in collaboration with Kyle Quass, Richard Bonnet, and Seth Davis. I am especially grateful to Kyle Quass, whose mastery of the collage form helped me realize the form the project needed to take. Those evenings of Malbec and poetry were generative for me, too. If there’s hope for a world beyond authoritarian domination, it comes to us from collaborative art and from the rebellious ghosts who continue to dance on the prison walls.


Joan Hawkins
January 2023


This work has its genesis in evenings of Malbec and poetry at the Writers Guild at Bloomington’s Spoken Word series at the Players Pub. Wine and friendship and discussions of Cabaret Voltaire, William Burroughs, the Beats and the avant-garde led to revisiting work that interested me when I was younger. Interests that were concurrent with, but subsumed by, my interest in jazz “proper”. This led me to revisit and further explore these traditions and incorporate collage and indeterminacy more fully into my artistic practice. When Joan planted the seeds for this project, it was a chance for me to come full circle and apply what I had learned over the last seven years to work she herself had created. This was both an incredible honor and an incredible challenge. As well as immensely rewarding.

I found Joan’s work rich in imagery and ideas that could be incorporated into collage. Additionally, the rhythm, melodies and textures of her readings provided further inspiration and material for the collage. As I approached this project, given the richness of the material, my primary objective became to work entirely with it and do my best to frame and feature the breadth and depth of content in these spoken word pieces as well as in Joan’s voice itself. With that in mind I searched for collage material that extended the text and expanded and colored it; from Paris to Prague, from Nixon to Ford, from Dylan to Brando to The Plastic People of the Universe, and of course to samizdat. Bill Fierman was an immense help in providing context and information about samizdat and helped steer me towards Vaclav Havel. Ultimately, The Power of the Powerless became an important text for me to come to terms with, both as a product of its time, and in relation to Joan’s piece. As well as in how it speaks to the present moment and the idea of values and living within the truth.

Most of us know and understand what collage is, an art form in which a new original artwork is created by assembling, manipulating and juxtaposing pieces of existing forms. However, I’d like to speak to how I manipulated some of the spoken word material, particularly Joan’s, to generate new content for this work. As I’ve worked in this medium, I’ve become very interested in the natural rhythms and melodies of speech and how multiple streams of speech create rhythm and polyrhythm as well as melody, counterpoint and harmony. This is something I have explicitly worked with in these pieces. For example, for the accompaniment of the Nixon spoken word speech I transcribed the melodies of Joan’s reading of the piece and then generated piano harmonies from those melodies. Once I had done that, I provided this material to Richard Bonnet and asked him to improvise his own accompaniment in this style. This idea was incorporated even more fully into the Prague collage. Here, all the melodies and rhythms for the bass, cello, viola and vibes were generated from Joan’s vocal phrases to create an ever shifting harmony and counterpoint. Likewise, the drum rhythms were generated from phrases spoken by Vaclav Havel. The goal was to literally bring the rhythms of the texts as well the rhythms of the English and Czech language into dialogue with each other. I am fascinated by the interplay of the rhythms and how organic those juxtapositions feel as well as the dichotomy in how they can be both abstract and literal at the same time. There is much more that could be said about the material, the manipulation, and the implementation of indeterminacy; however, I will leave that for the listener to unwind and discover for themselves.

Last, I want to acknowledge the visceral aspect of this process. The chopping and processing and manipulation of what ended up being thousands of samples. As an artistic practice this is a thing that unwinds itself in the act of doing over the span of the process. My wife Heather was there every step of the way, tolerating me hunched over my laptop with my headphones on as I discovered the puzzle pieces, sorted them and pieced them together. Without her tolerance, patience, support and encouragement I would never have been able to finish this work.

Kyle Quass
January, 2023