everyday objects equal performance art
Janet Kuypers
1/12/17
About a week before I did a poetry show,
a copper pipe sprung a leak outside my back door.
The repairman said copper pipes won’t stretch
when the weather is freezing in the winters here.
(Yes, it’s true, it can get that cold in Texas,
even if winter only lasts for less than a week...)
So they stopped the water flow, and started hacking
the copper to replace it with something that stretches.
Once they removed the copper with the faucet,
they sit it down. I picked it up. Twisted the faucet.
So I asked, “Hey, are you throwing this out too?”
Well, they didn’t have any need for it, so I
told them I would throw it out for them. I brought
it in and thought: I will use this when I read poetry.
*
So as I advertised my feature, I said the poems
would be flowing like water, so don’t miss the show...
And I printed a poem, cut and taped it into a long strip
and stuffed it inside this copper tube...
So on the big day of my show I asked for someone
to pull on the poem as I turned the faucet and read
my poem to the live audience as it came out
of a copper water tube. The host of the event
even wore my paper strip poem for the rest of the night,
because if you can wear a poem, then why not.
*
I don’t know where creativity comes from.
I don’t know if it’s a gene that you’re born with,
and I don’t know if it only surfaces when we’re faced
with new challenges we have to contend with.
But I don’t think it’s something you can switch on
like a faucet; you can’t say, “excuse me, I must
start my shift in my office and be creative.”
It doesn’t work that way. It never does.
But it might not be that only a select few are creative.
It might be that all of us have the capacity for creativity —
it’s just a matter of understanding that some of us
learned how to turn on that creative faucet in us
so we could really get our creative juices flowing.
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