Deadass Modern Dadaism: a Scene Report from LES's Most Outrageous Poetry Reading

Everyone may have already posted their Woah Vicky Poetry Reading reviews. We would have been more timely, but we were prepping our Out of Body issue for print, which you can purchase IRL on Monday afternoon, or online right here ;)

It’s 7:33 PM at le PÈRE on Orchard Street and it is becoming increasingly noticeable that Woah Vicky is not in the building. We’re talking a palpable, tangible lack of her presence. There’s a collective air of disbelief that—any minute now—the Twitter-evangelist-bard-with-a-blaccent will be standing before our very eyes, reciting her poetry to the 40-or-so of us crammed into the men’s clothing store.

“Woah Vicky only exists in words and tweets to me,” says Sam Leach (of sex happens fame), seated on a plastic folding chair to my left. It’s not untrue. Woah Vicky’s tweets are at once biblically profound and frenetically unhinged (and, for the record, spelled exactly as follows): “I wish i had . famiky”, “Kamlia harris is a which”; “Miami be feeling like sodden and gonnorah.” She’s white (?) but she tweets the N word. She’s a modest Christian woman who abstains from sex—or “smashing,” as she calls it. She is, at least tonight, a poet.

Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” sputters out over the store’s speaker system. It becomes clear in a matter of minutes that someone’s simply playing Michael Jackson Radio on Spotify—an equally insane and apt choice for what’s about to happen in the mirrored, butter-yellow square of fitting rooms housing the open mic. A girl in front of us shuffles through queue cards to pass the time: Do you believe in ghosts? Is luck real? Are you early, on time, or a liar? Matt Gasda, co-host of the evening, turns around in his chair to assure us that Woah Vicky isn’t here yet, but will be shortly—a prophecy that comes true instantaneously.

Full paparazzi flash, full entourage, there she is: Woah Vicky. She’s mic’d up. Glitzy black jumpsuit, booty shorts, hair pin straight, lips glossed. Harry Daniels, the guy who semi-consensually sings at celebrities, leads her by the hand. (“I’m just Vicky’s fag,” he says later, after non-consensually leading the crowd in a dejectedly half-assed bout of “Empire State of Mind.”)

There’s a flurry of confusion that slips through the whole evening—is Vicky reading? Now? Later? At all? What am I doing here? What are you? Miss Woah is whisked from the stage front into what can only be described as a broom closet in the back of the store.

“Ummm…round of applause for everything going on right now…” says Nolita Dirtbag, our evening’s emcee, taking stock of the stuttering chaos as the blank white door swallows the horde of videographers and streamers into its seemingly endless stockroom.

There’s a small mountain of writers we have to climb before we can cling to every unexpected word sure to stream from Woah Vicky’s filler-plumped lips. sotce reads from her notes app diary. Her legs are shaking, but not her hands. “I am confused and happy to be here,” laughs August Lamm, reading from her short story Skincare. Caroline Calloway is dressed, in her own words, like ‘Snow White when she was poor.’ She reads, also in her own words, an original translation—by her, from Latin to English—of Sulpicia’s 1st century BCE Roman poetry. “I have to go in, like, 5 minutes,” she insists, before spending 10 minutes pre-ambling her 6 short poems, of which she only reads 5.

Vicky comes out for a selfie with Caroline mid-sentence. Then she sits, listlessly scrolling and flipping through her printed out poetry packet, for the duration of Caroline’s performance, which is cut short—not due to timing constraints, as previously noted, but due to some unshakeable sense of confusion as to Vicky’s presence behind the self-proclaimed scammer. The audience is confused, too. Vicky is adlibbing and picking wedgies simultaneously, posing for mirror selfies with Harry while Caroline waxes on about Sulpicia’s situationship (which, frankly, might be the first documented poem about a situationship in human history.)

The pre-Vicky highlight, for me at least, was poet Alex Dimitrov , who is holding his latest poetry book, Ecstasy in hand, but reading from his phone. “I also share Vicky’s views on Gay marriage,” he deadpans into the mic, “in that I, too, don’t think it should exist.” (Crucial to note: Alex himself is a gay man.) After flagging that Caroline would make a better performance artist than a writer, he reads his poem Alex, it Was Really Nothing, in which he delivers the most poignant line of the night: truth has nothing to do with art, and art has everything to do with truth.

What is true in this room? It’s true that Vicky has taken to Twitter to bash gay marriage and spread false information about AIDS. It’s true that her best friend is a gay guy. It’s true that she’s a vocal D*nald Tr*mp supporter. It’s true that she preaches the word of God above all, and it’s true that she believes God loves you. It’s true that she loves people with Autism—purportedly more than most. It’s true that she speaks with a blaccent, true that she wants to spend an hour a day reading the bible, true that she donates her clothes to the homeless. Or at least wants to. It’s true that Walt Whitman once wrote I am large. I contain multitudes. It’s true that Walt Whitman himself couldn’t have possibly been aware of all the multitudes a person like Woah Vicky could contain.

And it’s clear that she’s nervous. Restlessly jockeying before the microphone, Vicky and Harry seem like two kids who’ve begged their parents to let them perform for their friends at a party, but are now second-guessing their routine. She steps up to the mic stand, placing the microphone backward, with the bulb facing out to the crowd. Her poetry is simplistic and absurd. In short, choppy stanzas, she covers a wealth of territory, from Christianity to Bhad Babie. “Michael Jackson Poem” opens with the line Michael Jackson would’ve slid in my DMs. (The Michael Jackson Spotify shuffle situation suddenly makes sense.) A personal list of my favorite stanzas: My thoughts while reading the Bible: it’s so true; I am a single Christian woman looking for a successful athlete; My brother in Christ, imma flirt; What shall I render?

It’s deadass modern dadaism. Mackenzie Thomas is so moved by the experience that she stands for the duration of Vicky’s reading, tears twinkling in her eyes. All the talk of chastity has the girl in front of me borderline gnawing on her fiancé’s earlobe.

In “Miami Story,” she writes, “all these dudes wanna smash. Some of them be gay.” Her work is, frankly, compelling—an open road with violently sudden, hilarious detours. It has its moments of clarity, too. “Lust for a man is never satisfying. Not because you’re not enough, but because his emptiness is endless,” she recites, the audience audibly startled by this glimmer of wisdom. Most of her poetry reveals a troubled girl yearning for family, for love, for people to see her as she is. “My family has forsaken me,” she repeats somewhat endlessly, gripped by a genuine pain. Her mother is a long-suffering alcoholic, her father a womanizer. “I need a new father. My father sucks. Who can adopt me?”

She calls her dad “Mister Woah” and refers to her family as “The Woah Dynasty.” She wants to adopt a lone autistic child and travel the world, maybe. “There almost wasn’t a Vicky to say woah to,” she says, to rollicking laughter, though you can audibly hear Harry say, “That’s sad.” “People only see me for Woah Vicky. Woah Vicky not real. Look at me, for my name is Victoria and I’m a child of god.” In her poem “Comments on the Allegations,” she simply recites variants of I love you in a slew of different languages. Dios es amor, Shalom, Mashallah. In her list poem “Things To Do This Week,” which, as titularly promised, is a list of things she had to do this week, you get a glimpse of the real Woah. The list includes: Nails, feet, tan, hair. Tattoo removal. Photo shoot at Michael House. Grocery shopping. Learn how to cook. Give away clothes to the homeless. Buy a bigger bra from Skims. Pray for my acne to go away.

It’s the most outrageously fun, albeit turbulent and rather disorderly, reading I’ve ever been to. The audience tilts toward her gravitational pull, butts genuinely on the edges of seats, the room pregnant with possibility. At no point could I predict what would happen next with any imperial unit of accuracy—a feeling so legitimately exhilarating I could feel my heart launching itself against my ribcage, could hear my own genuine bursts of raucous laughter adding to the growing chorus.

Woah Vicky closes the reading with a prayer, the audience standing hand in hand as instructed. Outside, smoking in the open streets, we hold hands and huddle together, putting forth a secondary prayer to protect from any evil energy evoked by Vicky’s initial offering. My heart still thumps as we watch her inside le PÈRE, posing for selfies, at home in the yellow glow. She beams into an outstretched iPhone, her tattoos nearly faded from the flesh she so often finds herself battling with, her art having almost everything to do with truth.