Next Friday, Kim Vodicka will be stopping by Found Studio on Broad for a poetry reading. It will not be family-friendly.
How do you describe what you do? Erotic poet seems too polite.
Polite?(!) Haha. I’ve actually often considered the term “erotic poet” to be an insult, historically. I much prefer “Spokesbitch of a Degeneration,” if they’ll let you print that. “Erotic” is also pretty limiting. My work is just as concerned, if not more so, with love as it is with sex. I consider everything I’ve ever written to be a love poem, really, even the pieces that cut off your balls and feed them to you! “Poet,” too, seems limiting, since what I’m doing is very much a hybrid project, a symbiosis of words and music.
It’s interesting to me that people often focus on the erotic elements of my work to the exclusion of all else. It’s interesting to me that, in 2017, people still have the ability to be shocked by sexuality. That’s why the Psychic Privates album cover is covered in genitalia. … I look forward to a day when sexuality is normalized in that respect, when people can see something like that and find it not shocking, but human. I look forward to a day when human sexuality shamelessly blends in with everything else.
Psychic Privates
The event is described as being “performed over psychedelic sonic architecture; a sui Southern freak show poetry reading.” What is psychedelic sonic architecture? And what does sui Southern mean?
Psychedelic sonic architecture is what happens when you gloriously stop making sense and surrender yourself to the moodiness of sound (shoutouts here to my musical collaborators on this project — Josh Stevens, Jack Alberson, and Randy Faucheux), when you build entire sonic structures out of emotional whims, when you ride the wave of that trip. Sui Southern refers to being born and raised in the Deep South and feeling like you’ll never get out and feeling so frustrated that you regularly want to die because of it. So, yeah … you’re seeing all of those elements in the work, and in the live performance … the sea changes, the frustration between fleeting moments of acceptance, the freak-outs, the soft whispers, the utter psychosis … the performance really functions as its own creative omniverse.
