Author: Kirsten Luckins

Director - Tees Women Poets Project Manager - Rebecca Swift Foundation #WomenPoetsPrize Collection 'Passerine' available from Bad Betty Press, longlisted for Laurel Prize for Eco-Poetry 2021

Filmpoems : Poemfilms

So I was rejected recently. Nothing new there. Got knocked back by Verb New Voices, who didn’t think much of a proposal featuring filmpoems. I don’t care, I love filmpoems, so here’s a couple of new ones for you. Please contact me if you’re available to re-record the voiceovers, I loathe the sound of my adenoidal toddler-voice.

This one written from a 52 prompt…

This one written from a Buddhist text…

Plus of course, the inevitable sweary rant that is Primavera, recently screened at Stage 2 of Northern Stage!!! Hahahahahaha.

Hannah Loves Kathy and other poetic shennanigans

That thing they do to plates, that’s coolee isn’t it? At half time we had masses of cheese. Are you calling my mam trailer trash? She’s in there puking now while he’s pissing.

Yes, these are random snippets overheard on the last train back to Hartlepool on a Saturday. I can’t make them into poetry. I bet Hannah Silva could, because she’s some kind of divine alchemist. She can take the dross that is Fifty Shades of Grey and the already cut-up works of Kathy Acker and transform them into a whirlwind of terrifying beauty, where cancer and childbirth and so many species of pain are funnelled through her singular, exacting creative practice to become a confluence of meanings. Spoken words degrade and reveal their emotional core, spoken words and subtitles and BSL gestures converge and diverge in their meanings but never lose their urgent significance, often slipping apart to leave gaps where we find our own meanings growing.  What is a woman if you take away her breasts, her volition, her body? If you hear these words and you are not in a sex dungeon – “everything in this room can cause pain” – if you are sitting with your friends – what does this now mean? Stunning. See her work if it’s the last thing you do.

For the sublime to the ridiculous, as I totally fail to spend any time at the Newcastle Poetry Festival, not even to see Kei Miller, for which I will do appropriate penance at some point in the future – but really, when you live in Spoken Word Land, it’s very hard to visit Literary Establishment Land without wanting to shoot yourself in the face. So many poets who are great on page but who should never speak. So few audience members in the huge auditorium. So little palpable enthusiasm. Sigh. So for those of you who didn’t get along, like me, you will be no doubt delighted to watch my very sweary filmpoem ‘Primavera’ on the Bloodaxe Archive website, along with a couple of other poems and a re-interpretation of Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave Off Kanagawa’ rendered entirely in ink stamps saying ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck’.

I was going to write you an immensely sensitive response to Heaney’s sequence ‘The Clearings’, which I have been reading out loud after meditation every morning this week, but that may have to wait until I get to feeling a bit more pretentious. Instead, here’s a list of Poetry Wot I Have Read This Week:

The Haw Lantern; Seamus Heaney

Abstract & Delicious; Tony Lopez

Penguin Modern Poets #12; Alan Jackson, Jeff Nutall, William Wantling

Forms Of Protest; Hannah Silva

Ekphrastic project – Sabina Sallis

Love art. Love it. Let’s all hang out in galleries, they’re mint. Got a new project, hanging out in galleries and writing poems about art and then having them published by Corridor 8 magazine alongside critical reviews.

Here’s my first one, for the Sabina Sallis exhibition running at Newbridge gallery until 28 March. You can click through at the bottom to the review by Annie O’Donnell, for to marvel at our different reactions – hers so sensual, mine so political. Then you should go along and make your own mind up.

Some snippets of Demeter

This show is going very slooooooooowly….I think I may be procrastinating. But I’m due to start the first of three mini-residencies next month, so I’d better get my thinking cap back on. One idea is that I won’t actually perform it in the end, I will do a very complicated and clever thing with audio recordings and make the audience do strange things in a fully-immersive participatory theatre way. Been thinking about that a lot today, and whether people would throw pots of water or paint over each other just because I asked them to. Probably not.

Anyway, for them that are interested, here is a Soundcloud playlist featuring the poems-plus-soundscapes I did on my residency at Caedmon Hall a couple of months ago. There are four tracks, but only two poems – each poem is repeated with a different soundscape mix underneath. I know which version of each I prefer, but you could always let me know your thoughts on the matter.

Poems I Have Been Reading… Forugh Farrokhzad

In English we say ‘out of the mouths of babes’, meaning that children often say out loud the unpalatable or indiscreet truths that the adults all know but are trying to ignore. We say it with a hair-ruffling air of indulgence, the implication being that children can get away with statements that would be embarrassing or even dangerous when made by an adult.

On Tuesday evening I went to a workshop on Iranian poetry led by Javaad Alipoor, from theatre company Soroush, and we looked at a poem from the mid-1960s written by iconic female poet Forough Farrokhzad. It was written in the voice of a young girl, and with devastating simplicity it lays out all kinds of unspoken truths like open palms – what it is to be poor and to want things, what it is to mix up desires and needs, what it is to live in fear of police in your own homeland, what it is to put your faith in a messiah. It is wonderfully subversive, all the while wearing the pigtails of innocence. I loved it.

You can read it and find out more about Forugh by clicking here.

Forugh’s brother, the equally iconic poet, broadcaster and singer Fereydoun Farrokhzad, is the subject of Soroush’s new play My Brother’s Country, which comes to ARC Stockton on 23rd and 24th February – but I believe 23rd is sold out already, so you’d better get your Wednesday tickets sharpish! Click here for information and booking. It falls under ARC’s new ‘Pay What You Decide’ initiative, so really have nothing to lose.

Demeter In Winter

Have I really not been in touch since November? So sorry, been a bit distracted, got a new spoken word show on the go…

GOTH In WinterThe initial idea was pitched to Radio 3 for their Verb New Voices commission last year – I got down to the final three, but wasn’t selected in the end. So I’ve been mulling over how to take a short radio piece and turn it into an hour spoken word show. Still not quite sure, but research and development has so far thrown me into the on-coming traffic of FAR TOO MANY IDEAS, to the point where I’m deliriously uncertain what I’m even writing about any more – the impact of the built environment of mental health? Greenham Common and feminist approaches to creative non-violent protest? Greek myths about spring? Rape culture? Yes, probably/possibly/definitely/maybe…

Lucky me, I was given a week at Caedmon Hall in Gateshead, and a most welcome wee pot of money, by NEADN in order to be confused in a more productive manner, with the helpful input of director Matt Cummins and composer Ed Carter. This is the first time I’ve had the luxury of a residency at this early point in a project’s development, so I wan’t really sure what to do with it. Let’s face it, this is only my second show, and the first one was autobiographical so I kind of knew how it was going to end, which seems like a bit of a cheat in hindsight. Anyway, if you’re massively curious about what goes on during a residency, here’s what I managed: in five days

  1. ‘Found’ DeDe’s posture and way of moving through experiment and rehearsal
  2. ‘Found’ DeDe’s voice through performing a poem in her body – learned the poem by heart
  3. Wrote a short scene between DeDe and her daughter and had a good old think about how that might be performed
  4. Researched Greenham Common protests and wrote a ‘found’ poem using first-person accounts of demonstrations
  5. Wrote a ‘found’ piece using The Handbook Of Urban Survival and started blocking out possible ways of performing it
  6. Took walks around Gateshead guided by local residents, looking at areas that were meaningful to them, places that ‘worked’, places where they felt uncomfortable, discussed the impact of their environment on them
  7. Took solo walks as DeDe and documented it with photos and notes towards further poems
  8. Took lots of video footage towards a possible future filmpoem/AV aspect to the performance
  9. Spent a day taking field recordings and learning how to make simple, layered soundscapes to accompany poems
  10. Recorded two poems and made two different sketches of the same poem with different combinations of field recordings
  11. Was videoed doing an interview about the residency
  12. Met with GIFT to chat about possible audio-tour presentations of the show as it progresses

You can keep up with the explosion of my head via the Pinterest board for this project, where I am randomly scrap-booking images and preoccupations as they assault me.

Poems from the ‘yuff

Heugh Battery gun emplacement, Headland, Hartlepool. For years I’ve been pronouncing it ‘Huff’, but I’m not from round here. It’s ‘the ‘Yuff’, and it’s where the first deaths on British soil took place in WW1 – at 8.10am on Wednesday 16 December 1914, when the town was bombarded from the sea. Over 100 people died, did you know that? Then the German ships went and knocked seven bells out of Whitby and Scarborough.

HeughAnthology

I’ve been part of a monthly writing group since January, bent to the task of researching and responding to the personal histories of those involved. We’ve put together this anthology, and we’re launching it with a reading at Hartlepool CFE at 5pm on Thursday 11 December. You’re most welcome to come along, and maybe buy a book – they’re most reasonably priced, and there are four poems in there from me. Here’s the titles, to create intrigue…

Night In The Barracks

The Margarets Go Digging Sea Coal

Etta Harris, Junior Mistress, Finds the Kingdom Of Heaven

Playing Soldiers

Mamela and other reviews (Gosling Watch)

Recently I was selected to be one of ten intrepid amateur theatre reviewers for the North East Artist Development Network. My first review is now online here; I decided to start with kindness. It would have been possible to be much more scathing, as the show I saw was billed as drama but really was a whole heap less sophisticated than that. However, I’m just finding my feet, see what you think.

Perhaps one day I’ll manage to feel secure enough in my theatre reviewing to do it in the same style as my now surprisingly popular ‘Gosling Watch’ on Facebook. For those of you who are not FB friends, here’s a round-up of my pearls of wisdom to date…

September 13 2014, Only God Forgives

So I watched Only God Forgives, hoping for some close-ups of Ryan Gosling’s beautiful face moving almost imperceptibly from one state of beautiful blankness to another, subtly different state of beautiful blankness. I was rewarded with many such moments, and also – a prescient, machete-wielding cop-nemesis, several sub-Lynchian scarlet-drenched dream sequences, an unrecognisably brassy Kristen Scott Thomas playing a castrating-mother-cougar-gangster-matriarch, and Thai karaoke. This film teeters on the brink of cult genius, before plunging slow-motion into the abyss of the truly fucking awful.

September 14 2014, Ides Of March

Still on the eternal quest for Gosling-satiety, I watched The Ides Of March, which is a typical late-period Clooney political noir featuring the Cloonster himself as a charming senator racing for the Democratic presidential candidacy, with Gosling our hero as the rising star in the campaign office. Fans of the Gosling School Of Facial Acting will be delighted to know that there is a decent quota of wordless, faintly enigmatic blank-face moments. Excitingly, there are also several moments in which his face does much more complex emotional stuff that I am forced to call acting. It’s a story of lost innocence, and yes I know there may not seem to be much innocence left to be lost for a spin-doctor with all the hallmarks of a political and emotional player, but lo! the labrador tail of idealism still wags in the soul of our hero, until actions and their consequences dock it for good. Most satisfactory as a film all-round, just what I’ve come to expect from Clooney as a director, although it scores quite low on the Gosling-Kit-Off scale. Which of course doesn’t exist, that would be puerile of me.

September 16 2014, Drive

Many of you will be asking ‘why the Gosling fetish, Kirsten? when did this all start? did you accidentally watch The Notebook or something?’ The truth is, I did wade through that particular tide of treacle some years back, and had managed to expunge the experience from my conscious memory. At the time, the divine Ryan moved me not one jot, the Face being at that time far too fresh, plus there was all that lying in the road whiffling at traffic lights bullshit to contend with.

No, good friends, it was Drive, Drive the magnificent, the moody, the mesmeric, a film with the racing lines of an urban heist movie but powered by pure Western. Gosling is literally the man with no name, drifted in from some modern high plains wearing not a poncho but a scorpion bomber jacket, laconic (naturally), and operating sometimes outside the law but always within his own code, driven to extreme violence only to protect the innocent. The whole film is fucking gorgeous, but it’s the interaction between him and Carey Mulligan that did it for me. She’s a pretty deft exponent of Facial Acting herself, and I was hypnotised by watching them watching each other, speechlessly allowing their faces to suffuse with – love? Attraction? Soul-recognition? Ah! The yearning….

September 23 2014, Crazy. Stupid. Love.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. Mid-life loser (Steve Carrell) gets booted out by his wife (Julianne Moore) and winds up sitting like a saddo in a pick-up joint, where he is taken under the wing of spectacularly successful Game-playing womaniser (Ryan Gosling). The inevitable happens – loser rediscovers his mojo through taking up anonymous sex, man-whore rediscovers his heart through giving up anonymous sex, but both end up re-affirming that All You Need Is Love. This is a modern rom-com of the knowing variety, one which makes slyly subversive digs at the very tropes it inhabits. Gosling is the focus of a few clever little camera-shot turnarounds where this objectifier of women becomes the object of the lens-eye. We meet him from the feet up, like Cameron Diaz in The Mask; we even get a full-length shot of him posing in slow-mo with orgasmic backing music. He falls in love with a girl who is incapable of playing The Game by the standard one-night rules. Gosling playing a man in love reads a lot like his ‘real self’, by which I mean the small-screen persona he projects in TV interviews. It’s a good look on him, and he seems to have some shit-hot deadpan comic timings in both arenas. There is really no Enigmatic Blank Face time in this film at all, but this is balanced by a solid six on the (non-existent) Gosling Kit-Off Scale. Yeah, you heard me, a six. I can take more. On a more worrying note, I seem to have refined my adoration of the Face into a specific obsession with his nose. Dammit, that’s a fine nose.

September 26 2014, more about Crazy. Stupid. Love.

Still slightly obsessing over Crazy, Stupid, Love and the rom-com genre in general. I believe rom-coms are equivalent to glossy magazines – they promise us (women) some light if slightly guilty pleasure, some ‘me-time’, a little harmless escapism. But they always seem to leave an aftertaste of depression. So much shiny fantasy undermines dull reality, throws our cellulite into sharp relief, and in the case of rom-coms propagates an impossible notion of love. Who was I meant to identify with when watching that film? My love was not the lightning strike of seeing my soulmate in the school corridor. My love was not a Photoshopped asshole transformed instantly into ideal family man by my unique personality. My love was a friend who forgave my faults, because if I was in that film I would have been the crazy-eyed, self-destructive teacher whose heart and genitals provided the arena for Loser-Hero Steve Carrell to grab back his confidence. And of all the characters, she was the one left still loveless at the credits, because she’s broken, right? And the mad ones don’t get the rom-com redemption. Directors, throw some crumbs to the broken bitches, there are more of us than you acknowledge, and these films are to love as cupcakes are to food.

September 28 2014, The Place Beyond The Pines

There are films which are novelistic in scope, introducing us to a protagonist and then following them through unfolding circumstances and personal developments to some kind of conclusion, resolution, redemption even. We stay with them, and are invited to care, even for the anti-hero. (There Will Be Blood, for example). Then there are films which play more like a collection of short stories, linked by theme or frequently by the daisy-chain of chance interactions between characters. There is no one protagonist, the focus of our sympathy shifts, the cast is vast and the effect is looser on the emotions, meditative even. (Short Cuts, for example). The Place Beyond The Pines sits somewhere between the two. A more conventionally structured version of this film would feature Bradley Cooper’s character, the cop Avery Cross, as the lead. Instead we are tricked into thinking Gosling’s mysterious and misguided motorcyclist is going to be the hero, and given almost an hour to give a shit before he gets a cap popped in him. As a Gosling-junkie, I feel cheated and used. Sure, lure me in with an opening shot of his immaculately chiselled torso, but then to abandon me with and hour and twenty minutes of your ‘meditation on fathers and sons’? You mean I have to read this film as art, not entertainment? I have to seriously ask myself what is this place beyond the pines, metaphorically speaking? Oh ffs.

October 11 2014, Lars And the Real Girl

“Quirky, heart-warming comedy” is such a devalued phrase, isn’t it? Like “luxury flat”. It could easily be applied to Lars And The Real Girl, the latest outing for Gosling Watch. Lars is socially crippled by shyness – hahaha! He orders a life-sized, anatomically-correct doll from the Internet – hahaha! He truly believes that she is real, and the whole town joins in with his delusion – oh, hahahahahahahahahaHAHA! Played differently, hilarity could indeed ensue. But it doesn’t, because even though there are funny moments, the point is definitely not ‘let’s laugh at Lars’. This film has way too much heart for that, and in fact it is about love in the widest and realest sense – intimate love, familial love, community love and I would say also Christian love. “Love is God in action” says the local priest, and we see the ripple of it extending out through the town in a most beautiful way. The town itself is a bastion of simple decency in the far north, probably where the cop from Fargo grew up. Of course. The northern small-town is the new shorthand for old-fashioned values, now that the mid-west picket-fenced hamlet has become so subverted (Lynch, I’m looking at you).

Loved this film. Loved Gosling in it, he’s superb, especially the panic attack scene. But when searching for it, Netflix suggested Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, and I advise you not to mix up the two when choosing your Sunday morning viewing, photomontages of flaccid penises can really put you off your cornflakes.

November 2 2014, Drive (again)

BBC Radio 1 have re-scored Drive. I haven’t watched it all yet, so I can’t comment on the whether or not I can tell the difference – I suspect the main change for me will be noticing the music at all, as the original score is minimal and seamless. But I did check out the scene by the river when Gosling takes Mulligan and her son for an idyllic outing. This montage is cinematic shorthand for ‘and over time the two fell deeply in love’. In the original soundtrack, it is the first incidence of ‘the theme from Drive’ (A Real Hero by College & Electric Youth), which has the hook ‘what does it mean to be a real human being and a real hero?’.

Now I was recently arguing with a good friend of mine about Drive. His assertion was that the entire film is a piece of cheesy nonsense, exemplified by this section and this song. After vigorously reminding him that Gosling is playing not a character but a FREAKIN’ ARCHETYPE, DUDE, I got to thinking about what I actually meant by that.

So I think the archetype is The Hero, and I think it’s as impossible an ideal of masculinity as any film portrayal of femininity. That whole strong and silent – yet feels deeply – yet is a loner – yet is a family man – yet is brutally violent – yet is tender….even his faults presented as virtuous. How is anyone meant to combine all of that and still be plausible? You can’t do it, men – you can’t be a real hero AND a real human being.

Which is why I prefer the original soundtrack, cheesy as it is, over the new (and equally cheesy) ‘aaaaaahhh, you’re amazing’. Pur-lease. Give me an existential question over a breathless assertion any day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DSVDcw6iW8

New poems

Very happy to have a poem in Alliterati issue 15, available online now at http://alliteratimagazine.com/issues/issue-15/. Nice to see fellow poets Carmen Thompson, Jane Burn and David O’Hanlon in there as well.

I also had a couple in issue 2 of Lunar Poetry, which you can buy very cheaply at http://lunarpoetry.co.uk/Buy.html.

Review – Dead To Me by Greyscale Theatre

Do you believe in the spirit world? If you could talk to the dead, might it change your life?

Steven (Gary Kitching) is a small man in a stifling job, who visits a psychic (Tessa Parr) because someone gave him a gift voucher. He’s sceptical, uncomfortable, hunched and nervy and literally wrong-footed by her fey new-age mannerisms. She pulls his aura like taffy, twinkles about like a ballerina doll and jumps off furniture. Their interaction is a hilarious mismatched tango – until a final piece of abrupt advice from her spirit guide tips him into anxiety. When the prediction seems to come true, he comes back and we see their relationship evolve over several meetings, as Steven becomes more enamoured with the psychic and her beliefs. Each time he leave, he sheds his jacket, putting on a new one when he returns. They lie around the stage like skins he is shedding, or parts of himself he is losing. Each meeting is separated by a strange red-washed interval where Steven paces out his discomfort at the margins of the stage while the psychic occupies it, dancing her weirdly naive dance to the sound of Elvis (that great ambassador of the Realm Beyond). It’s clear that this is not going to end well. Maybe you can even guess what might happen if an emotionally vulnerable person is encouraged to believe that they too have the gift of communication? The audience can see where it is headed, not with the stale predictability of a cliche but with the dreadful inevitability of a tragedy.

Kitching and Parr are both tremendous in this, their physicality is pitch-perfect. Kitching in particular basically gives us a masterclass in how to ramp up status just through body language. Initially, he is so far down the food chain that it is easy to ignore him, the whimsical Parr is so much more charming and compelling. But by his character’s final manifestation, he is as riveting and chilling as a psychopath. This was a flawless production, as far as I’m concerned, worth every penny.