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

Playing With Rose’s Bodies

When I mentor performance poets, I watch their bodies. Are they – static, rigid, fidgety, slumped, blocked? Are they all up in their head, or is their personality coming out to meet me? I imagine I can actually see the movement, quality, even colour of their ‘energetic body’.

Then I get them to build new bodies.

Ones that better express their words. Ones where the non-verbal communication amplifies the verbal.

Rose Condo makes solo theatre shows, full of poems and warmth and humanity. She’s a very good writer, and Very Good People. But, she does have this habit of always keeping calm and still when she performs. So when she commissioned me to be performance mentor on her new show, The Empathy Experiment, I was itching to get her body moving. Fortunately, that’s exactly what she wanted too…

Here are the bodies I created with Rose:

  • The Donald &The Magic Mirror
  • Red Hot Chilli Rose
  • Hopelessly Devoted To Facebook
  • The Memory Arcade
  • Trying Her Best & The Scientist
  • Rose Under Pressure

The Donald & The Magic Mirror

In one poem, Rose plays both sides of a conversation between Trump and a magic mirror. We made sure the mirror showed polite horror through a rigid ‘backing off’ shape. For The Donald, Rose had some good expressions and gestures, but it really came alive when I got her to imagine projecting a huge ‘psychopathic hook’ out of the top of her head.

Red Hot Chilli Rose

“Put it away, put it away, put it away now” – the poem mimicked the classic Red Hot Chilli Peppers track ‘Give It Away’, but we needed the body as well. Using the video as inspiration, I forced poor Rose to flail about in full rock star mode!

Hopelessly Devoted To Facebook

For this break-up love-letter to social media, I wanted to channel Olivia Newton-John in ‘Grease’, but the wistful gazing into space didn’t quite nail it. Once we included a prop for Rose to look at, I could provoke a waltzing motion that was both romantic and confrontational.

The Memory Arcade

Memory Arcade

Three memories form the three stanzas of this poem. For each one, I asked Rose to visualise a tableau and stand within it, creating the scene in her mind as she spoke. Much more effective than you might expect from an invisible technique, and we spent some times drawing the tableaux to fix them in her mind.

Trying Her Best & The Scientist

Real Rose vs Science Rose

These two are the narrative glue, the personas that do all the explanation. They are both Rose, but one of her is less confident, which shows in her looser posture and looping, wandering movements around the stage. The other Rose is more structured and certain, so she stays by her whiteboard and keeps herself straight and ‘plugged in’ to her head.

Rose Under Pressure

This body contains the heart of the show, and when we found it there was a very emotional, precious moment. I’m not going to talk about it too much. Perhaps you can understand it from the pictures?

Stay tuned for more, including a Q&A with Rose herself, plus I reveal how shiatsu training can make you a better performance poet…

 

Impermanence by Kirsten Luckins — Celebrating Change

https://videopress.com/embed/AQByGcjZ?hd=0&autoPlay=0&permalink=0&loop=0

Celebrating Change grew in part out of a love for film-poetry. Although not everyone who takes part in the project ends up using a poem as the basis for their digital story, there is still something essentially poetic about putting pictures to words. We ask our film-makers to explore what happens when the pictures don’t […]

via Impermanence by Kirsten Luckins — Celebrating Change

Blackout Poetry Workshops

Hi folks! I just remembered I have a personal blog where I can tell you things!

I’m doing blackout poetry workshops for Crossing the Tees Festival this month, and I’d love to see a few more faces as I fly about Teesside with my trundle case full of dismembered library books, watercolours, Sharpies, glitter tape, star stickers, crayons and frames…

Book via ARC – dates include TODAY 11th June 2pm in Redcar; Wednesday 13th June 5pm at Cockerton Library in Darlington; and 10.30am Saturday 23rd June in Hartlepool Community Hub (the library on York Road)

Workshops costs a fiver, and you’ll go home with your own piece of text-poetry-art, in either a clip frame or a mount (depending on how much glitter glue you use, I swear that stuff NEVER dries…)

 

Dinbych by Stella Wulf

Please click here for an audio recording of Stella’s wonderful poem.

IMG_0191

Stella Wulf hails from Wales but now lives in France with her husband and a menagerie of critters. She has spent her life restoring ruins and is yet to live in a house that’s finished. Her poems have appeared in Obsessed With Pipework, The High Window, Raum, Prole, Ink Sweat & Tears, Rat’s Ass Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, and many others. They have also been included in several anthologies: The Very Best of 52, three drops, Clear Poetry Anthology, and #MeToo. She has an MA in Creative Writing, from Lancaster University.

Wild Awake In Winter

2018 is, I hope, the year of TWO retreats. I spent the last week in January at Dhanakosa, marking my tenth annual retreat, enjoying snow, writing poems, and collecting footage for this filmpoem inspired by our discussions on environmental activism.

If you’re considering a retreat and would like to learn more about meditation or Buddhism, I really recommend Dhanakosa. They have wonderful week-long retreats throughout the year for beginners, and the meditation is always partnered with a sympathetic activity like yoga, writing, painting, photography or even hillwalking. Prices are also on a dana basis – you pay what you can. Go; you won’t regret it.

Speak up, larches.

Now the wind has gone

you have stopped your roaring song.

Instead, you watch the buzzard

trace gentle circles in the air.

And now you hold your arms out

to catch the chaffinches, and the rain.

Otters, gigs, pamphlets, gigs, projects

Hi all – quick round-up of what’s been keeping me away from blogging here – blogging HERE! Celebrating Change is a new Arts Council-funded project from me and my colleague Laura Degnan. We’re combining my writing experience with her filmmaking skills in order to run a year-long digital storytelling project for Middlesbrough residents. I’m also in charge of running the blog as a poetry/film/flash fiction online magazine, so please do check out the many poems I’ve been posting over the last few weeks.

Otters are through the first edit and getting their covers sorted, on track for publication in early October – you can still pre-order your copy, and even buy a print of my ‘Otters In A Bathtub’ illustration, or instruct me to draw an otter of your very own! You have until 10th October to get in on the deal, so do get clicking!

And finally, I will be one half of a brand-new pamphlet coming out in the Black Light Engine Room series. These are gorgeous little pocket-sized poetry gems, with a classy yellow cover, and only cost £4 a pop. I will be reading at the pamphlet launch at Python Gallery in Middlesbrough on Saturday 28th October, hope to see you there.

Lots of other gigs and readings lined up for autumn:

Autumn Gigs updated

Utterly Otterly!

BathtubOtters

Hi there cutey lutraphiles! As some will have heard from my social media trumpets, all is going ahead with my second collection of poetry, Utterly Otterly! Containing poems and illustrations by Yours Truly, all otter-themed, many ludicrous. Also containing the writing prompts I was working from, and my excuses for why I ended up doing something else instead.

You too can pre-order a book, which will be published and sent out in October. You could even fund me further by ordering a print of Otters In The Bathtub (above), or a bespoke otter of your very own! Simply follow this link to my GoFundMe page, which will remain open for donations/pre-orders until we go to press in around 6-8 weeks time.

My mother’s eyesight

437926-contact-lensNew poem for you, should you fancy a shufty. This one was written a few days ago whilst on a Wolf At The Door writing retreat at Dhanakosa (the anchoring place of my spirit). It’s about my mother searching for lost contact lenses, something that seemed to happen on a daily basis through my childhood, although she swears it was a rare occurrence. Years (and soft contact lenses, and bifocals) later, my unearthed memories of this once-commonplace activity came back to me like hallucinations.

Contact Lens

My mother is blinking like an owl treading water.

She has spatchcocked her palms, is strip-searching

the carpet, patting the sofa down, looking for her sight.

 

The world, transparent and the size of her pinkie-tip,

has fallen out of her eye and now, out of malice,

it will not be found. Or worse, it has sailed away,

 

intrepid coracle, to the dark side of her eyeball.

She tents her lid by its guy-rope lashes. I see inside her

it’s as red as a desert noon. A morbid rolling

 

hoves the fugitive into view. Retrieved, she lathers it

with spitwash, pinions again her Clockwork Orange eye,

and deftly launches the tissue-thin glass bowl. It floats,

 

meniscus on meniscus, world upon world.

Fiddling on with film

Hey hey, how’s it going?

I have a new filmpoem for you to look at – it’s VERY amateurish, hooray. I filmed my shadow at Hartlepool station when waiting for a train one morning. (Pretty soon I’m going to have a collection of work entirely created at Hartlepool station while waiting for trains). There are two soundtracks overlaid; one is a free download of wind chimes, the other is my annoying voice being much more boring-intoning-typical-poet than I’d like. Anyhoo, give it a look if you’d like 🙂

Even Though I Looked, Even Though I Listened

Oh, and the poem itself was written in response to work by Louise Bourgeois, during a workshop led by the rather super Lisa Matthews.

louise-bourgeois-art-is-a-guarantee-of-sanity-body-image-1459766804

Playing with form

Recently I’ve been reading Asteronymes by Claire Trevien, a collection of poems that has repeatedly and deservedly been called ‘playful’. Lots of the poems muck about with wordplay, redaction, and poetic form. There’s a form in there that Claire has invented, where she splits four-letter words down the middle and uses them to start the first word of a line, and end the last word. This is most evident in the poem ‘Goatfell’, whose first two lines read thusly (emphasis my own)

GOthic scrabble of rocks, we chAT

FEy and murder: how this chap feLL

I rather like this game, so I had a go at it myself. I found it tricky but interesting, as it forced out a strange little poem quite unlike what I would usually write. The inspiration for the subject matter was a conversation I had with Husband as we sauntered through a churchyard. Husband says he’d like to be buried with a video camera in the coffin, so people could watch some kind of live stream decomposition. Grim, but funny, and potentially a spiritual act – it reminded me of a set of Buddhist watercolours I saw in the touring ‘Flesh’ exhibition, which portray stages of decomposition as an aid to meditation on impermanence.

What I really wanted to do was create a version of the poem where lines would fade, or decompose. I’ve seen similar things online, and had hoimagesped it would be something I could do via Twine – but alas, no, it needs properly coding and I am ignorant of this arcane magic. So instead I have rendered it as a Powerpoint presentation with slides that fade into each other! Neat! If you’d like to read it, please click on the link below to download it.

Underground, his face and body disintegrate