poetryasf-ck - Tumblr blog

poetryasf-ck · 6 years

Text

Good Grief #9 - Hannah Raymond-Cox

Hannah Raymond-Cox grew up in Hong Kong and San Francisco, and has bounced around the UK since age sixteen. She studied International Relations and Modern History at St Andrews alongside her career in poetry and her work includes original plays, slam poetry pieces, and bespoke poems. Hannah won the Stanza Slam, was a National Poetry Slam Championships Finalist for Scotland, and performed on the BBC Stage at the Edinburgh Fringe. She has gigged everywhere from the Royal Albert Hall to a tiny dive bar in Hong Kong. She is currently touring Germany as an actor and munching her way round all the Bäckerei available. Her debut book, "Amuse Girl", comes out from Burning Eye Books next year.

Why, if there was a reason, did you write this poem/these poems?

I wrote the show because I’d been approached after a gig in Edinburgh (Other Voices) and was asked whether I had a full-length spoken word show they could come see. I didn’t, and I felt like… well, why not challenge myself not only to do more long-form work, but share my diasporic story? Writing to time of 3 minutes where you’re essentially doing a persuasive monologue means that nuance and context is harder to achieve, and I wanted to frame my story not as one of moments of fear and loss but one of longterm survivorship.

Why, upon writing this poem/these poems, did you perform them?

I think that there was a sense that for me - it was important to share what abuse and the aftermath of abuse/loss looks like on a practical level, in a way that was performing victimhood but as a part of a larger queer diasporic narrative. For the audience I feel like a lot of us experience grief and loss and loneliness and I wanted to connect with others like me - to say hey, you are seen. Also, it was written to be performed. My background as an actor and spoken word poet rather than a page poet means that to me, some work is explicitly created in the medium for a reason.

How does performing this piece change how you look at what happened to you?

Not really - I feel like a lot of the changing happened during the writing process. It took me the best part of 9 months to write the show, and during the last 4 of those I was working with my director and turning in fortnightly revisions. When you’re editing hardcore like that, the preciousness and connexion to the trauma has to take a backseat in service of a good story for an audience that you can deliver consistently every night.

How do you separate artistic performance from lived personal experience?

I feel like most conscientious poets I know are aware that we perform authenticity, and that means that lived experience gets condensed and presented in a way that makes an impact. My lived experience wouldn’t rhyme, it’d have way more hesitations, deviations, and repetitions, I can’t present an hour of it and go The End - it’s a show. No one piece of work can fully articulate the constant complex changes in how I feel about what I’ve lived.

Do you find yourself affected negatively by performing this piece? If so, how do you look after yourself?

I was terrified the first time I shared it - the sense of ownership was huge, and it took a great deal of trust to hand over my script to someone, and the first time I performed it was also huge. But I now treat it like a job to a certain extent - if I were being triggered or emotionally tired out more than usual in the course of a normal acting job then I’d have had to go back to the editing table and see where I could build in safety measures for myself. For me, poetry is inherently performative, and having years of acting under my belt helps me delineate performance emotion from my own mental state. Writing helps delineate too, like POLARIS’ format of “snapshots” and “scene” literally being said helps me reset my breathing and emotional state between scenes and reminds me and the audience that this is all constructed. I’m not Brecht, but I borrow bits...

Do you practice any aftercare after performing this piece (either for yourself or audiences)? (E.g., talking to audience members who are upset, taking some time out after your performance to ground yourself, ensuring you perform in places where you feel safe etc.)

Personally, I go for a pint with friends who enjoyed the piece. I warm down the same way after my spoken word show as my traditional theatre work. If I weren’t able to perform the piece without touching the unsafe parts, then I wouldn’t perform it. I feel like part of my job as an artist is to be able to reproduce the same experience every show for an audience… The great thing about the conventions of theatre and spoken word theatre means that the safe space notion is a compact made as soon as an audience enters a space with clear performer space vs audience seating. I think it does a disservice to say that as artists we need to practice aftercare for an audience - that’s not a responsibility of the performer to police or preempt reactions. Triggers and grief are so personal that what would you warn for? Frequently, trigger warnings beyond the vaguer “mature themes” remove nuance and subtlety from a piece, I’ve found. I’d rather challenge an audience that let them self-select out with my own interpretation of concerning parts of the show...

Do you do any content warnings for this piece? Why?

I do but I keep them generic! Considering the show sits in the realm of spoken word theatre, warnings are on all marketing materials and are necessarily programmed in to the theatres’ booking systems. It’s an important part of marketing a show - to know your audience and your demographic targets. I also definitely don’t want any kiddos walking into a show created for a more mature audience. POLARIS’ content warnings are: 15+, strong language, and mental health themes. Any more than that and I feel like we’re stepping into the realm of spoiler territory and nuance removal, and I feel like I’ve given enough information to the audience in other material. That material includes biography, reviews, the short and long copy for flyers and websites, the visual design of the poster itself, and more.

Does the artist owe any kind of protection or safeguarding to their audience?

In a vacuum/ideal world, the performer has a duty to one thing and one thing only: making the best piece of art they can, which says something, and communicating that something to an audience in a reproducible and safe manner for themselves. They are not there to warn the audience, make the audience feel comfortable, or look after the audience’s reactions to their work (unless directly funded to produce media that does so). We can't cotton-wool art because it's an important medium for raising awareness, for reflecting life back at us, and for representation. Other things too, but they're less pertinent to the conversation and a medium associated with telling a “truth” to a “power”. Triggers can come from many things, not just things that can be classed as art - we as a society don’t expect them elsewhere, what makes spoken word different?

I think that the warnings in front of a typical show (eg. strobe lights, mature themes) work well enough now. We have content warning systems for some arts (cinema and video games really stand out for the level of detail available pre-purchase) but almost nothing for others, particularly books and theatre. For cinema and videogames, solitary and personal media, that makes sense to provide a measure of information to consumers who may have the ability to pause the medium or want to allow kids to watch material beyond the suggested age rating. Theatre and books, which performance poetry most closely resemble, do not warn beyond blurbs on covers or through supplementary materials used primarily for marketing. They allow for exploration, challenging those who engage with the work in a different way.

Part of the problem with asking the performer and writer to provide content warnings and/or aftercare for the audience is that the performer/writer is usually a) too close to the work (in poetry, the content’s usually personal in nature), b) busy pre-show and post-show working on performance itself and may not want to break character of “performing”, c) drained/busy at the end of performing, and d) the only person doing everything associated with that performance! A small example: halfway through my month-long run of POLARIS at Edfringe 2017, a man who’d watched me perform cornered me immediately after and asked me to talk through his reactions to the show with him, then and there. I was in the middle of set take-down, turning around the space, was tired and mildly out of breath, was emotionally resetting from the show, and was absolutely not in the right space for the conversation he wanted to have. I'm not a psychiatrist, and I don't know about any trauma other than my own. I was one person, doing the work of 5, and in that moment, I wished desperately for another person to manage audiences - with funding, of course, that a spoken word solo show doesn’t have.

Additionally, you don’t approach an actor at a traditional theatre stage door and expect a verbal warm-down, nor do you corner a writer of a book you like and ask they help you with the themes/your reaction to their work. Not to go all “Death of the Author” on this, but like - people have approached me post-show with a myriad of different interpretations on “emotionally fraught” sections. They ranged from reasonable (depression) to out of the blue to me (eating disorders) - even with my imagination on full blast I could not have predicted their personal reactions to the work. If I listed every element of the show I could think of, I still would have missed a content warning that occurred to someone somewhere. The nature of the piece is that - as adults seeing a show on queer themes and mental health, the obligation is on the person who’s chosen to consume that media to decide whether it’s appropriate or healthy for them.

If the piece has funding beyond the usual spoken word operation, in which the poet is performer, marketer, director, producer, and front of house, then there are more options. It could be good to have content warnings but in a way that isn’t visible to people unless they want to see them (so a visible warning saying ‘content that may be disturbing, ask a member of staff, or similar). That would keep both camps (the ‘I need to knows’ vs ‘I don’t want any spoilers’) happy, I reckon. Box office/FOH would be provided with a list, which the performer/producer draws up prior to the tour as a part of the tour pack. There could also be further supplementary materials, like a website for content warnings. A bigger budget, like for Trainspotting: Live! enables you to do fun things like have scratch cards with content warnings that you physically have to work for to reveal… Or you could try and set up a nationwide age rating scheme like for video games and films, but that requires maintenance and a solid review board, neither of which the spoken word scene seems likely to be able to do.

In conclusion, I think that if you engage in art then you're bringing yourself and your experiences and your worldview to it: the artist can't control if those things include triggers beyond a typical age rating and “mature themes”. So if, for example, extensive talk of food triggers you then do your due diligence pre-show and at worst, don't come - it's in the synopsis of POLARIS, on flyers, on the website, and more marketing media. If you're triggered during the show then that genuinely sucks but as far as I'm aware, it's unfortunately part of having dealt with trauma. As for post-show, well, the BBC provides links to Samaritans and other organisations at the end of their programmes. I’d rather put the onus on the audience to find ways of processing art that work for them, and encourage them to take responsibility for their reactions.

Do you believe writing about areas such as grief, loss or trauma is a form of healthy catharsis or memorialisation?

I’m not qualified to answer this question, like, at all. I’m not a therapist working directly with the person who’s going through it. So...it depends on the individual. Writing can be healthy! Or it can lead to fixation.

What kind of warnings signs would you point out to someone new to poetry or performance who was performing about their traumas?

I suppose I’d ask the person to ask themselves why they’re doing it, if they’ve got another safe place to process trauma, and to gently caution them from using poetry as a form of therapy. If you find performing the poems trigger you or leave you mentally unsafe, don’t do it. Work on editing, work on the craft, and by understanding how best to say what you want to say, you can create distance and reproducibility for performing poetry.

#good grief #hannah raymond-cox #polaris #spoken word #other voices #grief #trauma #poetry

2 notes · View notes

poetryasf-ck · 6 years

Text

Good Grief #8 - Marianne MacRae

Marianne MacRae is a poet and academic based in Edinburgh. Her work has been widely published in journals including Magma, Ambit and Acumen. In 2017/18, she was the inaugural poet-in-residence at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from The University of Edinburgh. You can find her on Twitter @MarianneMacRae.

Why, if there was a reason, did you write this poem/these poems?

Most of my poems come from a place of grief and trauma, though often it’s subconsciously accessed and manifests as an expedition into the surreal. It’s hard to say why; in both a very real sense of “I find it too difficult to have the words come out of my mouth (or in this case fingers…)” and in a more subliminal way as in “I didn’t realise everything I’ve ever written was actually a product of a traumatic event, because LOL I do funny poems, right?”

Why, upon writing this poem/these poems, did you perform them?

Largely for the LOL reasons stated above; I thought I was being very funny and clever and weird and that audiences would enjoy it. Maybe I thought this was a way people would be forced to accept the stranger/darker aspects of what I have to say because they were peppered with jokes.

How does performing this piece change how you look at what happened to you?

It really didn’t at first (see above). But now I suppose I see it as my attempt at processing somewhere outside of my own mind. Plus, I’ve probably hidden it enough that people might not guess what I’m really saying, so I can keep a certain level of control in terms of how my work is received. And that’s good, I think – I’m saying it, but no one knows I’m saying it, so they can’t feel sorry for me. That’s a bit fucked, I know, but sympathy just makes the sad thing sadder for me.

How do you separate artistic performance from lived personal experience?

I’m basically a hot bag of very frightened insects living inside a coat of very cool cucumbers on a day to day basis anyway, and I only take that off when I shower so…stop watching me in the shower, I guess?

Do you find yourself affected negatively by performing this piece? If so, how do you look after yourself?

No. I don’t think so. But as I said above, I didn’t see the poems I perform as responses to trauma for years; until I was in therapy, actually. I think any laughter I get from my lame jokes is enough to assuage negative effects. Saying that though, if I don’t get the laughs or whatever, I usually churn over the performance in bed, rolling my eyes at how embarrassing I am and swearing I will never do another gig again…but we all do that, right?

No. Feel like I should say more, but it’s a very simple no.

Do you do any content warnings for this piece? Why?

No. I don’t think they’re so necessary with my work.

Does the artist owe any kind of protection or safeguarding to their audience?

Yeah, sometimes, I think. It’s not a great feeling to go along to an event, ready to enjoy yourself, only to hear a story or poem that unexpectedly reminds you of something awful. It snuffs out your buzz. But at the same time, I don’t believe in having to explain every minute detail of a piece of work in case there’s one word that triggers something in one person. It’s discretionary. If there’s likely to be a more common hurt coming through in your work that’s likely to have affected people, then yeah, give it a nod before you get into the details.

Do you believe writing about areas such as grief, loss or trauma is a form of healthy catharsis or memorialisation?

Very much so.

What kind of warnings signs would you point out to someone new to poetry or performance who was performing about their traumas?

Hmm, maybe just be aware of your own limitations as you’re writing, before you even think of performing. Don’t perform anything if a wound is still raw. It’s important to put some distance between yourself and your poetic voice, sometimes. So in my case, for example, “Someone close to me died and I’ll never recover” might become “I married the emu who pecked my guts out because love is not bound by convention” …maybe I’m the wrong person to answer this one.

#Good Grief #Marianne MacRae #poetry #poems #poet #spoken word #grief #loss #animals

2 notes · View notes

poetryasf-ck · 6 years

Audio

The latest in our Headset series, a feature set from Janette Ayachi. It is also available to buy, without adverts, from Bandcamp.

#Janette Ayachi #headset #lies #dreaming #poet #poem #poetry #spoken enlish coomplete course

0 notes

poetryasf-ck · 6 years

Link

No blog this week, but I’d like to bring your attention to this event in Glasgow on Friday the 2nd of November.

In The Works are putting on a night looking at grief in spoken word, featuring their show The 900 Club, with support from Catherine Wilson and Colin Bramwell (as featured in our Good Grief blogs). There will also be a panel discussion, hosted by Andrew.

In other news

One of us is the father of a three week old baby, and the cat is if anything increasing its demands for attention. Thus we will be attempting to continue putting out one podcast per month, but if there is a gap it is because childcare is taking precedent.

In other, other news

We think we’ve worked out what a Bot Slam would involve.

Support your local poet

If you support our Patreon, the money goes to the poets we feature on the podcast. Plus you get exclusive bonus features! WHY NOT DO THIS?

#900 club #in the works #poetry #spoken word #good grief #event #colin bramwell #catherine wilson

0 notes

poetryasf-ck · 6 years

Text

Good Grief #7 - Jay Whittaker

Jay Whittaker has lived and worked in Edinburgh since 1995 and Scotland is very much home, though she grew up much further south in Devon and Nottingham.

After taking a degree in English Language and Literature at Leeds University, I became a librarian, and have worked in the British Library, National Museums Scotland, and the University of Edinburgh. I changed direction in 2009 and now my day job has nothing to do with books. I don’t think having a day job is a bad thing at all for a writer (and for most of us it’s a necessity), though it makes for a constant balancing act.

I’ve written poems for most of my adult life, but have taken my writing much more seriously in the last 4 years. This is the unexpected outcome of my personal annus horribilis, during which my partner died and I started cancer treatment. Who would have thought the shitstorm would re-energise my efforts to get my poems out there? It’s not just all the extra material. If not now, when?

When I’m not writing or working at the day job, I’m usually to be found walking my dog on Edinburgh’s hills or the beaches of East Lothian – or enjoying the many distractions my adopted home town has to offer.

1. Why, if there was a reason, did you write this poem/these poems?

My collection Wristwatch contains a sequence of poems arising from the early death of my partner Morag, and a second sequence about my own cancer treatment in the year that followed. I’m a compulsive journaller as well as a poet and I couldn’t help but write my way through it. The poems are the more public, edited version of that writing.

2. Why, upon writing this poem/these poems, did you perform them?

I wrote the poems to communicate, and performance is the most immediate way of getting feedback. The audience reaction can be seen and heard, right in front of you. It’s always wonderful to hear that my writing has touched someone, has resonance for them.

3. How does performing this piece change how you look at what happened to you?

Performing the poems somehow ritualises, distances and legitimises the experiences: yes, this happened to me, but here I am, trying to make meaning from it all. I suppose it gives me the illusion of control.

The poems were written / edited looking back at particular points in time – as time passes, my reaction to the events has changed, and my feelings about the poems has changed as well.

4. How do you separate artistic performance from lived personal experience?

My performance persona is a protective shell, a public cover version I developed when I was working out who I was after the shit-fest.

Also, these poems are lightly fictionalised, rather than strict truth. My dog was a lurcher, not a greyhound, but everyone knows how a greyhound runs, so Wristwatch turned him into a greyhound. When editing I have no compunction in changing minor details to make a better poem. That’s another form of detachment, I suppose.

5. Do you find yourself affected negatively by performing this piece? If so, how do you look after yourself?

There are some poems from the sequence I choose not to perform – they are in the book, but voicing them is too hard. I did read the whole “Risky breasts” sequence in its entirety at the Edinburgh Maggie’s Centre, where it felt safe, reading to people affected by cancer and their support workers.

6. Do you practice any aftercare after performing this piece (either for yourself or audiences)? (E.g., talking to audience members who are upset, taking some time out after your performance to ground yourself, ensuring you perform in places where you feel safe etc.)

I talk to audience members if it seems appropriate or if they approach me. In terms of self-care, I don’t drink too much booze – usually the adrenaline carries me home. I notice it’s hard to sleep after performing these poems – so I plan accordingly, aiming not to over-commit myself in the week I’m performing. I need space to decompress either side.

7. Do you do any content warnings for this piece? Why?

I usually build content warnings into my patter - it’s part of putting the set together. I try to create a set with a narrative arc that eases people into the tough stuff, and then eases them out again – I always try to bring the energy up towards the end with humour, and more life-affirming material.

8. Does the artist owe any kind of protection or safeguarding to their audience?

We should make it clear it’s fine for people to remove themselves or stuff fingers in their ears. Lloyd (Robinson) and Matt (McDonald) set the bar at The God Damn Debut Slam – I love how they make the space safe, giving permission for people to just leave if they need.

This is making me think about the impact of my poems on unsuspecting audience members – I’m sorry for any anguish I’ve caused.

9. Do you believe writing about areas such as grief, loss or trauma is a form of healthy catharsis or memorialisation?

There are studies which bear this out – Pennebaker’s research is a good place to start. Readers turn to poetry when the shit hits the fan, and maybe poets are taking this to the next level.

10. What kind of warnings signs would you point out to someone new to poetry or performance who was performing about their traumas?

When you practice performing a poem, which words or lines make you stumble or your heart lurch? Pay attention to that. Practice those sections. I sometimes sing them, which makes them ridiculous, and less personal. I sometimes feel sorry for my downstairs neighbour! Accept some days it will just be too hard to perform some poems, so have a back-up “safe” poem in a short set / open mic. In a feature set I’ve sometimes just left out a poem (or poems) because either I or the audience are clearly not in the right place. You need a plan for that.

If you can get to training by a master such as Jenny Lindsay, do - you’ll pick up loads of useful strategies which apply to performance generally, never mind the traumatic stuff.

I would also suggest you let poems compost before performing them – I’m certainly more at ease when I do that, and glaring edits are usually easier to spot with a bit of space!

Trust your guts. There’s a difference between the adrenaline needed to perform an artistic version of events and the horror of reliving the experience. If I’m in danger of reliving rather than performing, I switch to another poem.

Hope this helps!

Jay’s website: https://jaywhittaker.uk

Psychology Today article about the Pennebaker approach to writing about trauma: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/write-yourself-well/201208/expressive-writing

#jay whittaker #loss #trauma #grief #good grief #pennebaker approach #poetry #poet #poem #death

0 notes

poetryasf-ck · 6 years

Text

Good Grief #6 - John Guzlowski

cw/holocaust, sexual assault, murder, abuse, mutilation, violence, infanticide

Born in a refugee camp after World War II, John Guzlowski came with his family to the United States as a Displaced Person in 1951. His parents had been Polish slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and refugee neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, he met hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead comrades, and women who had walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. His poetry, fiction, and essays try to remember them and their voices.

His writing appears in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Rattle, Ontario Review, North American Review, and many other journals here and abroad. His poems and personal essays about his Polish parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany and refugees making a life for themselves in Chicago appear in his memoir Echoes of Tattered Tongues (Aquila Polonica Press). Echoes of Tattered Tongues is the recipient of the 2017 Benjamin Franklin Poetry Award and the Eric Hoffer Foundation's Montaigne Award. He is also the author of two Hank Purcell mysteries and the war novel Road of Bones. He is a columnist for the Chicago Polish Daily News, the oldest Polish language paper in the US.

He is a professor emeritus at Eastern Illinois University and now lives in Lynchburg.

youtube

1. Why, if there was a reason, did you write this poem/these poems?

I never chose to write these poems. They chose me. My parents were both people traumatized by their experiences in German concentration camps. My dad spent 5 years as a slave laborer in Buchenwald. My mom spent 3 years in various subcamps of Buchenwald, after seeing her mom and sister raped and murdered and her sister’s baby kicked to death. After that they spent 6 years in refugee camps. That’s where I was born. My parents expressed their trauma differently. My dad couldn’t stop talking about the war, couldn’t stop drinking, couldn’t stop having nightmares and flashbacks. My mom was the opposite. She wouldn’t show any sign of trauma. Wouldn’t show any kind of emotion in fact. I never saw her cry or smile or kiss my father. Nothing.

I tried to get as far away from their pain as I could. When I turned 21, I moved to another state, and tried to start a life completely apart from theirs.

And that’s when I discovered I couldn’t separate myself from their pain, and I started writing about my parents. I’ve written 5 books of poems and memoirs about them, and three novels that are influenced by their experiences in various ways.

2. Why, upon writing this poem/these poems, did you perform them?

A prof at Valdosta State University found out I was writing about my parents and their experiences in the war and he asked me to talk to his Holocaust class. Then a rabbi at a temple asked me to speak to his congregation, then a high school teacher asked me to speak, and then another and another. That was 20 years ago. I think I do about a dozen presentations a year. Probably more.

Why do I do it? People want to know about the war, trauma, pain.

3. How does performing this piece change how you look at what happened to you?

Originally as I said above, I wanted to get away from my parents. I considered their story a lot of “camp shit.” I didn’t want to live in misery. With my parents it was always there. Dying in 1997, my father thought the nurses and doctors were concentration camp guards come to take him to the ovens. You want to step away from that sort of stuff.

But writing and performing stuff about my parents, finally had a strange effect on me. It brought me closer to them, their pain, trauma, their camp shit. I can’t describe how close I feel to them now. It’s like we are the family we were always meant to be.

A side note: I have a sister who was also born in the camps after the war. My mother in her trauma abused my sister for years. It was like my mom learned mothering from the guards in the concentration camps. When I first started writing about my parents, I told my sister and she said she never ever wanted to see any of the poems. Never. About 20 years later when I was doing a reading in Chicago, she came to my reading. She listened to my poems and told me that she had bought a copy of my book about my parents, and that reading it and listening to me, she had found a way of forgiving and understanding my mother.

4. How do you separate artistic performance from lived personal experience?

I don’t. When I perform my poems, and my memoir pieces, I am me talking to you. When my dad was alive, he couldn’t stop himself from talking to people about what he saw in the camps. It was like he would grab you with his eyes and let it roll out of them, all the horror, the killing, the agony. The stories were his life. There was no separating the two. I feel some of that when I read. I become for a short moment my mom and dad.

5. Do you find yourself affected negatively by performing this piece? If so, how do you look after yourself?

It’s almost always a positive experience. The people who come to see me want to know and I’m there to tell them. The only negative effect (and I’m not sure that this is negative) is that I start weeping remembering my mom telling about being raped or my talking about seeing a friend castrated. I guess I’m feeling and reacting the way I want the audience to feel.

Yes. I always leave about 15 minutes, sometimes more, to talk to people. I’ll talk to the entire audience, and I’ll talk to individuals. I also offer people my card with my email address on it so that if they ever want to talk I am ready.

7. Do you do any content warnings for this piece? Why?

If I am doing a presentation in a middle-school (6-7 graders) I tell the teachers what to expect and I also tone down some of the violence, sexual and otherwise.

Why? Because my father started telling me about what he had seen when I was about 6 years old. I remember him telling me about a German soldier cutting off a woman’s breast with a bayonet. It has stayed with me for my entire life. I think I was too young to hear him tell me that.

8. Does the artist owe any kind of protection or safeguarding to their audience?

I think that my audiences generally know what to expect. They are students taking courses on the Holocaust or people who have had family in the camps. I think they want to know what I have to say.

9. Do you believe writing about areas such as grief, loss or trauma is a form of healthy catharsis or memorialisation?

It was for me. As I said above, it brought my parents closer to me, brought me closer to my sister, helped her deal with her trauma induced by my mom’s trauma.

10. What kind of warnings signs would you point out to someone new to poetry or performance who was performing about their traumas?

Tell the truth and don’t be afraid. People need to know.

Amazon Link to Book

Author Page

Blog

#John Guzlowski #good grief #holocaust #loss #trauma #grief #poetry #poet #poem #spoken word #coping mechanisms #mental health

0 notes

poetryasf-ck · 6 years

Text

Good Grief #5 - Nicole Carter

I’m Nicole Carter, born in 1975 and now 43 years young, I started writing at the age of 12, my first book was called The Key, measures 10 cm by 7 cm and is 13 pages long. It was an attempt at writing a fantasy adventure story, where you decide what happens next by choosing which page to turn to next. It’s epic, and probably still my best work to date ☺ Studying Higher English in 5th year and again in 6th year at High School, my second attempt may not have given me the A grade I wanted, but my teacher was aaaahmazing. He introduced us to Norman MacCaig’s poetry which continues to inspire me. My first “proper” recital was at the remembrance service for an ex-boyfriend fellow student, who had very sadly passed away when I was studying Applied Biological Sciences at Napier Uni, in 1998.

Due to the rollercoaster ride of a life I’ve had since 1995, it took several years before I got involved in writing again. After another hospital admission, I got involved with the Royal Edinburgh Psychiatric Hospital writer’s group in 2008, and things evolved from there. My next recital was at a Shore Poets open mic gig in 2010. I’d previously written some really difficult poems about sexual assault and other traumas I’d faced, and at that first open mic, I was extremely nervous, I was shaking and my voice was quivering. It was the start of me continuing to use poetry as a means of, what I felt, was a necessary, cathartic compulsion and has grown since then, into me being open about all my hard times, in order to reduce the stigma that surrounds mental health issues, homelessness and abuse. Essentially, I want to save the world by helping other people to feel more comfortable sharing their stories, so that the fear of these issues, is reduced by creating a better understanding of them.

1. Why, if there was a reason, did you write this poem/these poems?

I try to use poetry as a means of, what I feel, is a necessary, cathartic compulsion which has grown since 2008, when I started going to a psychiatric hospital writers group after another admission. It has become a real desire for me to be open about all my hard times, in order to reduce the stigma that surrounds mental health issues, homelessness and abuse.

2. Why, upon writing this poem/these poems, did you perform them?

Maybe because since I was a young child, I felt I never had a voice, my father was a violent man but quiet when he wasn’t shouting, there was very little conversation between my parents, as I was growing up. Reciting my poetry gives me that voice I used to crave and fantasise about, whether or not people actually listen, doesn’t seem to matter to me as much as simply me being able to “exorcise” some inner demons, but often I do try to include some humour in my work.

3. How does performing this piece change how you look at what happened to you?

Aye, ye cannae beat a good rant!! Not that I do that often, but I really feel it helps me to get stuff off my chest. Having had regular 2 weekly home visits from CPNs (community psychiatric nurses) for much of my adult life, I realise I’ve actually been very lucky to have that service, and it has enabled me to talk openly and honestly about all the issues that I have, in a safe place with people I am familiar with and trust. Essentially I’ve had CBT for the past 20 years!! Lol!! I’ve come to the conclusion that if getting it all off your chest works for me, then hopefully it will work for other people too, people who don’t have access to CPNs!!! Wow, it’s all been free too, God bless the NHS!!!

4. How do you separate artistic performance from lived personal experience?

They both make me nervous, and if I’m honest, I don’t like the pre-recital nerves, but, the over-confident, slightly manic, gobby diva in me, has to get an airing occasionally, to keep me sane!!

5. Do you find yourself affected negatively by performing this piece? If so, how do you look after yourself?

General mental health self-care : I talk to and meet with friends and family, eat regularly (every 2 ½ to 3 hours up until 1 ½ hours before going to bed), keep reasonably hydrated with water (tapering off up until suppertime to make sure I don’t wake up during the night), use mindfulness / breathing / grounding techniques, listen to music, and make sure I get enough sleep, and downtime in quiet places. I take my *prescribed meds at the right time (8.30pmish as they help me sleep), I also occasionally to moderately do physical activity such as going for a brisk walk / jog / easyish swim or go to the gym, to help me process the fight-or-flight hormones and neurotransmitters. Seek professional help if I’m seriously struggling. The Edinburgh Crisis Centre and Mental Health Assessment service at The Royal Edinburgh Hospital are both fantastic.

I mention there may be triggers, and have reached out to a few acquaintances I’m friends with on facebook, when they post something that indicates they may be struggling. I like letting folk know if their work has struck a chord with me. Also, please see answer to question 5 above.

7. Do you do any content warnings for this piece? Why?

Yes, because I know how being affected by triggers at gigs can be distressing.

8. Does the artist owe any kind of protection or safeguarding to their audience?

Yes.

9. Do you believe writing about areas such as grief, loss or trauma is a form of healthy catharsis or memorialisation?

Yes.

10. What kind of warnings signs would you point out to someone new to poetry or performance who was performing about their traumas?

Loss of appetite, not sleeping enough, serious distress / anxiety, not communicating with friends / family as often as usual, nervous habits, addictions, lack of personal hygiene (eg. not showering or brushing teeth for several days), not doing housework to the point it feels like it’s too much to deal with, thoughts of self-harm / suicide.

Samaritans

Breathing Space

The Edinburgh Crisis Centre

Mental Health Assessment Service

#grief #poetry #trauma #poet #poem #spoken word #nicole carter

2 notes · View notes

poetryasf-ck · 6 years

Audio

Our latest headset, a short horror story by Ryan Vance.

#ryan vance #the pit king #rats #fiction #short story #ambient #lies #dreaming

3 notes · View notes

poetryasf-ck · 6 years

Text

Good Grief #4 - Lloyd Robinson

Lloyd Robinson has almost twenty years of performance experience as an actor, poet, and musician. He is one of the few performers holding the title ‘Bad Boy Of Spoken Word’, is a multiple slam winner, the reigning Axis slam champion, and qualified for the Scottish National Slam Championship the last three years running.

Lloyd is the host and co-organiser of Edinburgh’s most exciting new-material poetry night, ‘The God Damn Debut Slam’ in the Scottish Poetry Library. He has been featured at many of Scotland’s more popular spoken word events, in particular Hidden Door Festival and StAnza literary festival. He has also independently released an album of spoken word and music, ‘Reclaimed Memories’, has a degree in Creative Writing & Drama, and a diploma in psychotherapy.

Image credit: Perry Jonsson

1. Why, if there was a reason, did you write this poem/these poems?

Catharsis. Therapy. As a tribute to my brother in law who took his own life, and to raise awareness of the very real issue of Male suicide. I have a compulsion to try and ‘fix’ bad situations, but obviously this was unfixable, so writing about it was the closest I could get.

2. Why, upon writing this poem/these poems, did you perform them?

To raise awareness. And to be totally honest, to shock the audience. I want them to be uncomfortable. I want them to remember this material out of everything else they see, and have a newfound respect for the gravity of the subject. Not only that, but suicide is still socially permissible to joke about, and I want people to think twice next time they laugh at it.

3. How does performing this piece change how you look at what happened to you?

It makes me feel more in control after something very chaotic. I like to think that he would like the piece and be proud of me.

4. How do you separate artistic performance from lived personal experience?

Focus entirely on replicating my more successful rehearsals, improving performance and heightening audience reaction. I am making art for public consumption, so I choose that as my focus. Also, quite subconsciously I (for the most part) avoid the ‘I’ pronoun, instead using ‘we’, which gives me a little more distance.

5. Do you find yourself affected negatively by performing this piece? If so, how do you look after yourself?

When I started performing it, I would be somewhat exhausted afterwards. These days though, not so much. It can depend on the audience. If they’re clearly very emotionally affected that has fed into my performance before. I’ve never lost control and become tearful, but I have felt intense.

I try and be around post-show; I reliably get at least one audience member come up to me afterwards who has been affected by suicide. They always thank me because being bereaved in this manner can completely alienate people and make them feel alone. For that reason I consider it important to perform this piece and make the time for them, so they realise they are not.

7. Do you do any content warnings for this piece? Why?

Depends on the night. If it’s a night with a more therapeutic lean, or it is specifically designed to be a safe space, or friendly to vulnerable people then yes. Really, in that context I probably wouldn’t perform it anyway unless it was actually requested or on theme. If not, then no. When people go out to see live entertainment, the performer should work in service of entertainment. Theatre isn’t supposed to be 100% safe, and performance poetry IS theatre. If an audience has come to a poetry show on purpose, the implicit relationship is that there will be emotional themes addressed, you don’t have to know anything about the scene to realise that. People watch theatre to be elevated and catharsis through experiencing challenging performances is a big part of that. Content warnings, unless handled very carefully, can break the rhythm and illusion of the show, as well as creating preconceptions about a piece.

EG; I have been in the audience when someone has started a poem with ‘trigger warning, suicide’ which IMMEDIATELY put me on edge. However, the poem itself was really comforting and I’m glad I ignored my instinct to leave.

THAT BEING SAID context is important, I’m not about to blanket damn trigger warnings. A LARGE part of serving the entertainment of the night is the ability to read the room, spot when something isn’t appropriate and make a call. If I’m doing the poem as part of a longer set, I will usually do a brief intro to it, not specifically making a content warning (although one is implied), but to steer the audience into a different energy. In reality you can never 100% tell which way a performance will go. Someone could be fine hearing a poem about suicide, but get upset with a poem about food because they have a history of eating disorders. There does come a point where you have to acknowledge all audience reaction as valid even if the audience straight up walks out. Sometimes trigger warnings are very necessary. Sometimes putting a trigger warning in front of a piece is actually more about giving yourself an illusion of control that you don’t, in reality, have.

8. Does the artist owe any kind of protection or safeguarding to their audience?

Yes and no. The artist owes organisers and programmers an accurate representation of their performance practice and general content so they can be booked for appropriate nights. They owe it to the audience to create art to the best of their ability. If their art is massively triggering, though, they have to be prepared to not be booked very often, or only for specific nights, or to have to put on their own shows. It is the organiser’s job to keep the audience safe, especially at curated nights, where they should know their regular audience well enough to bring in acts that will succeed. When there is an open mic element, the responsibility is a little more shared. Again, you have to read the room but you also have to acknowledge that you are a part of a community. If you are unfamiliar with the nights setup/it’s your first time, you should either scout it out first or bring a backup piece in case your chosen material isn’t going to work. There is no ‘don’t be an asshole’ rule, but there is an understanding that you should ‘try not to be an asshole’. Still, ultimately it is the organisers responsibility. They have to serve the needs of their night, and if someone steps to the mic and directly works against those needs, they have to be able to stop it.

BUT AGAIN this is not a hard and fast rule. Art practices don’t exist in a vacuum and absolutes are rarely sufficient to support the balance between safety and progress. Nuance exists.

For a scene in rude health, there needs to be a wide variety of event types. The safer spaces need to exist, because vulnerable people deserve entertainment and self-expression, but they ideally would exist in parallel with middle-of-the-road-pop-Poetry for the newcomers, and a more extreme end of the spectrum where limits can be tested, because such testings are VITAL to the evolution of the artform. ‘Saved’ by Edward Bond featured the stoning of a baby onstage and it resulted in a court case that DESTROYED the Thatcherite censorship of British theatre. ‘Shopping & Fucking’ featured drug abuse and violent rape, but broke new ground, opened doors for today’s pioneers of queer theatre and predicted the neo liberal society of today. ‘Ubu’ by Alfred Jarry was considered so nonsensical and artless that it caused TWO FUCKING RIOTS on opening night, but it spawned numerous artistic movements, without which we wouldn’t have Monty Python or Mighty Boosh. Nights need to exist where decency is malleable, simply for the evolution of the artform. Great art is not impossible when subjects are considered ‘off limits’ or ‘inappropriate’ BUT there are great things that can be achieved by breaking perceived barriers.

HOWEVER. NUANCE AGAIN.

We can’t have a blanket ‘anything goes’ approach, even at the most basic level. You have to restrict hate speech for a start, because one confident speaker given a platform can convert others to a cause. You have to no-platform predators and abusers because they will pretend to be innocent and use a platform to find more victims. This, as far as I can tell, is the most pressing responsibility an artist and an organiser has. It’s not a service to the artform, it’s a service to society, so in this case, yes, the artist, and to be honest EVERYONE is responsible for bombarding hatespeech, bigotry and abuse with poison until it dies like the fucking cancer that it is.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

9. Do you believe writing about areas such as grief, loss or trauma is a form of healthy catharsis or memorialisation?

Yes. NEXT QUESTION.

Alright, alright;

Writing stuff down can allow you to recognise and acknowledge your feelings much more clearly. Also, there are three poems that, whenever I perform them, will make me feel like the lost are still here with me.

In fact, every year on the anniversary of my brother in laws passing, I meet with my family, we chat, we support each other, and I perform two poems; the one I’m writing this survey about entitled ‘jump’, and another, more personal one that I rarely perform in public. Before I started organising this, we were stuck with ‘just getting through the day’ when it came around. It’s still the worst day of the year for us, but we have something to focus on that brings us together.

However, once again, we should be wary of absolutes. People can process grief in many different and utterly unexpected ways. This works for me and a few folk I know, but it could be catastrophic for others. Grief is one of those things where you have to acknowledge every possible emotion, no matter how illogical, as valid. If the bereaved responds by instinctively picking up a pen, whether to memorialise or seek catharsis, then writing is a valid response to grief. Therapy and/or seeking advice from medical professionals are also valid responses. It’s a simple case of ‘you do whatever makes you feel better’. If that includes enrolling in clown college and riding a unicycle everywhere; valid response.

10. What kind of warnings signs would you point out to someone new to poetry or performance who was performing about their traumas?

First of all, unless they specifically asked me, I don’t think I would. In this hypothetical I’m going to assume they are an adult presenting as neurotypical. They have a right to explore their own trauma/reclaim their narrative in whatever fashion suits them and I wouldn’t want to patronise them by giving the impression that I thought they needed help (see my question 9 chat about valid responses; we mustn’t tell people how to or how not to grieve). Humans are much hardier than they often give themselves credit for. The only context in which I would intercede would be someone clearly exhibiting signs of severe anxiety/depression, & I had even the slightest suspicion they might be a danger to themselves. However, these conditions make it very difficult for new voices to leave the house, let alone sign up for an open mic, so while I acknowledge there’s a risk, it isn’t a particularly likely scenario. I feel like that’s not the sort of answer you’re after, though.

I do think there is a bit of a danger (the extent of which I’m unsure of) that a new poet could see performances on YouTube and in slams that lead them to think they have to mine their own trauma to get material. The warning signs of this would be asking yourself ‘what can I write about’ and the answer being ‘ooh, that horrible thing that happened’.

When rehearsing the poem, it is perfectly normal to cry (or similar emotional release) even a few times. If you well up during a public performance, also fine AS LONG AS THE PERFORMER FEELS IT HELPS.

If, however, you have an uncontrollable emotional response EVERY TIME you perform it, I’d start to question whether you should.

If the idea of performing it causes anxiety above the usual pre-show nerves, and that anxiety reduces when you decide ‘oh I’ll perform something else instead’ then that’s a CLEAR indication.

It is hard to point to specific warning signs other than the above and feeling peer pressure to perform grief-motivated poetry, because everyone’s responses can be incredibly varied. All I’d really say is some advice I was given when I started writing;

“There are two types of writing; what you send out into the world and you do for yourself. The first type needs to flexible so you can improve it based on the responses you get. You have to learn that constructive criticism is valuable and not a personal attack. The second is imperfect and often messy, but it helps you learn about the craft and your own mind. Always remember the two are flexible. You can start writing something personal and realise it’s for everyone. You can send something out into the world and then entirely take it back upon realising that this was just for you.”

lloydcarltonrobinson.bandcamp.com/releases

https://www.patreon.com/poetryasfuck

#lloyd robinson #suicide #poetry #poet #poem #spoken word #grief #loss #trauma

3 notes · View notes

poetryasf-ck · 6 years

Text

Good Grief #3 - Colin Bramwell

Continuing our look at poetry and poets who tackle difficult personal subjects - these will continue twice a week until we’ve got everyone’s responses published.

My name's Colin Bramwell, I'm from the Black Isle in Ross-Shire. I'm a poet, performer and translator, though I also work between forms, and as a musician. Most of my published work is in translation: I co-translate the Taiwanese poet Yang Mu, and also translate from various European languages into Scots. My principal way of getting my poetry out there is by making theatre shows—poetry is involved in all of these, some to a larger extent than others—under the moniker of Teuchter Company. I've written and performed four such shows in the last three years. My latest solo show, Umbrella Man, just finished two short runs at the Edinburgh and Prague Fringe festivals. I've been selling it as the story of a man who works in Subway and tries to prove the earth is flat, but it's really a show about how grief can make people behave strangely.

Why, if there was a reason, did you write this poem/these poems?

I like to write about all sorts of things. When I started writing poetry properly, I was very clear that I wanted to avoid writing about details of my life that I considered personal. My reasons for this were grounded in a healthy suspicion of personal revelations of authorial trauma and hardship in poetry, particularly in performance settings. The manipulation of an audience's attention and sympathy is so frequently substituted for the actual work of art, which, if you care about the people who listen to it, ought to be generous to them, and to their experience. In some ways, it ought to be for them (principally, not solely.) Pain or grief can make people very selfish, and lead to the rotten assumption that one individual's pain is somehow greater than another's for having been transfused into the form of poetry, and that this individual somehow elevates themselves above the crowd through the bravery of reading it. The anger that I felt when placed in those situations by other poets, and the awkwardness of having to lie to them about enjoying their work afterwards, made me want to do the opposite in my poems: to extinguish not personality, but personal details.

I found that writing explicitly in a narratorial or dramatic voice was a good way for me to avoid hypocrisy in my ethical requirements for my own poetry, and have proceeded along those lines ever since. However, the more I wrote, the more I realised that it was ungenerous to exclude the personal stuff: that the poets I loved were good at inhabiting and expanding their memories, and that this is an essential aspect of the task at hand. There's a line from Michael Donaghy that I like: 'My father's sudden death has shocked us all / Even me, and I've just made it up.' I still believe that making things up is a less boring way to access truth.

Umbrella Man has about four poems in it. Two were written this year, with the show in mind; the other two were written about three years ago. A close friend of mine died unexpectedly about five years ago. Only one of them is explicitly about her. I have a feeling that it's the one she would have liked the least. The show, as a whole, is a heavily fictionalised account of a period in my own life where I was really devastated about losing her. I wrote it because I reached a point where I was thinking about it so much that I had to address it in some way. I also, perhaps bizarrely, wrote it because it made me feel closer to her. It forced me to spend more time with memories of her, which guided me in writing it. That process became far easier when I realised that I should make something that she would have liked. I sometimes see my performances as encounters with her, and I haven't decided whether that's overreaching yet, but sometimes the thought has been helpful.

2. Why, upon writing this poem/these poems, did you perform them?

I appreciate the gently disapproving tone of this question. I performed them because I liked them, because they were part of the show. 3/4 of the poems are quite page-y, the other is very much a performance poem that I don't think would work on the page at all. That was important to the show and the character. I attributed most of them to fictional authors, apart from the performance one, so I suppose it was important that they felt like they could have been read in a book, then delivered by someone who had remembered them, as opposed to heard in a live setting first.You'd have to ask the audience if they felt similarly. I did the performance one as a kind of advert for the show once, to a large audience with a front row comprised mainly of children. I'd forgotten that there was a line about paedophiles in it. There's probably a lesson somewhere in that.

3. How does performing this piece change how you look at what happened to you?

If you'll forgive my pedantry, I feel like it would be a basic failure of perspective to say that what happened to my friend also happened to me. In terms of the event of her loss and its significance to me, at least I've registered it now. But I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface of it.

4. How do you separate artistic performance from lived personal experience?

You could spend a long time on this question. It's not a hard and fast rule that you have to. I've seen some very powerful performances, and read powerful work, that is essentially a naked account of lived personal experiences. But they've been well-written, and that's often the first and last stumbling block for exhibitionists. You have to give yourself material that allows you to perform it: if your material won't allow for that, your performances will viscerally enter the annals of your living, personal experience.

If you're performing your own work then you always have the option to self-consciously put on your performer's hat for however long it takes. The idea is to remember to remove that hat, but don't be too harsh on yourself if you accidentally end up wearing it at parties sometimes. Everyone performs at parties too, even the folk standing in the corner not saying much. If you want to separate performance from life, be a gracious guest, don't overstay your welcome, and apologise if you stand on the cat.

If this question is something that keeps you up at night, you can always take the option of fictionalising details. I wrote Umbrella Man in a character's voice, included real details alongside made-up ones, wore a three-piece suit and flipflops, and spoke in an exaggerated version of my own accent. You can always have a bit of fun by lying to people about things, or pretending to be someone else.

Perspective is essential too. Consult the living. Consult the dead, they have useful things to say about such matters. Like this, from Leonard Cohen: 'You are playing to people who have experienced a catastrophe. This should make you very quiet. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside. Everyone knows you are in pain. You cannot tell the audience everything you know about love in every line of love you speak. Step aside and they will know what you know because you know it already. You have nothing to teach them. You are not more beautiful than they are.'

5. Do you find yourself affected negatively by performing this piece? If so, how do you look after yourself?

That depends on how it goes. I've found that I get into a funny mood before performing it, that I've needed to be alone more in the lead-up to performing it. I'm very aware that, with it being more personal, if my performance isn't up to scratch, it can really bother me. I'm also more proud of it than anything I've written so far: performing something I didn't believe in as much would affect me more negatively. If I do a performance that I'm happy with, I feel good but never as if a weight has been lifted. There is a level of clarity, though, and that has its own satisfaction. I'm realistic about the fact that the show will not necessarily get easier the more I perform it. It's a journey, I'm not at the start any more but I know I haven't reached the end either.

I've also found that a post-performance pint or two takes the edge off, though having a good interior monologue just edges alcohol in terms of importance. You have to remind yourself that you're going through some shit, that everyone else is too, but you've stuck your neck out and that's better than sitting at home playing Bejeweled Blitz and/or touching yourself. If you feel really shit after performing then message a pal and tell them what's going on, I find that feeling of failure is often quickly fixed by a bit of affirmation.

I'll always take time to speak to audiences after anything I perform. I've had a lot of people react to Umbrella Man in quite an emotional way, and I've tried to be open to their experiences while at the same time giving myself a bit of space to process the show myself. I think you need to be available, and certainly you treat audiences well if a show brings up personal things for them. I understand if a performer was inhabiting traumatic memories that these strategies become increasingly important (especially in the context of, say, a Fringe run of multiple shows.)

We're often told to 'practice self-care' as artists, and yes, of course, it's important to look after yourself. But you don't perform material about grief, loss or trauma to be safe, you do it for precisely the opposite reason. And that's as true for a poem about apples as it is for one about trauma. All performance contains an element of risk: performance of this sort of material even more so. But you do it because you've chosen to. No one is making you write about these things, and no one is making you perform about them either. If you've chosen to do that, and to do it well (and good on you for making that choice), own it and feel empowered by it. Particularly with the topic of violence, which we can only address if we normalise its discussion. Putting these topics in glass boxes, though well-intentioned, is the opposite of normalising them.

7. Do you do any content warnings for this piece? Why?

I don't, because I think they are more relevant in the case of trauma. Grief is almost a condition of life, its viscerality hinges on its temporality. It can get worse at certain times of year, for instance. It felt important to have it come up and for that to be a surprise—the show is partly an attempt to capture the pervasiveness of loss, so I felt like there was something apposite about not warning people of that content.

That being said, a friend of mine saw the show after having lost someone, and I was glad to be able to warn her that the show was about that. I think I need to take a look at how I'm selling it. I'm still unsure about how I'll negotiate that, because there seemed something apposite about a show where a character avoids talking about it to also have advertising that avoids talking about it. I chose to push the flat earth aspects of it as an 'angle', because I see it as a way into talking about grief. I'll need to give that more thought.

8. Does the artist owe any kind of protection or safeguarding to their audience?

That depends on what said artist might want the audience to feel. There are cases to be made for it either way, though I think there is only so far you can go with it. If you're telling a story, it means you might give away plot points, which some audiences would find irritating, though others might be glad for the heads-up. You can't please everyone, though you try to please the majority. Foremost among what a poet owes to their audience are poems that are worth listening to. That is the best way of protecting, or safeguarding them—to be generous by presenting something good. It's almost banal to make this point, but audiences will prefer a good poem without a warning to a shit poem with a warning.

9. Do you believe writing about areas such as grief, loss or trauma is a form of healthy catharsis or memorialisation?

Yes, it's tried and tested. The benefits of writing as a form of self-reflection are very clear. And you aren't obliged to share that writing, it can be just for you, then you don't have to think about the requirements of sharing it. Performing for me is a different matter altogether: writing for yourself is one of the most healthy activities you can do. In poetry, elegies are invariably beautiful for their truthfulness and way of sharing your experience with other grieving folk. I think it's one of the kindest things a poet can share with the world. Funerals, for instance, are one of only a handful of occasions where poetry should be encouraged.

10. What kind of warnings signs would you point out to someone new to poetry or performance who was performing about their traumas?

Start by writing about something else, otherwise you'll be trying to climb the mountain too early. You should try and get confident with your mode of expression before performing. Spoken word at its best is a split between performance and writing that favours writing. Any halfway decent actor can make tripe sound convincing, so if you are naturally a good performer be particularly wary of this. Try and experiment with form, technique, play games with language. Read a lot—if you're writing about death, a compilation of elegies wouldn't be a bad place to start. Douglas Dunn's Elegies is a stunner too.

Once you've written a bit, remain critical of your work. Approach it like someone else wrote it. The selection of a painful subject is not an excuse for carelessness in execution. In general, if you're reaching to write about something without having given yourself space to reflect on it, you're less likely to be able to write something worth listening to: similarly, you'll be able to read, say, Sylvia Plath and know whether that raw, distanceless emotion can guide you to creating work that transcends or even expresses the confusion of pain with clarity. Pain obscures and clarifies. You might find that in trying not to write about it, you end up writing about it; or in trying to write about it, you end up writing about something else. Don't do it because you feel like you need to inhabit a space of victimhood in order to make your work credible and real. We're all credible and real. It's just as valid to write about a moment of happiness, or where happiness and darkness intersect—that's often where the truth lies. Paint with more than one shade, unless you're really good at painting.

Remember that you don't get points for your chosen topic of poetry. Apart from if you're at a slam, in which case the opposite can be true. I once saw a student read out a diatribe at a slam about how she had to drop out of college and return to the psychiatric institution that she had previously resided in, and how she didn't want to go. The audience judges awarded her unanimously high-scores, boosting her into the next round. She broke down halfway through reading her final piece, which was on the same topic, interspersed with memories of being bullied at her all-girls school. She was evidently unwell, and had to be consoled by friends on stage. By a very slim margin, she didn't make it to the final. This upset her even more. She left the venue, friends in tow, crying her eyes out. It was exactly what a performance of difficult material shouldn't have been: damaging for the young, unwell performer who received high marks not because her stuff was good, but because the audience felt bad for her. The relative positions of audience and performer made it impossible for one to be properly kind to the other, and vice versa. If you're performing about any of these topics, this is exactly the kind of hellscape you want to avoid, unless one of the goals of your poetry is to actively pursue pity.

Try and keep it real. Don't elevate your pain over someone else's: put it into the context of the lived world, and remember that nothing you write will stop that world from turning. That way you'll be able to do the most good.

You can listen to a segment of an early version of Umbrella Man on our podcast. If you’re able to buy it, you can download it from Bandcamp:

Listen/purchase: Colin Bramwell: Headset by Colin Bramwell

#colin bramwell #umbrella man #poetry #poet #poem #loss #grief #trauma

0 notes

poetryasf-ck · 6 years

Text

Good Grief #2 - Sam Grudgings

This is the second of many blogs where we interview poets about their experiences of writing and performing about personal losses. As a result, the blogs talk about some potentially triggering subjects. CW/ Suicide, eating disorders.

Sam Grudgings is a poet from Bristol. He yells stories about recovery, kaijus, cities made of teeth and haunted people cos it's cheaper than therapy and less physically taxing than porno.

Why, if there was a reason, did you write this poem/these poems?

One poem was written as a direct response to the loss of a friend from school. She was the last person I still remained in contact with or hung out with, who hadn't abandoned me in a way others had and still cared for me. I had no friends left from school that I spoke to on anything other than a phatic level and as a result, when she died I felt completely isolated from a large part of my formative years, I had no one to grieve her with, no one to reminisce over shared memories. It was written as an epitaph, a reminder that though no one else around me would say her name, I still would.

2. Why, upon writing this poem/these poems, did you perform them?

There is a peculiar catharsis in airing grief to an audience, in a very volatile way it helped to get rid of the worst of the loss from where it was festering in my stomach. As well I felt like I owed it to her to keep on talking about her, no one in my current group of contemporaries had ever met her and I think they would have liked to, it served a dual purpose in that regard.

3. How does performing this piece change how you look at what happened to you?

The poem itself has changed over time quite significantly, to the point where it is in essence three separate poems. It was initially very very focused on my feelings about the loss, how I was without her till I realised that this helped no one but me, once I had outwardly and publically grieved as much as I needed to it felt selfish to keep performing it in that way. She passed away from complications due to a long standing eating disorder and though I had no one to ever really look into it further I suspect it was suicide or at least exacerbated by a previous suicide attempt. As a piece it was initially somewhat selfish, for me to perform it (which I think is completely fine within poetry) but when I had processed the grief to a certain degree I naively saw it as something that could be used to benefit people in her situation. I was very aware that I do not have the tools to discuss something of that magnitude as my personal experience is only from exposure to the effects, not any direct experience of the issue itself so tried to be delicate in how I phrased it and offered it as a warning and an opening to a dialogue that I hoped people would be able to take and realise they didn’t have to suffer it alone. Now I worry as I suspect that the second version would come across as preachy, or not my story to tell or trauma porn, clickbait for empathy.

It has helped me process the loss, the act of performing it, reliving the story in a set format where I have control on the narrative allows me to consider it in smaller easier to understand portions. The only danger is that her passing itself becomes nothing more than a story rather than an experience so it is not one in heavy rotation.

4. How do you separate artistic performance from lived personal experience?

Depends on the piece in question, as a poem is a set narrative I try to perform it as the poem warrants. If I read it and the poem triggers a memory or means my voice cracks or I start to cry then so be it. As a poem about grief is often biographical I think it's necessary to be in the piece, when you read a poem regularly or commit it to memory you can fall into the performative element of how a poem should be, ie the breaks go here, the emphasis is here, faster at this stage slower here, and there is a strange mediative headspace you get into with poems you know well which can take out the rawness of something and come across as just a piece of good writing about a sad thing performed well. With certain poems I try to remove that aspect and just read it anew each time and feel it as the audience does, just being a mouthpiece to previous me's grief and allowing myself to be washed up with the poem,

That said, there are other poems which have done their necessary work for you as a writer, you have spilled your guts and now you're quite well again thank you, but they can be beneficial for the audience. They could be your most popular piece or a snapshot of a time when you were feeling awful which is quite difficult to get back into that headspace to perform it so at that stage I think you have to separate yourself from it and look at how to do it justice, experiment with the delivery each time. It's still true because you wrote it, you're just not in the headspace you were at the time, and in performing it you are giving it to someone else so best wrap it up well. This wrapping up well and giving it a good performance does not extend to cutting onions before performances of a particularly moving piece to really pull the heartstrings of an audience, then you are just feeding your ego on the economy of trauma porn...but I guess only the individual performer really knows what's genuine

5. Do you find yourself affected negatively by performing this piece? If so, how do you look after yourself?

I'll just take five after my set, leave the room have a cigarette, allow myself to process the sadness I've actively stepped into and breathe deep. If that's not enough I have excused myself and just gone home to be alone with my thoughts.

I don't for myself, if I've opted to do something that will trigger me then I have to live with that, but when a piece has resonated with an audience member I will always make the time talk to them. I will always add the caveat that I only have my external experience of the matter but performers often forget they have a captive audience whereas the discussion of grief needs to be an open dialogue, a conversation going both ways and just because, as a performer, I got the catharsis of saying something, doesn’t mean that an audience member will get the same level of catharsis by simply hearing something and think that allowing them to get something off their chest after your set can really help ensure they are ok.

7. Do you do any content warnings for this piece? Why?

I'll normally trigger warning my entire set, a pre-emptive warning of some of the themes that may come up but certainly with work that may be very difficult to deal with I will add an additional pre-poem warning. A performer who I saw recently gave the audience a 10 second moment before his poem started to actually give them the chance to leave the room and take a break which I thought was a really bloody good idea with the poem in question which was harrowing and beautiful.

8. Does the artist owe any kind of protection or safeguarding to their audience?

I had to think pretty hard about this one, I don't think any artist actively wants to cause their audience any difficulty but some poems may be so coded, or wrapped up in metaphor that the piece may only reveal itself at the end to be about something specific and giving content warnings ahead of time could spoil the piece, which ultimately is a piece of performance art and if art becomes answerable to the consumer then it becomes completely commodifiable and manufactured.

The best practice I've seen is for the host to give advance warning for any potential difficult content that may be through out the night, a poetry night should be a safe place to be triggered in. Some nights insist on content warning across the board, and if thats the case then you as the performer should respect the ethos and do as you're asked or just don't perform that particular poem that night.

9. Do you believe writing about areas such as grief, loss or trauma is a form of healthy catharsis or memorialisation?

Yes, it creates a finite black and white piece of work or narrative that can help the individual in processing their emotions.

10. What kind of warnings signs would you point out to someone new to poetry or performance who was performing about their traumas?

Just because everyone else around you is reliving their traumas doesnt mean you are under any obligation to, nor do you have to use your trauma to be considered a good writer, though you may see other people winning slams and doing X Y And Z because of it does not mean this a measure of their skill, they are writing about their grief and they are skilled but there is no correlation. Only write about what you feel prepared to write about. If you do write about grief, do not feel disheartened if people don't relate to your poem, the technical aspects of the poem do not diminish the actual event that caused you to write it, poetry and grief are both subjective. How the heck are you supposed to quantify sadness? Everyone's problem is their own worst problem, never sneer at someone because they did a sad poem about losing their favourite pencil case when your poem about losing your cat is so much sadder. SADNESS IS NOT A COMMODITY TO TRADE.

#poetry #poem #grief #loss #trauma #sam grudgings #spoken word

2 notes · View notes

poetryasf-ck · 6 years

Text

Good Grief #1 - Catherine Wilson

This is a new project. What we’re going to do is talk to poets who have written and performed deeply personal work informed by grief, loss and/or trauma, and ask them how this affected them, and whether or not they’d do it again. As such, these posts will talk about traumatic events including assault, genocide and suicide.

In the last ‘Eight Poems…’ podcast with Claire Askew we talked about the tendency for poets - amongst other artists - to explore personal instances of loss, grief and trauma in their work, and how it can negatively affect them. There’s been some discussion about autobiographical works of this nature: how performing them over a sustained period of time (for example, a month-long festival run) can negate the cathartic effect by making the poet relive the event, and whether slams encourage performers to expose wounds that haven’t healed properly in return for heading to nationals via your devastating pathos.

This is a topic that, I feel, needs exploring in more detail. Why do poets do this? What are their reasons, and how do they feel about it in hindsight?

Photo by Chris Belous.

The first person we’re talking to is Catherine Wilson. This is specifically because of a guest slot I did at Loud Poets’ Fringe show a few years ago, when I was on after Catherine who was part of the regular bill. I was about to do a poem involving increasingly bizarre facts about the actor Robert Pattinson, which is generally considered to not be a serious piece, whereas Catherine’s poem was about the death of her sister.

In order not to give the audience mood whiplash Kevin McLean had to warm the audience back up before I went on stage (Loud Poets now let you know what tones the different parts of their show want to hit to prevent this sort of thing happening). As a result of both the poem’s content and knowing this sort of situation might arise, Catherine was visibly distressed afterwards. This stayed in my mind as we were less than halfway through a full Edinburgh Fringe run, that this was an experience she was going through daily.

As a result I asked Catherine to help me write the questions we’re asking poets in these articles, and to be the first person to answer them.

1. What motivated you to write about grief/loss/trauma?

Initially, when I first started writing about grief/loss or trauma, I think I did it because I saw it as the done thing. For context, my sister was killed in the Dunblane Massacre in 1996 and my father also died before I was born. I looked at my lived experience and thought "I can make a good poem out of this." Looking back this wasn't the right motivation at all! However, now, I'm glad I wrote what I did. It really was a fantastic first step into learning how to express myself about things that I don't often get to talk about - either because of awkwardness or not wanting to bring down the mood. Poetry offered me a place to admit that I wasn't okay and talk about it without being interrupted or edited.

Now, when I write on similar topics, it's a much more thoughtful process. I really think about how what I'm writing is going to look on stage - whether I go too far down a dark rabbit hole and need to pull myself back a little and mostly, how it will affect me personally to perform this piece again and again

2. How does performing this piece change how you look at what happened to you?

I think it has totally changed my perspective. It's given me my own way of articulating my experience which has naturally re-shaped how I conceive of it. By giving it words I've changed how I relate to it. I think too, that experiencing loss is a very de-personalising experience: you lose yourself a wee bit along the way in your grief. By writing I've put myself back in the narrative and marked out the place within the story that is mine.

3. How do you separate artistic performance from lived personal experience?

I am notoriously bad at this. When performing about my losses it's nearly always pretty much exactly my experience, I don't really write it through a fictional lens. My one tactic is to always remember that each poem is one poem, not the poem. I don't have to sum up absolutely everything with one poem - I can focus on one mood or capture one moment. Not only does this probably make my poetry better, but it stops me feeling guilty or worried about forgetting or neglecting to include something.

4. Do you find yourself affected negatively by performing this piece? If so, how do you look after yourself?

I do find performing my pieces about loss more and more hard the more that I perform them. I always ensure I have someone in the audience I trust (usually this is my partner). At the end of the day, I have to constantly examine why I'm performing that piece: if it's because I've been booked/asked to or really want to - then great. That's a motivation. If I'm really not feeling it that day, or will upset myself then I tend to not do it. It's not healthy to constantly upset yourself onstage for the sake of performance. If it still makes you cry every time you read it, then chance is you need to process your feelings a bit more.

5. Do you practice any aftercare after performing this piece (either for yourself or audiences)? (E.g., talking to audience members who are upset, taking some time out after your performance to ground yourself, ensuring you perform in places where you feel safe etc.)

My main piece of aftercare is recognising when to draw the line. Recently, I performed at the March for Our Lives anti-gun protest, I spent two hours there and spoke to three members of the press. I knew more press was coming, but I decided I was tired and wanted to go.

When I perform this piece as part of a larger show, I would normally hang back and wait for some of the audience to leave. If someone is really upset I want to prioritise actually looking after them. What I don't want to do, however, is subject myself to a lot of "clumsy samaritanism": nearly everyone in Britain remembers Dunblane, it's a huge part of our history and our only school shooting. Therefore loads of people, if they see you, want to stop you and tell you where they were when it happened or how they remember it. They are processing meeting a Dunblane family member and the only way they can relate is telling you that memory. There's nothing wrong with it, they don't mean to do anything malicious at all - however - I still want to avoid it. By the time I've performed I'm normally hungry and tired anyway, and want to look after someone seriously upset. Being stopped constantly by ten or so people as I'm trying to leave by people who kind of want you to tell them "it's all okay" is too laborious and exhausting. So I normally hang back to pack up, or hide for a wee while, or my partner helps me escape a wee bit.

Image from TedX talk

6. Do you do any content warnings for this piece? Why?

Sadly, a lot of promoters will still stop you from doing content warnings, which is unfortunate because if I saw a poem similar to mine, I would probably have to excuse myself (because of my own experience). I don't watch other poets do poems about guns or shootings - I have to leave because it's so uncomfortable (often because they don't actually have the experience themselves, but that's another story!)

I rarely do this poem at shows or in sets, if I did I would definitely give a blanket warning and also assure the audience I was totally comfortable with them leaving and/or coming back if they needed to.

7. Does the artist owe any kind of protection or safeguarding to their audience?

I think so. Whilst I should be allowed to speak honestly about my experience, I also need to have context in mind. Most of the time, people haven't knowingly come to see me expecting to see me do very intense pieces about trauma. Most of the time I'm part of someone else's event or gig. It's not fair, then, to thrust my trauma on the room without at least some gentle framing: whether that be ending my set with another poem to soften the blow and allow breathing room, or doing content warnings.

8. Do you believe writing about areas such as grief, loss or trauma is a form of healthy catharsis or memorialisation?

I definitely think writing is one of the best, if not the best, form of catharsis and memorialisation, precisely because you get to decide what feelings you want to process or how you want to remember that person or event. It is, however, changed with performance, and I think it's important to examine WHY you want to perform this piece.

9. Do you believe artists whose work heavily focuses on their own traumas or losses should also attempt to explore other topics?

I definitely do. Whilst not every poet is going to write silly or funny poems, it's definitely not healthy to just write about your losses and traumas. Even if they never hit the stage, I think it's important to also write about what makes you happy.

10. What kind of warnings signs would you point out to someone new to poetry or performance who was performing about their traumas?

I have three:

If a poet cries, breaks down or is deeply unhappy or irritable when they do that poem, I don't think they're ready to be performing it. It's natural to be upset, but with an element of professional performance it's not healthy.

If a poet forces themselves to do the poem. If you have to push yourself to do it every time you perform, it's probably best to shelve it for a while.

If the piece becomes overly performed and completely separate from the lived experience. If a poet is doing this piece and shutting themselves down, or going into autopilot whilst they do the poem - this really isn't healthy. It's a numbing affect to shut yourself off from your real feelings.

What I would say about these warning signs is that the same poet can have all three, or none in the space of one week. Sometimes you feel everything really intensely and sometimes it's totally fine and really cathartic. I think it's about making sure you check in with your motivation for performing, how you feel on the day, and making sure you're in a space you feel comfortable in.

Catherine Wilson can be found on Twitter: @CWilsonPoet

Her website is http://www.catherinewilsonwriter.co.uk/

While you’re here, would you be able to review Poetry as Fuck on iTunes or Stitcher please? Or if you’re feeling flush, please contribute to our Patreon.

#poetry #trauma #grief #loss #personal pieces #safe space #content warnings #poem #poet #catherine wilson #loud poets

2 notes · View notes