Poet & Professor of Creative Writing (Poland & UK) who took part in the conference 03: Map the Imagination.




https://youtu.be/A7kvZh8ra0g




en français



Bohdan Piasecki is a poet from Poland based in Birmingham. A committed performer, he has taken his poems from the upstairs room in an Eastbourne pub to the main stage of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, from underground Tokyo clubs to tramways in Paris, from a bookshop in Beijing to an airfield in Germany, from niche podcasts to BBC Radio. He enjoys the creative chaos of big field festivals just as much as the composed concentration of literary events. Bohdan was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem: Performed in 2023, the category’s inaugural year.



Bohdan founded the first poetry slam in Poland before moving to the UK to get a doctorate in translation studies. He has worked as Director of Education on the Spoken Word in Education MA course at Goldsmiths University, and was the Midlands Producer for Apples and Snakes between 2010 and 2017. He is Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. He also works as Creative Producer, and sits on the board of the Poetry Translation Centre.



— an interview by Antoine Le Bos, Screenwriter and Artistic Director of Le Groupe Ouest, recorded at Les Champs Libres (Rennes) in December 2023 in the framework of the serie "What stories for our time?".







Bohdan Piasecki



The Story: an Absolute Experience



« Oral storytelling traditions is where you go to learn how to hold attention. » The story, between languages.



I'm a poet, I'm a poet and I do other things that surround poetry, and then stem from poetry. I am a poet who has always lived between languages because I was born in Poland and grew up there. But I went to a French school and I studied English literature so I've always existed in between, in the space between languages.I write a lot for the voice, I write for performance where the poems that are meant to be heard rather than read off a page, although I write those too. And because I spend a lot of time talking to people, some of the traditions I've drawn from were oral storytelling traditions.This is where you go to learn how to hold attention, what forms work, even if the poems themselves can sometimes be stories and sometimes don't rely on narrative to work.



« Even poems that, like I said, don't rely on narratives, follow an arc that is not dissimilar from what you might expect from a story. » The story: an absolute experience.



I do consider myself as a storyteller as a poet. Although I think poetry complicates this idea. And sometimes it is close to the definition of storytelling that we might all carry in that the poem tells a narrative. It may be unreliable or it might be surprising or it might not follow the standard pattern but it's still a story. But even poems that, like I said, don't rely on narratives, follow an arc that is not dissimilar from what you might expect from a story.And especially in performance, you have a group of humans in the room and you're trying to take them through an experience. You try to build up a reaction, you try to establish a connection in ways that are very similar to when you tell stories, even if what you're offering them is, I don't know, a sequence of images or something that doesn't resolve itself as neatly as a story usually might. You still try to take them through a similar experience.I would say, yeah, I tell stories.