THE BODY/THE POEM/THE BODY
with Poet Keith Payne and Dancer Inma Pavón
After a hugely successful run of 20 weeks in Cork City as part of the Eco Poet in Residency, THE BODY/THE POEM/THE BODY comes to Bere Island for one session. Poet Keith Payne and dancer Inma Pavon alert you to how the everyday movements you make: walking to the shops, doing the washing up, digging in the garden, all generate their own poetry. The poetry of the everyday. And that poetry is better understood when felt in the body, very often by simply walking the line. THE BODY/THE POEM/THE BODY allows participants to feel in their bodies the connection between poetry and movement. This workshop is open to everybody. Absolutely no previous experience is necessary, this is a workshop for all and everyone is encouraged to participate. We particularly encourage participants from underrepresented groups, people with disabilities and citizens for whom English is not a first language.
Writers have always been on the move: walking, wandering, roving and rambling. Bashō; the Beats; Herzog Walking in Ice in order to save Lotte Eisner, ‘our Eisner mustn’t die, she will not die, I won’t permit it;’ Simon Armitage troubadouring his way home along the spine of the Pennines; Brendan Kennelly, one of our great poets of the city walking Dublin daily, and most recently Tommy Pico walking the High Line in NYC back to his Native American origins. All these writers moved. They moved in their own space and they moved through space. They located themselves in a place and wrote back from there. As Patrick Kavanagh —who walked from Dublin to Monaghan in his becoming a poet—had it ‘we have lived in important places.’ And so just as one word follows another across the page, one foot follows the other across the floor. And the articulation of poetry becomes one with the articulation of the body.
Spellbind the foot! Bless it!
The forefoot, the midfoot, the hindfoot, bless it.
Its twenty-six bones, its thirty-three joints,
Its more than one hundred ligaments. Bless it!
Bless its arches:
From side to side, from toe to heel, bless its springiness.
Bless the left; Bless the right.
I shoulder my load and hit the road.
(Paula Meehan, from ‘The Walking Cure.’ For the Hungry Ghosts, etym press, 2022.)
“Keith and Inma built a feeling of team-spirit and belonging in which everyone could follow their own pace and build the self-esteem and courage to experiment both with their body and writing. The different approaches, both in the poetic as in the performative aspects, made me explore and discover new facets of familiar urban spaces and rethink my own role and the one of others moving in them and served as inspiration for similar projects in the future.”
Benjamin Rupprecht
This is a free event. Click HERE to book your space.