Apr
09

Please Resist Me: Sarah Stanton Interviews Luka Lesson

1. You’re the current Australian Poetry Slam Champion. How does that affect your work? Do you ever get sick of hearing it?

I don’t think I’ll ever let a title like that affect my work…but it is affecting how many people are watching me and expecting me to be good enough to back it up. So I’m respecting my own processes and getting ready to make my next album knowing that the title comes with a responsibility to represent for the poets back home and bring awareness to issues I believe in. I’m about halfway through the year of being the Aust champ…and no, I’m not sick of it yet. :)

2. What are you working on at the moment? Does it involve poetry? If not, why not?

At the moment I am working on videos for the “Please Resist Me” album singles. I think it is important to make my work as accessible as possible so I’m excited to put out videos for not only my songs but also my poetry. I’m also enjoying being involved in the process of making something visual rather than lyrical. It gives me a break from constantly writing but still lets me be involved with creatively producing more work.

3. Hip-hop is central to your identity as a performer. How did hip-hop influence your poetic development, and vice versa?

I don’t see a difference between rap and poetry. I started writing raps and then discovered def jam poetry on Youtube and took it from there…but I never really thought I was then becoming a ‘poet’. I was just doing the same as I always had, just without the beats. I love the freedom of performing without music, and the immediacy and rawness of it all. I think the biggest issue in the separation of poetry and hip-hop is that people don’t recognise rappers as exceptional poets…some of the best lines that I know are from rappers not poets. People aren’t seeing the artist behind the face or name or fashion and judging rappers before they listen to their work…and the same goes for hip-hop fans not listening or going to poetry shows because they’re not ‘cool enough’…both are missing out on the absolute skill and artistry of both genres…for me, at their essence, they are the same thing.

4. Your new album, Please Resist Me, includes a number of pieces which I have heard you perform solo set to music. Why the change? How do you think it influences the poems?

I decided to put some of the poems to music to make sure the album could sit as both a hip-hop album and poetry CD seamlessly. Also, as a listener myself, do not necessarily enjoy listening to poem after poem with no other element on the album. I get bored I think because I started making music before writing poetry, so I decided to mix it up. I think it gives the poems a extra something, I really enjoy all the intsrumentation on all of these…The piano on ‘May Your Pen Grace the Page’ is a great start to the album and lead in to the next track ‘Desire’ which is piano heavy, the guitar on ‘The Confluence’ is actually played by my brother Elias back in Brisbane, so that is special to me. And the Oud on ‘Athena’ is culturally appropriate for the piece and gives it more depth and atmosphere that can’t be created with just a flat a-cappella track.

5. Tell us a little about the Centre for Poetics and Justice. What’s going there that isn’t going on anywhere else?

As far as I’m concerned The Centre for Poetics and Justice is the best thing to happen to the poetry scene in Australia for a long time. I haven’t been around the scene forever but I know in Melbourne that we are leading the charge towards creating a community of writers and performers who are conscious about the way their words can be used to positively affect the society within which we live. We are sincere about our assisting people of all races, ages and creeds to find their truth and help them write work that is transformative not only for the community but also for themselves. I believe this is a rare thing for an organisation to engage with on a public level and our grounded way of working is gaining support and momentum exponentially at the moment.

6. What are you reading/hearing/experiencing that’s influencing your poems right now?

I’m not writing poetry at the moment, I’m still on tour until the end of May…I’m taking care of all the things that come with being on tour and an independent artist away from home base at the moment. But I know all the slams I have been attending throughout the USA and all the amazing things I saw in China while I was there will influence the next piece I write, if not thematically then at least aesthetically.

7. Why poetry?

This makes me smile. To tell the truth I don’t like ‘poetry’ and I never did growing up. I just seem to have a knack for words, and I enjoy making beautiful things. I also love photography, painting, colour, music, dance, nature, sounds, culture and languages. And the ocean, especially the ocean. But poetry is a place where I can engage with all of these things, we can write about anything. So I hope to sustain a life where I can disseminate knowledge without being affiliated with a university or government structure, and provide inspiration about any topic I choose to uncover for myself, or I feel must be uncovered for society.

Luka Lesson.

Luka Lesson is the current Australian Poetry Slam Champion and Co-director of The Centre for Poetics and Justice based in Melbourne.

Luka has been active in utilising hip-hop and poetry as a form of self-determination and raising awareness for marginalised young people through community development projects for many years.

He has also taught Indigenous Studies at Monash University for the past two years and holds a first class honours degree in the same field.

Luka has performed his work beside the likes of Shane Koyczan (Canada), Amir Sulaiman (USA),  Lowkey (UK) and Lemon Anderson (USA), and was invited to perform a full feature at the famous Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe in New York City in 2011.

Still only only at the beginning of his career, Luka’s roof raising performances and expert writing has built him a reputation that already spans the globe with UK performance poet Charlie Dark once describing him as “a young Saul Williams”.

His first full length Book and Album ‘Please Resist Me’ will be available  through Australian Scholarly Publishing in 2012.

Mar
23

Performance Review: SLAM!

2Kolegas is a small live music venue hidden inside the grounds of the Beijing drive-in movie theatre. (Yes, we really have one.) When considering how to describe it to you, the word grungy didn’t so much spring to my mind as catapult vigorously in its direction; it is the type of place which serves cheap drinks and big dreams and where every square inch of the walls is covered in graffiti. I dropped in for the first time last Saturday night, to attend a slam poetry performance sponsored by the Bookworm International Literary Festival and the Jue Festival. The event featured performances from Luka Lesson, the current Australian Poetry Slam Champion, and Tim Clare, British stand-up poet and author of WE CAN’T ALL BE ASTRONAUTS; Montreal based musician Courtney Wing opened the night, but since you came here to read about poetry, I will with the utmost respect gloss over his part in the proceedings.

First up after the music, then, was Tim Clare. Clare talks like a poet but takes the stage like a comedian; in his T-shirt and scraggly hair, he exudes a very powerful, and oddly endearing sense of self-deprecation. This is reflected in the nature of his writing: his set began with Pub Stuntman, a poem which opens with a vivid description of banging an old lady for a bet. In this poem, and indeed throughout the set, Clare’s choice of rhymes is integral to the comic effect; lines like ‘Her lips are dry, her legs are splayed / She switches off her hearing aid’ are nothing so much as the poetic equivalent of carrot and stick. And yet this poem, when it comes full circle, highlights what is perhaps the most powerful part of Tim Clare’s work, which is the pathos behind the joking.

Clare’s set also included Down With The Kids, a poem so deftly inserted into a comic monologue that we were five lines into it before anybody had noticed; a song entitled Nice And Gentle, Jesus which takes a chance moment witnessed on the River Cam and turns it into the Passion of the Christ; and finally, what was possibly the most impressive rap I’ve ever seen from a man attempting to impersonate famous women throughout history while rhyming at the same time. His set was short, but it packed a punch, blurring the boundaries between poet, musician and stand-up comedian and doing it well. I missed Clare’s solo show Death Drive while he was in Beijing, but I’ll be picking up his book as soon as I can.

Then it was Luka Lesson’s turn. By this point, I have to confess, I was a little the worse for wear: it was St. Patrick’s Day, I had come straight from a bout of heavy drinking, and I had the sort of headache which makes a bear to the face seem like  a cheeky massage. Lesson’s performance cut through all that; by The Confluence, a simple yet incredibly powerful portrayal of the coming together and parting of two lovers, I was on the edge of my seat despite the haze. ‘Half a bird seemed to chirp half a song in half a tree’; he said he wanted to get this poem over and done early so he wouldn’t have the chance to cry, and I believed him. Other highlights included A to Z, a glorious rollercoaster of a journey through the alphabet complete with audience participation, and Athena, my favourite poem of the night, for which I can conceive no higher compliment than that it made me think I was Greek too.

Lesson’s poetry is a heady mix of mythology, political commentary (immigration and racism are two issues which are frequently referenced) and stylistic influences from rap and hip-hop. In fact he performed a number of hip-hop pieces in addition to his standard spoken-word, but I won’t discuss them here because hip-hop might as well be moon opera for all it makes sense to me. But that just emphasises my point: Lesson’s work is a very far cry from the sort of poetry I usually engage with, it was battling the twin forces of exhaustion and alcohol, and yet it moved me. It opened me up and invited itself in.

SLAM! was the first spoken word event I have ever attended. I know, I know, I’m a terrible person, but I have to say I couldn’t have chosen two better poets to take my slam cherry if I’d tried. Between Tim and his ukelele and Luka and his hair–I’m convinced it’s a sentient being that just happens to live on him–I was introduced to the big wide world of performance poetry with a maximum of magic and a minimum of mess. If either of them ever comes back to China, I’ll be in the first row at their shows. And I learnt another important lesson that night too, one just as important as the literature: don’t challenge the Australian Slam Poetry Champion at foosball. He will rock your socks every time.