Bohdan Piasecki

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

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?”.

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.

« I think it’s easier to write poetry in an exploratory manner. I often write to find out what it is that I want to write and that freedom can also be a useful tool. »
The Use of Metaphor.

One example I could give you of a tool that’s used in poetry a lot that can be used for discovery is the use of metaphor, for example, which is common in any story. In language, right? Language is made out of metaphors. But what we often expect when we talk about metaphor in writing, is that the writer comes up with a clever image, that tells us something new, that makes a particular moment memorable.
Staying with it for a second, what it does in the mind of the reader, of the viewer, is it invites them, or almost forces them, to be active within the text, right? It invites them to find out what the possible connections are between the object and the thing, the object of the comparison. And that’s exciting because different people will come up with different explanations. If it’s a good metaphor, it opens up a space where they can be active and create meaning or create beauty or create something. This is the common use of it.
But if you reverse it, so if you are say working on a screenplay and you haven’t started writing it yet, you’re figuring out who your characters are, you’re figuring out the world in which they move.

If I can trick your brain into providing answers, if I give you a forced metaphor, so you know a little bit about your character, and I can take a random object, I don’t know, a bicycle, and I will say your protagonist is like a bicycle. Your brain, because of how they work, how our brains make sense of the world, will immediately try to find points of connection.
“Well, my character transports me somewhere, but I have to make an effort to get there.” It’s not as fast as a car you know, you look for ways, and inevitably they will show you something about your world.
This is a small, very specific example, but I think that some of the poetic practices can be useful in exploration. Because often, I think it’s easier to write poetry in an exploratory manner. I often write to find out what it is that I want to write and that freedom can also be a useful tool.

« I think poetic writing or poetic thinking can be fantastic starting points for screenwriters, for story development. »
The poetic approach to release the story.

Because taking someone out of their creative habits is invaluable. And taking, specifically with a screenwriter, taking someone away from how they’re used to using words. And keeping them in this world that is their professional realm that they are ostensibly used to and comfortable in, but subverting it, making it strange, assigning different values to the words, sequencing them in a way that has nothing to do with story structure and so on, can be freeing because it lets them see the very building blocks of their stories in a different way.

« Poetry is very comfortable with inviting others to make meaning within it. It’s very comfortable with multiplicity. »
The multiplicity of poetry for the plurality of narrative.

And you could argue that the poems that are overly prescriptive, clear, declarative, are less exciting because they get close to other modes of speech in a form that doesn’t support them. And if you ask people to think poetically early in their creative process, you hopefully give them a tool where they can keep their options open for longer. Where they can withhold solutions, resolutions. Where they can move through an idea. Where they can explore it. Where they can articulate it without closing down options, without getting into that tunnel that is very hard to leave.

« I often use images as in photographs starting points , because that can also help you discover beyond the plot and beyond character. »
Before the story is written: exploring the world.

I often use images as in photographs starting points for this, because that can also help you discover beyond the plot and beyond character, beyond dialogue before the functions we usually assign to words, it can help you think about the visual side of the world.
How a thing appearing can mean different things and so on. And, even though this writing will likely never make it in the way it’s written into any finished form of a screenplay, over and over I’ve had feedback that said that it opened up an understanding of what the story wants to be, of what the character might be, or things that are harder to name and articulate in the process in the process of writing.
I think it’s that multiplicity is that idea that I will build I will find out myself what it is that I’m making as I make it in the moment. And I will trust others, I will trust my audience, I will trust my readers if you’re a poet, to take these elements and find something in there that I will encourage certain directions, but keep the others open.

« I think that fun is often undervalued in the creative process: the enjoyment of it, asking people to play. »
Nourish the narrative through improvisation, play and fun.

That is exciting and that can offer something to screenwriters, to people who write in other modes.

Poetry can be used to dig into different, less conscious decision-making processes, but that is, I would say, easier to do, using tools that come from spoken word and performance and that kind of overlap a bit with the word of improvisation. Which has been part of poetry as well for centuries, the different traditions of improvised poetry that are fascinating and this is yes, a set of almost games.
I think the idea of play and keeping play in there is important too. Again, that help people not lock themselves into a set of decisions and keep options open.
And if you do that without writing, if you do this in speech and if you especially use time constraints, if you ask for immediate responses, immediate ideas, immediate creation in the moment, it can be not just spontaneous and fun. And I do say fun as an important word. I think that that’s often undervalued in the creative process, the enjoyment of it, asking people to play, to respond quickly, to follow aspects of language other than meaning, to follow aspects of language like sound, like rhythm, and to see where they lead them is can open things up.

An example of play that I sometimes use with working with groups is by reversing the standard rule of improvisation, which is if you do improv in the drama context, you’ve probably heard the idea of “yes and…”, that the way you build a scene is you don’t question what the others are building. If somebody brings something, you have to react with, “yes and then…” So, they say we’re in a hospital and you say “yes, and I’m the doctor” and they say “yes” and so on.
This game flips this and it’s nice to bring in at the moment where stories begin to crystallize. So somewhere, you ask one person to tell the story the way it exists yet – but they likely still have a lot of questions – but you ask them to say, for now, what you have. And then others get to reject elements of the story to push back against them. So you go “no but” rather than “yes and…”
And you have to very quickly redirect your story in directions you hadn’t considered, suddenly changing the location or changing a key decision point or changing what might become a plot point as it evolves.

« Everything is mutable! »
Letting go to unlock the story.

The key here is it’s clear that it’s a game. It’s clear that you’re not making any final choices. You’re playing around with what you have so far. And this makes it easier for people to become less precious about what they’ve made to let go to look at it from a different direction to…
And this in turn reinforces the fact that everything can still be changed. That everything is mutable.

Sometimes it just ends up being an odd, bizarre world version of the story and it exists there and you don’t take anything from this. Sometimes it opens up an option that they hadn’t even considered because they thought something was axiomatic within the story and it could not be questioned could not be changed.
And in fact, it turns out that the change unlocked an element, unlocked a pathway that wasn’t there.

« Describe a film rather than tell a story. »
Feel the story.

One of the things I like working on, when I work with screenwriters, is shifting them from thinking about the film to just thinking about the story. I find very early on if you ask them what they’re working on, they describe a film rather than tell a story. And that’s an exercise and I have to often be quite ruthless.

But when you listen to the to the language ticks to how they open up, and how they how they present a story even at early stages, they’re not telling the story itself, they’re not in the story. They’re describing a film meaning like… You might say, “we open in a forest.” “We follow a character as they walk through the forest.” So already I’m not in it. I’m imagining a film. I’m not imagining the character. I’m a few steps removed. And so are they.

And because thinking like this about the story forces them to think using patterns, using codes that are the codes of filmmaking rather than for now just elaborating a story. I use a set of games and approaches to drag them back to how you might, to a human way of storytelling, to how you might tell a story to friends in a bar or to a group of people who are here to listen to a story.

And that does a few things. One again, it moves the brain in a different direction. And it makes them engage with the story in a different way. It makes them feel their story which sounds maybe a little abstract. But any storyteller who has performed to an audience will tell you that it’s not abstracts in the slightest. You feel both the story in yourself. And if you do, you get something back from the people listening to you. That’s feedback. That’s a very concrete form of feedback that helps you shape and evolve your story. It can be quite hard sometimes and quite irritating to the person speaking. But irritation is not necessarily a bad thing either. It can it can lead you to then make a quick choice.

That’s actually exciting. Activities like this have to do with leaving analysis in favour of experience and leaving analytical thinking and more experiential way to develop a story or a text. And I think I think that’s crucial. We can absolutely kill our own process with being overly analytical, which I don’t think is particularly new but it’s worth repeating.
And the trouble is that it’s very hard to force ourselves out of this analytical mindset Especially for your experience, especially for had positive reinforcement for ways in which we find stories. And it helps to have an external stimulus to leave that.

« We treat ourselves too seriously as authors. »
Enrich the writing process with other modes of creativity.

We treat ourselves too seriously as authors, as writers, as professionals. And it’s understandable. It’s people’s livelihoods or it’s people’s… It’s people’s main activity in life. They treat it seriously.

But this seriousness shuts down avenues of play and then which shuts down avenues of discovery. And switching to a different mode of creativity opens them back up because it takes away some responsibility.
If I ask you to write poetically and you’re not a poet, you go like, “well, of course, this is going to be bad because this is not my craft. This is not what I’ve worked on.” And often what this means, it becomes incredible and becomes extremely valuable because of that freedom of suddenly letting go of the… What I’ve been talking about, analysis, but also of the “professionalism” and everything it brings in terms of limits, forms, rigid rule sets and structures that may be coming later. But in the early stages can be harmful to ideas and to creativity.
What I make is inviting enough for others to want to play with it and for others to bring in their own understanding of language, their own histories, their own identities, their own backgrounds and to find a space that maybe I could not predict but that is meaningful to them in some way that elicits a reaction of some kind.

« You can make yourself let go of anything that’s there by default, of factory settings for your writing. »
Stimulating the narrative through connection.

Another way of thinking about this is connection. I think it’s building a bridge. It is connecting.
I think, what I’m working on, I’m very wary of trying to position myself as either someone with a lesson or a moral standpoint or even a clear and singular story to tell because I don’t think I’ve earned this place. I think there are other sources where people can find this. But what I can do, is I can take from me, from my languages, from my voices, elements that I can shape into something interesting, beautiful, intriguing, confusing that people will want to engage with.
It’s an almost physical thing. The sense when you feel that a certain set of words arranged in a certain way is doing something. And I know something is a vague term and I can probably wrap it in literary terminology and make it sounds weightier.
And I find over and over again that poems touch people in extremely deep and often emotional ways. And it’s nothing to do with the poem itself. I’m not saying I write poems that make people cry. No, it’s what they see of themselves reflected through these words and complicated and made beautiful or what they see of themselves through someone else’s eyes.

Having that connection happen between two humans is I think one of the very basic core foundational blocks of why we tell stories in the first place, whether they manifest in poetry or in novels or in screenplays or theatre, whatever you care to name.
But I couldn’t name it and I don’t want to name it, especially since it is a slightly different beast every single time. But it’s there. The thing I have to say is to not be afraid to look for the things that are specifically yours, that are unique to you, that maybe build on text that came before, forms that came before, sounds, rhythms, shapes that came before. But that nobody else could write.
That is where you will connect and your voice, your language, the way they express your way of what you consider interesting, beautiful, touching, important, urgent. That is the value. That is what we look for, even if we don’t know that that is what we look for. And so anyway, you can make yourself let go of anything that’s there by default, of factory settings for your writing, is invaluable.

Even it feels strange and uncomfortable and childish and overly playful, then it’s worth pursuing.

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