Claire Lacey

Hooray! My creative-critical PhD thesis is now open access. That means you, and er, well, anyone really, can download it and read it. I hope you will.  The first half is the critical stuff: it looks at how brain injury is represented through language in both medical and literary settings. The second half is my poetry manuscript, which represents the disorienting experience my life-altering brain injury. Download Concussion Episodes: a creative-critical project on poetry and brain injury , at the University of Otago's online archive: https://ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/handle/10523/12826  

A longpoem response to the mining at Foulden Maar, generated at a workshop led by writers Iona Winter and Kirstie McKinnon and produced by Kate Dawson and Sophie Briggs on behalf of the Mining for Meaning: the Geoethics of Extracted Industries  project. The workshop occured in Middlemarch, Otago in October 2022. More writing and art from the workshop can be found at  https://www.rareearth-art.com/foulden-maar-writing-group   Claire Lacey · Ensemble: Foulden Maar — a poem by Claire Lacey, performed with Dane Oates Ensemble: Foulden Maar Dramatis personae: Mined Text  — the reportage The Soil  — as described The Poet  — always puts themselves into the poem The Fossil Beetle  — found at Foulden Maar The Diagram  — found in the New Zealand Listener The Corporate Entity  — our villain The Underfunded Locals  — the chorus     Fossil: Foulden Maar               The diatoms sank to the bottom, formin...

Join me Thursday, September 29th from 1-3pm at Te Whare o Rukutia, Ōtepoti for a free workshop that explores sound, movement, and collaboration.  

 I was asked to contribute a video for Brain Week by the Neurological Foundation of New Zealand. I appreciate the opportunity to chat about my work writing and thinking about concussion. This video is also hosted on the Otago Museum's Brain Week page  alongside some really fascinating talks about neurological research around Aotearoa New Zealand

 Concussion Episode 7: There's A Body All Right is a new chapbook of my brain injury poems. Many thanks to Model Press / Ryan Fitzpatrick for publishing this excerpt of my thesis manuscript. You can download the pdf for free here: https://ryanfitzpatrickca.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/model-press-011-claire-lacey-concussion.pdf

 I'm very excited to have a poem in the second issue of n-o-b-o-d-y, a poetry zine curated by the hardworking Jason Christie. The issue has an amazing lineup of poets, and is available for free at https://n-o-b-o-d-y.ca/products/issue-2-fall-2020

I'm very excited to have new poems included in the latest issues of Landfall and 1964 .  I am grateful to be in these amazing journals next to so many writers and artists I admire, and it gives me a real thrill to be in print in Aotearoa New Zealand based journals. Does this mean I am officially a local poet now??? 

Erin Mouré's poem "What, me, guard sheep?" from Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person  is my favourite poem. I know I wrote about it several times before back when this was a blog I kept regularly. I have been spending a lot of time with sheep during the Covid-19 lockdown, since I am lucky enough to live in a house with a paddock out back. I have taken to visiting the sheep daily and, often, recite lines of Mouré to them. So when I wanted to make a video for the Octagon Poetry Collective's virtual reading series, it seemed obvious that I needed to include the sheep. I wrote a poem about a lot of things, but with Bossy, the cuddliest ewe, and Lambikins who comes galloping over for pets, in mind. Of course, when it came time to film, the four white sheep were in an unreachable corner down a steep hill. But Cassius the Grumpy Grey Ram came to see what I was doing, and so he features in the video where I talk about the sweet ewes. What a good sport. He isn't always,...

With cancellations of live events, I have made some videos of recent poems I have produced as part of my PhD project which uses poetry to explore brain injury. In the first video I give a character to the brain structure of the amygdala, which is involved in both fear and pleasure responses. In the second, I swaddle myself in a blanket to read about brain injuries and moths.

The Mapping Issue of Dandelion Magazine is something special. It doesn't currently exist online, but I believe it should. It is a thematic issue that includes poetry, prose, visual work, and originally had an audio CD accompaniment.

I have a new article published on the Corpus blog about my experience with brain injury, and why I am working to represent that experience through poetry. https://corpus.nz/headcase-on-representing-concussion-in-poetry/

Check out this video of my poem Digital Dunedin commissioned for National Poetry Day hosted at the Dunedin Public Library. When Wikipedian at Large Mike Dickison paid a visit to Dunedin, he mentioned how integrated Wikipedia is in our daily lives. I took that sentiment and ran with it, creating a text that looks at how I use digital spaces including Wikipedia, Twitter, Pokemon Go, and Google Maps to navigate my physical surroundings, and that adds a layer to my environment that is both collectively generated and individually consumed. Online spaces are ambiguous and can be fraught with tension as they demand our attention, but they can also be connective and empowering. I hope this piece expresses some of that sentiment. I am so grateful to be in Dunedin studying at the University of Otago. The support of the Department of English and Linguistics, the UNESCO City of Literature Scholarship, and the mentorship of my supervisors Jacob Edmond, Ruth Napper, and Christine Jasoni mean so...

23 August 2019 @ Dunedin Public Library 5:30pm Free, booking required I will be performing a new piece of work about Digital Dunedin, inspired by the recent visit of Wikipedian at Large Mike Dickison. How does our digital landscape interact with the physical world around us and vice versa?