Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. This week I want to look at the work of a poet called Greta Stoddard and particularly a collection from 2022 called Fall.

Now Greta Stoddart didn't start out as a poet.

She was an actor, an actor who had trained at the Jacques Lecoq School.

Now, I don't know if you've ever heard of Jacques Lecoq.

He's, surprisingly, he was, should I say, a French acting guru and also

a lot of clowns, I think, trained under him and then later on under his continuing posthumous

method.

And Greta Stardart worked as an actor, and then one day, so she tells the story, she's

in Belfast, I believe, she was out walking and she started to compose a poem in her head.

And by the time she got back to the dressing room, it was kind of done.

And that was the big change for her.

This is how she puts it.

She said, performing that night, I felt at one remove as if the heart had been taken out of the stage and placed on a page.

So she became a poet.

She'd been an actor and in that special experience of composing this poem in her head, she became a poet.

I believe, though, that the Jacques Lacock, you can tell I enjoy saying it,

with Jacques Lecoq method, which informed her acting, also informs her poetry.

I don't want to give you too much theory before I read you some poetry,

but just very quickly, as she says that acting and writing are simply,

this is a quote, simply different kinds of performance.

Either way, you're both being and not being yourself, which I think is very interesting.

I'll tell you what, I'm going to jump into the poem, the first poem,

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