Embracing the Poetry of Presence
An Interview with Sydney-based poet Stacey Cotter Manière
In a world that never stops moving, the art of mindfulness and being present in the moment becomes a precious gift. Meet Stacey Cotter Manière, a Sydney-based poet and long-time contributor to The Lissome. Stacey’s story is a testament to the beauty of embracing the present moment and finding solace in the art of poetry.
In this interview, we embark on a journey into her world, delving into her thoughts on the connection between poetry and mindfulness, her career within fashion and poetry, and her unique blend of yoga and verse.
Dörte: Stacey, you speak of poetry as a “portal to presence.” How would you describe the relationship between poetry and the notion of being present?
Stacey: For me, presence is a lot about being deliberate – intentional and conscious in the present moment. Bringing my heart, head, spirit and body into communion in the here and now. Writing poetry can be a tool to draw me in to focus on what is happening around me and internally in that very moment. Reading poetry is also a beautiful way to call oneself into presence. To give oneself up to a poem, to notice the physical senses’ reaction to it which can differ from moment to moment.
Dörte: Why are practices of mindfulness and being present important for you?
Stacey: As a mother, who often has to multitask out of necessity, I can get distracted easily and fall back into conditioned behaviours constantly throughout the day. My approach to many things in life especially if something seems overwhelming or scary is to break it down into step-by-step actions and be intentional about what it is I am doing and keep coming back to that intention – whether it is a goal, dream, sometimes even getting my two young daughters out the door in the morning can seem an impossible feat.
I approach mindfulness or being present in very much the same way that I approach big tasks except step by step becomes moment by moment. If I stray, I return to the present once I have noticed it has happened, moment by moment I come back, again and again. We are constantly dancing as humans between forgetting and remembering, forgetting and remembering …
Dörte: What do you love about writing poetry, and having it as a part of your life?
Stacey: Writing poetry can be cathartic, an act of self-care and an opportunity to sit with the discomfort of something difficult we are facing so that we can move through it instead of drowning it out with consumption. Everyone has their consumption vices. Often we may be unaware of it as it can appear to be healthy and may well be but it doesn’t always help to use it to block things out. It could be food, alcohol or recreational drugs, binge-watching telly, exercise, or Instagram feed scrolling … mine is listening to audiobooks to drown out my thoughts sometimes. But if we stop, and change from consuming to creating something magical begins to happen. We can take that pain and turn it into something beautiful – art. There is an invitation if we are willing to show up and get curious. What happens if you pick up the pen? Quite often what I think I am going to write about never is actually what I end up writing about. The subconscious starts to spill forth. The universe starts to conspire for you, you can tap into the creative source that we all have access to if we accept that invitation.
Dörte: Could you tell us more about your background, about how writing entered into your life, and how it is connected to mindfulness?
Stacey: My career began in fashion. For many years I have been working as a creative director and fashion designer, consulting well-established brands in Europe and Australia. I was also the co-founder of (re)vision society in London. We created limited edition pieces out of materials destined for landfills from the fashion industry and worked on some collaborative projects with dear friend and menswear icon Nigel Cabourn and Isetan in Japan. Whilst working on (re)vision society and desperately wanting to contribute to a positive shift within the fashion industry towards more sustainable practices and consumption, I realised that the changes at large would never be achieved on the scale required if we did not look inward at our motivations, desires and our relationship to our deeper selves and the external world.
So I began to look hard at the person in the mirror, curious to understand myself more and perhaps encourage others to do the same. Alongside this exploration, I was practicing mindfulness, meditation and yoga for years and began to feel very called to follow this path further as a way of internal reflection and coming more into presence. Writing became a daily practice, I began filling journals and journals full of my findings.
Dörte: What are some of your early memories of your relationship with poetry?
Stacey: I have been creating poems for as long as I can remember, I say creating instead of writing because I remember hiding notes in my drawers with what I thought were poems only to find them years later and realise that the words didn’t even make any sense on the page because I hadn’t yet learned how to write ‘real’ words. But the feelings and emotions and the rhymes I was creating in my mind all came rushing back to me when I found those papers. So from a very early stage, I was trying to capture on paper my experiences in a melodic rhythmic way.
My mother gave me a book of spiritual and motivational poetry when I was around 11 years old. It felt very sacred and precious, like something I had never owned or read before. To me, as a young child, the poems felt almost like magic spells and I began to try to write poetry like the poems in that book. Now, upon reflection, I guess they were like spells – spells to bring us back into presence.
Dörte: And how has your practice evolved over the years from a private to a more public practice?
Stacey: During the last eight years, I have begun sharing my poetry more. Firstly by gingerly standing up at open mics in Paris and London then submitting to anthologies and magazines. A series of synchronicities led me to an introduction to you and The Lissome, and a beautiful creative partnership and friendship began. I have written poetry for The Lissome since the first published issue and the poems have always been very much born of conversations of curiosity between us, and other creatives who contribute to The Lissome. They are “cosmic commons” so to speak, I have felt somewhat like a scribe capturing on paper what was swirling in the subconscious soup we are all tapping into.
My work has also been published by Andrews McMeel in Smear Poems for Girls edited by Greta Bellamacina, Common Interest, a beautiful offering curated by the sustainable label KowTow, and I am one of the 26 alliterating poems in The Alphabet of Women edited and produced by Miriam Hetchman – an incredible body of work that began as a performance before the pandemic lockdown and later became a book in 2022.
Dörte: You recently started teaching yoga in combination with poetry. What led you to this rather unique practice and way of teaching?
Stacey: My husband Frank and I were living in Paris at the time with our first child Luna and we were yearning to be more connected to nature. So we decided to return to Australia where we would be closer to the ocean and still connected to the city to work in our respective industries. A few years into our Australian adventure Frank surprised me with a yoga teacher training course, knowing how much I wanted to deepen my practice. I didn’t know where it would take me but trusted the calling.
Earlier this year I created a small studio in the bottom level of our home. I hold classes of 5 to 10 people per class three times a week. In these intimate gatherings, I take people on a journey through a poem each week and explore the theme of the poem through the physical, mental and emotional planes. It is a considered yoga asana practice and I provide a lot of prompts to pull us back into the present and also offer zen Thai massage in savasana. We go slow – we strengthen, we soften, we surrender to what the moment asks of us. By moving through the poses and exploring the stanzas in a more physical way I feel it penetrates the being more deeply. I have also started holding workshops recently and am excited about what offerings will continue to unfold like the ones I am working on with The Lissome.
Dörte: How would you say yoga and poetry are related?
Stacey: Poetry is very much about the breath; the pauses in a poem are very intentionally placed. Then, there is also the white space around the poem which is also like breath, it creates space and offers up the opportunity to zoom in, to slow down. Yoga too, is also very much about the breath; awareness of breath, and intention as to the interconnection between breath and movement. So for me marrying poetry and yoga together feels very natural and complimentary.
Yoga has its roots in mantras and hymns, The Vedas, the ancient Sanskrit texts are often referred to as the oldest poems in the world. The Vedas have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE. So it is not anything new or unusual I am doing by bringing the yoga asana and poetry together, perhaps just in a different way.
Dörte: What do you see as your purpose and calling in life?
Stacey: A contribution I would like to make in this lifetime is to help others experience more presence, joy and creativity in their lives. A coming home to one’s self, to the collective one. The way in which I feel called to do that is through speaking to others’ curiosity by way of my own curiosity – a communion of curiosity so to speak. The ingredients I am called to alchemise to achieve this at this moment in time are poetry, yoga and meditation. What I am finding more and more is that by sharing and supporting others to have more presence, joy and creativity in their lives these things are penetrating my life even more deeply.
Dörte: What can participants look forward to when signing up for your Portal of Presence workshop?
Stacey: We will go on a journey of my process of cultivating presence and inhabiting states of mind that nurture creativity. This is not a ‘how to’ write poetry. It’s an invitation. An invitation to a shift in perspective, an invitation to get curious and to explore what expands you. In a line from one of my poems Cosmic Commons for the most recent issue of The Lissome, I write: “The communion of curiosity is always calling us.” If you are here, you’re here because you have heard the call.
I’m going to share with you what can cultivate the skill of paying attention through the medium of poetry. Just like in sports, like in making art or making music you exercise through practice – through the practice of writing poetry we may nurture attention to the world around us and the world within us.
I’m an example that you don’t have to have studied poetry formally or know everything about it to begin or to be a poet. It begins when you pick up the pen and transforms when you begin to share your work. In Seth Godin’s book, The Practice, he writes about art being art when it is shared and sharing our art is being generous. So here I offer up my art and my practice to you as a gesture of generosity.
I believe that our stories have the power to change people. All of us have something we can give that offers others an opportunity to see the world differently, and to learn from. I am a poet because I write poetry and share it. I am still learning about the craft and form and will continue for the rest of my life to be a student of poetry. It is not my place to teach about the rules and structure, at least not yet. But what I do know about is the presence that poetry brings to my life and others when I share it. The mindfulness of the act, the experience of the source flowing through my body and feeling connected with something much larger than myself when I am writing – that is something I want to share with as many people as possible.
Portal to Presence – A Poetic Practice with Stacey Cotter Manière:
Date: Sunday, October 29th, 2023
Time: 9-11 am CET (e.g. Berlin) / 7-9 pm AEDT (e.g. Sydney).
>> Order your workshop ticket here.
Stacey Cotter Manière is a creative consultant, designer, yoga teacher and published poet living in Sydney. Find her on Instagram, and visit her website.
Photography: Sarah Andrijcich
Interview: Dörte de Jesus
