A loud hello bellows from my laptop, while the image of a man with a five o’clock shadow appears on screen. It’s only 6pm in Hong Kong, but the chaos in the streets isn’t reflected in Luka Lesson’s apartment. He’s sealed himself off in a quiet room, where there’s shelves of neatly placed books hanging on the wall behind him. 

 

It looks like he’s made himself at home, even if his home in Sydney is thousands of kilometres away. It’s something that comes with practice after being on the road so frequently, which Lesson is accustomed to. He has four years of international touring, 13 Writers’ Festivals, nine years of workshop experience and ten years of writing under his belt and has just released his second full length album.

 

Lesson smiles as he recounts when he first discovered his passion for writing poetry. He was studying Anthropology at the University of Queensland and would often turn to writing raps as a form of procrastination with his friend, Julez.

 

“We would write raps in class and muck around, and then I’d go to his joint and record in a makeshift studio that he had under his house,” says Lesson.

 

“Then I discovered spoken word poetry about five years after that. So, I started making some music and freestyling. I used to busk in Brisbane outside the clubs and to people were lined up to get inside… I would insult them about what they were wearing and they’d pay me for it [laughs]. Drunk people.”

 

From there he discovered spoken word on YouTube while watching the show, Deaf Jam, and was inspired by how these people got up onstage with nothing and could present something raw and incredibly powerful, which had an impact on himself and the audience. This sparked him to further investigate performance poetry, which he studied through the Victorian College of the Arts.

 

Now he’s the one inspiring others, something which is a frequent occurrence on his trip around Asia, where he’s running workshops in schools, teaching them about performance poetry and helping them “overcome humanity’s second greatest fear - public speaking.” He talks about one girl who reached out to him, during a period of hardship in her life.

 

“She wrote a poem in a workshop, rehearsed it without anyone really knowing and got onstage and performed this piece about self harm,” says Lesson.

 

“Everyone kind of turned a blind eye. I ended up sitting down with her afterwards and we’re really good friends now. I would give her tasks, like to write a poem to her 30-year-old self. I kept in touch with her and kept her writing poetry, because that’s her one passion.”

 

Lesson acknowledges that performance poetry has the potential to impact people’s lives in profound ways and has witnessed it several times.

 

“I had a judge come up to me after a poetry slam and tell me that my poem changed his life. He came up like a blubbering mess and he had been an arsehole throughout the slam because he was going through a break-up. That poem kind of broke him and helped him.”

 

Despite all of his success, Lesson still finds it difficult to put pen to paper sometimes, but maintains it’s not writer’s block because he doesn’t believe in it.

 

“Sometimes I struggle to get started. Then I’ll do a stream of consciousness exercises. I’ll put a 20 minute timer on my phone and make myself keep the pen on the page the entire time. Our writing is very shallow at first… Then it gets deeper. So I’ll do an exercise like that to clear away the day-to-day stuff we think about and get to the deeper stuff.”

 

Before we hang up, Lesson leaves one piece of advice that he feels everyone should hear.

 

“Be fearless. I know it’s a cliche, but really be fearless and do what you love. Put in the hours, enjoy it and fuck shit up.”