The PK Featured Poet James Bell
"...genuine poetry has a certain glow that's like finding gold. It's a wonderful feeling when you see it and recognize it." James Bell
Regular members of the PK List will be familiar with James' comments on other members work and will know how incisive and helpful his comments are. They will also know that he brings the same expertise to his own work, and over the months I can recall reading many of his poems posted to the list which have brought a fresh and interesting view of both familiar and unfamiliar subjects. One of the aspects of James' work I most admire is his range and grasp of his subject matter. (Jim Bennett)
Featured Poet 5 James Bell
Please briefly outline your life and career.
I came into the world in1950 in Edinburgh, Scotland and either through indolence or being too comfortable I mostly stayed there until the late 1980s when I moved to the other end of the country and now live in rural North Devon. Exeter is the nearest city and with its university and cathedral is redolent of what I still call home, though its colours are different and the lines a lot softer. I left school at sixteen and started an apprenticeship in a garage spraying cars and read Hemmingway and Steinbeck in my lunch break. Thus commenced a series of jobs taken either for convenience or money or both while I pursued a career as an actor. The main thrust of this was working as a mime artist. The original publicity photographs now decorate the kitchen walls. After marriage to my now long wed wife I began to think more long-term and in 1976 went to Stirling University as a mature student and took a BA in English Studies which encompassed all sorts of interesting things. I then entered the job trail again at a higher level and went into sales and marketing (I still wear the scars) in different roles. After becoming tired of being a well paid, company car, expense account cloned yes man I went back to education and did a post graduate diploma to allow me to work as a Careers Adviser. This brought me to Devon where the plan is to stay a little longer.
How/when did you start writing? Was there anything that particularly influenced you?
Writing has been part of my life since the age of 11-12 years when I began to read voraciously things like Biggles, Just William and John Buchans novels. It led me to write stories of my own in notebooks. Poetry came into the picture in my mid-teens. I still have a folder of juvenilia I occasionally look at and wonder at whom might have written all that angst. Later poems of that period (late sixties) I self published and hawked at poetry readings at the Traverse Theatre during the Edinburgh Festival. I met and was exposed to my first real poets then. The role call goes something like this: Norman MacCaig (who was later one of my tutors at university), Robert Garioch, Edwin Morgan, Alan Bold, Alan Jackson, Pete Morgan, all of whom influenced me in some way. I also went along to mind blowing readings from people like Adrian Mitchell and, of course, the Liverpool Poets - MacGough, Henri and Patten. I think poetry seeped into my consciousness too through the wonderful songs and music being created at that time in the emergence of singer songwriters. Then I touched on some earlier writers like Ginsberg and the other beats.
Do you have any strong influences on your writing now?
Gosh, yes! As I get older I think I go back to Norman Mac Caig more and more for direction. I was recently bowled over by Edwin Morgans New Selected Poems and the sheer variety of forms and styles in which he works. These are both Scottish poets and I think there is a doppelganger that exists in every Scottish writer in whatever medium, Hogg and Stevenson are well quoted prime examples, that allows us to see things in two different ways at once. Its partly to do with language; MacCaig always denied this, where there was always a language of the playground and one of the classroom. The tendency with Scots is not to put boundaries around themselves either and are happy to be citizens of the world rather than confining themselves to a particular bit. Nevertheless, my origins exert a terrible influence. Apart from that I tend to favour oriental poetry, Japanese and Chinese. I also love the acute poetic angles from which Eastern European poets like Holub and Ceslaw Miloslav work. I stopped writing poetry in 1980 and wrote little until about 1997 and wrote novels instead, none of which are published. What brought me back was entering a poem for a competition I had dashed off as I was revving up for a novel and came runner up to the national winner. I then got the bug and bought some anthologies to see what was current and found poets had established reputations in the time I had been away. I read Hughes and Heaney because I recognised the names and was duly moved, especially by The Birthday Letters. I love the Emergency Kit anthology edited by Matthew Sweeney and Jo Shapcott and for a while carried it everywhere. I read a lot of terrific contemporary work now but would find it difficult to pinpoint specific influences.
How do you write? Do you have any particular method for writing time of day?
I write practically anywhere. Not quite the back of a cigarette packet job , as I dont smoke anymore. I always carry a couple of small notebooks with me. Sometimes I will get only an idea and a few words. Once these are down the poem is on its way. Most of my stuff is shortish, the longest being about 120 lines, which can be partly attributed to writing on the hoof. I travel around a lot so this means I might be writing in a car park or by the side of a road. Another favourite time is late at night where theres a good chance of a complete poem being written. If it gets written down in the first instance, its got a chance of being finished. Time scales for completing a poem are irrelevant for me, extreme examples are the handful of poems I wrote in the 1970s and revised and published in the late 90s. Poems tend to come in surges of two or three at a time. Ive even had the experience of writing two poems at the same time that are quite different. I re-draft a lot, changing form and words. I tend to see the form of a poem rather like musical notation and affects how it will sound when read out loud, so I try to work hard at this. Also, as I write quickly in early drafts, I try to draw a tension between preserving the original impulse and something that is carefully worked. It worries me that I could draft something out of existence though feel comforted by how the final poem seems to announce itself eventually.
Why do you write poetry?
I think its always been there and Ive learnt to respond to the impulse that comes from goodness knows where. Im now an incurable addict and cant stop. The great fear is that my next poem will be the last I will ever write. I can write something like a hundred poems a year which averages at around two a week. In reality it is rather like a drunk going on a binge when I just cant stop; then I go on the wagon for a while and look and act like any other normal adult human being with responsibilities. The urge is to create and make sense of life events. Sometimes its like a parallel existence. 1 Corinthians expresses it better than I ever could: "For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face." Theres the doppelganger again.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
Ive been writing poetry again this time round for 4-5 years. One thing that seems to bother people other than poets themselves is how old they are. I feel the established order is on constant look out for the vibrant young poet like a quest for the holy grail. Ive know people as young as 16/17 being feted as the next best thing which is probably more destructive than helpful to the poet, poets of quality that young are the exception rather than the rule. I think it borders on a kind of fetishism. Ive just read a newspaper article that publishers of fiction will no longer look at new writers unless through an agent and especially those who are older. We all have to serve our apprenticeship and I see this as corporate publishing lunacy. The disease is present in contemporary poetry too. As a reader of poetry who performs his stuff I find it does not do poetry any favours when it is not read well. A friend has suggested that any old rubbish would sound good if it was done well. I wouldnt go that far. There are lots of people writing utter tripe who are products of workshops and a hobbyist mentality that would do better in the advanced origami class. May there always be those with enough second sight to know the difference between the Emperors new clothes and the real thing. I feel privileged to have met the real thing in the flesh and emerging poets through the likes of Poetry Kit to feel that genuine poetry has a certain glow thats like finding gold. Its a wonderful feeling when you see it and recognse it.
The Poems
I wanted to include this poem, as it was the first poem I published for about twenty years in 1998. Patricia Oxley at Acumen gets acknowledgement and thanks for taking the work of a total unknown.
IMAGINATION
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This second poem lies to rest a lot of feelings I had about my relationship with my father. Its a kind of reconciliation I did not have time to make with him before he died. Acknowledgement is due to Jeremy Hilton for publishing this poem in Fire 13 this year.
WHO HE ONCE WAS
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A lot of my poems are influenced by visual imagery. There is a sample of that in this poem, which reflects my admiration of children as artists. I feel that all true artists must have great resilience because social conditioning has not beaten their original freshness out of them. This poem was originally published in Links 7.
THE PYTHON ON THE GRASS
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This next poem is a sample of my fascination with Japan. The castle at Himeji was a location for the James Bond film "You Only Live Twice" but this fact has nothing to do with the poem whatsoever.
HIMEJI CASTLE
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The next poem is significant because it is reflective of going about my daily business. Its about an ancient stone cross I used to pass often on the A30 going into Cornwall. The county is literally peppered by these old monuments to early Celtic and Cornish peoples. The poem was published by Poetry Scotland this year.
STANDING STONE
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The last poem here is a little longer than the others. Its a kind of dream poem that reflects my ambivalent attitude towards the state of being Scottish. I will be returning to Scotland this year for the first time in eight years and did the journey in my mind first. Jock Tamson is what you could call the Scottish everyman.
DRIVING THROUGH SCOTLAND AT NEW YEAR
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