An Interview with Annie Bell for The Poet

By David Hollywood

Back in 2021, I was interviewed by internationally renowned poet and writer David Hollywood for a feature in 'The Poet'. The website has since been closed, so I am reposting the interview here.

An Interview with Annie Bell for The Poet

By David Hollywood

Thank you for taking the time out to chat to me Annie. Who are your major poetic influences, and why?

My poetic taste tends to veer towards the past. I love the work of the romantic poets but I’ve been most influenced by the works of William Shakespeare and Wilfred Owen. I have visited the birthplaces of both of them, as well as a great many of the places where Owen lived, during his lifetime. When reading Owen’s biography by Jon Stallworthy, I read that Owen had spent time standing outside the house of his long-dead hero John Keats, in Teignmouth, gazing at the place where his poetic hero had spent time writing and he then wrote a poem inspired by that moment. The poem was named: ‘Sonnet, written at Teignmouth, on a Pilgrimage to Keats’s House’. It made me smile to read this, because I felt there was a symmetry, given that I had stood outside Owen’s house in Shrewsbury, doing exactly the same thing and have written more than one poem directly inspired by Owen, his life and his work.

I relate to Owen especially, both from the point of view of his poetry and also his life experiences. Like me, Owen spent time working as a teacher and he, too, struggled to find the space in his head and schedule to write, while also devoting himself to the very demanding role of teaching. On a deeper level, his descriptions of how shell shock affected soldiers during World War I, in his poetry, really resonate with me. As someone that has suffered with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), I have been inspired by Owen’s honesty and the brutality of the truth in his poems. I aim to be as honest as him and I hope this comes across in the poetry I have written on the theme of mental pain.

MENTAL QUICKSAND

You're sinking: glued to one spot, in a vice.

Claggy mud grips like a vacuum device.

Beneath the mud, tonnes of silvery quicksand:

insidious master, gripping your hand.

Layers of granules sliding, sucking, you're bound,

as your legs slowly penetrate into the ground.

Entombing your tired body, sliding, sucking.

Preserving your broken mind, sliding, sucking.

Descending further, your body's submerged.

You're floundering, thrashing, your energy purged.

But hard as you try, you sink further, you shout:

up to your neck, gasping, thrashing about.

Your lungs are constricted, your cheeks are burning.

Your vision is blurred, your stomach churning.

A lifeline's thrown – heck! A noose for your throat,

choking, garotting, when you needed a boat.

Holding your mouth just high enough to breathe,

suspended in a painful, purgatorial sleeve.

A strait-jacket, padded cell, chemical crutch.

But stuck in quicksand, living doesn't mean much.

So there you hang, awaiting the rescuer's call,

hoping, praying for a miracle,

so you don't end it all.

Has your poetry tried to emulate any of them?  

Of course. You can find echoes of both poets in my writings. My earlier poems contain quite a lot of lines inspired by Shakespeare. To be honest, I find it fascinating how many poets will find ways to point to their forebears in their own work. For example, in ‘Mental Cases’ Owen describes, of shell-shock victims, how:

’Memory fingers in their hair of murders,

Multitudinous murders they once witnessed’

This is a direct reference to the speech in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, in which Macbeth’s mental state begins to deteriorate. Similarly, as well as making a number of references to poets that have influenced me, in various pieces I have written, I wrote a very cathartic analogous poem, based closely on Wilfred Owen’s ‘Mental Cases’, applying its structure to describe the plight of teachers that are suffering with stress and burnout, from the perspective of the managers that have mismanaged or bullied them. This is a topic that is close to my heart. Sadly, bullying is rife in education and is something that I would like to see stopped. It is sad but true that so many people I know, myself included, who have worked in this field and have suffered at the hands of regimes that continuously assess teachers’ performance in a very subjective manner and find them wanting but fail to provide real support or training to help them improve. These regimes ignore successes and drive their staff to exhaustion with impossible workloads and expectations. Furthermore, since the Covid-19 pandemic, teachers are increasingly facing vilification in the press, especially in the UK, simply for wanting to ensure that their workplaces are safe both for them, the students they work, with and the families of all concerned.

MENTAL TEACHERS

Who are these? Why sit they in their dwellings?

Wherefore sob they, these academic zombies,

Glugging wine from mugs so stained with lipstick,

Scrawling red from pens, like bloodstains crooked.

Word on word of strain – but what rogue creature

Clawed the mask of youth from their young faces?

Ever through their limbs and through their strained wrists,

Panic just shakes them. Surely we have entered

In the knacker's yard, but who these knackered?

These are staff, whose minds bullies have damaged.

Phobia fingers through their veins of untruths;

Innumerable untruths waged against them.

Wading lakes of lies, these victims flounder.

Joy destroyed in souls that had loved teaching.

Always they must see our face and hear us.

Spatter of poison and patter of lying false tongues.

Damage incomparable; cerebral squander,

Bruised too deep for these teachers' redemption.

Therefore still, their blood pens scratch tormented

On page after page, because in their heads,

Night brings fear of Dawn's anxious arrival.

Day fills veins with adrenaline born of lies.

Thus they wear this terrifying, horrifying,

Awful falseness of phobia concealed.

Thus hormones are clawing at their insides,

Picking at the fibre of their being;

Snarling after us, who hurt them, colleague;

Lashing us, who dealt them lies and madness.

You indicated your poetic style has changed? If so, how and why?

I used to be quite keen on writing poems that used rhyming couplet quatrains. More recently, I have moved towards a more free verse style of writing. While I love the rhythm of rhyming couplets, they don’t always give you the best chance to express yourself, as the rhyme and rhythm patterns can restrict your word choices. Free verse gives you much more freedom in that sense, so that’s what I’ve been working with in my most recent poems. This came about, after I submitted a poem I had written about my pilgrimage to Wilfred Owen’s grave, on the centenary of his death, to The Wilfred Owen Association Journal for consideration. The editor - Meg Crane - was kind enough to point out that my preferred style was rather archaic and not really in the spirit of Wilfred Owen’s work, which pushed the boundaries of poetry, particularly in his use of pararhyme. It was Meg’s honest and very constructive feedback that led me to rewrite that poem completely, using free verse.   The new version of that poem had so much more impact than the original and I realised that I needed to break away from rhyming couplets and experiment more. It’s really broadened my horizons and I’ll always be grateful to Meg for her input in that regard.

What type of poet do you believe you are?

I don’t think of myself as being a ‘type’ of poet. I have written poetry that is extremely bleak but I also love to write humorous poetry. In between, there are poems that are romantic, archaic, poems that tell stories and poems that are distinctly political. Much of my poetry originates from my emotional state and I hope that my work expresses those emotions in such a way that readers can relate to them, as I would like to think that my poetry might give people a way to vocalise what can often feel impossible to express. So to address the question, I write what is in my heart or on my mind.

Do you think poetry groups are a good thing, and are you a member of any?  

I am a member of The Red House Poets in Lismore, Co. Waterford, Ireland, which is uniquely a poetry group. I am also a member of WriteNight in Colchester, Essex, UK and Youghal Creative Writing Group, in Youghal, Co. Cork, Ireland, both of which are more general writing groups. I think writing groups are extremely important. Writing can be a very lonely pursuit. Often, it’s just you, a pen and a blank page. If inspiration is in short supply or you’re feeling a little demotivated, I find that the company of other writers can be very useful. Sometimes, by reading other people’s work, you gain a sense of how to improve your writing, or of what you are doing well. If you’re a group that really trusts one another, then feedback on each other’s writing can be incredibly helpful and instructive. The setting of prompts or writing exercises is also a great way of pushing your writing in new, exciting and sometimes surprising directions. I love the sense of shared purpose that comes from participating in writing groups. I find that being around other writers has improved my writing enormously. I have written a lot more, and diversified the content of what I write, as a result of being a part of them.

What about workshops? Have you attended any workshops, or delivered any workshops on poetic creativity?  

At WriteNight, we often worked through writing exercises or had workshops at our monthly meetings. I remember one especially, in which Mark Brayley - a poet and novelist from the United Kingdom, who is a fellow Essex University graduate, guided us to explore our emotions through objects, enabling us to express how we were feeling in a more universal way. On that occasion, I wrote a poem about my grandad, through memories connected with bread tags and Marmite toast. I really liked the way it made the material more relatable for the audience, while still providing a release for the emotions that needed to be expressed. And last year I attended a creative writing workshop with Professor Dr Robyn Rowland. She is a dual Irish/Australian writer, who has also lived in Turkey. The workshop was part of the Immrama Travel Writing Festival in Lismore, County Waterford, Ireland. It was a hugely interesting workshop, focusing on using the concept of landscape and archaeology to enhance one’s descriptions. It resulted in a poem about my sister who suffers terribly with Endometriosis.

For how long have you been writing poetry?  

I would say that I have been writing poetry off and on for over 30 years, but at various points in my life I have had bouts of prolific poetry writing and other periods where I have written very little.

When did poetry become important to you?  

Honestly, I don’t remember a time in my life where there was no poetry. It’s always been there, whether it be simple rhyming stories read to me as a small child or Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes when I was a bit older. Encouraged by my excellent primary school teacher - Gary Stimson - I learned to recite ‘Ode To Autumn’ by John Keats, aged 10 and to this day it pops into my head when I notice the leaves turning orange and brown in October. Later on, when I was 16, my secondary school had a resident poet - Martin Newell - who inspired me to write poetry to express who I was and what I believed in. At the same age, I first discovered Wilfred Owen. Poetry is just something that has always been there in my life and it has always been important.

Do you suffer from writer’s block? If so, how does it affect you, and how do you overcome it?

Oh yes. I think writer’s block is something most writers will encounter at some point. For me, it usually arises from a situation in which my brain is so full of the detritus of everyday life that I have no room left for the ideas to flow. I find it terribly frustrating. In non-Covid times, I always pictured my poetic muse as a contrary character, who withholds inspiration from me, then releases it in a torrent. I described this in my poem ‘The Muse’, which was published in The Kleksograph in 2020. The current Covid-19 pandemic has caused the worst writer’s block I’ve ever experienced and I have been finding it very difficult to access my creative side. In general though, I find such things as writing prompts and actually sitting in silence with other writers, with a prompt, knowing that you have to read something out at the end of the exercise can be a great way to generate new ideas and break the writer’s block.

THE MUSE

She is beautiful.

She fills me with inspiration: a passionate tryst.

Her phoenix-like heart is of pure amethyst.

Yearning, I need her; she beats only for me

But it's just not that simple for her to possess me.

Beneath her desirous and beautiful face,

there beats an ice heart in a prison of lace.

Paper and ink, pen in hand, ink on paper.

Paper and ink, pen in hand, ink on paper.

The blank page stares at me, demanding I fill it.

Her diamond hard laugh says even if I will it,

she won't let me walk through the woods of her mind.

She is vicious and to my torment, she is blind.

She is cold as ice and conceals all her wealth,

hiding her heart with ingenious stealth.

Paper and ink, pen in hand, ink on paper.

Paper and ink, pen in hand, ink on paper.

An empty marriage: without her intervention,

the pen stands poised but no thought breaks the tension.

Increasingly purple, she taunts me with silence,

mockingly smiling in cruel, passive violence.

I wait and I wait but she just takes her time,

withholding her honey of metaphor rhyme.

Paper and ink, pen in hand, ink on paper.

Paper and ink, pen in hand, ink on paper.

She is a cruel temptress, yet when the mood takes her,

she switches to seductress from evil heart breaker.

When she warms up, deciding she wants to be heard,

I must simply obey and write down every word.

She speaks and I become a cerebral fast-breaker;

absorbing ideas, I'm the poetry maker.

My pen is her sword and my paper her mirror.

Her steel eyes shine golden with warmth from within her.

Her ink vomit spews out all over the page.

For a moment, I'm freed from my ice crystal cage.

Unfrozen, the ideas flow out like a river.

I sort out the pieces, sliver by sliver,

and then, when the ideas have flowed to their peak,

she just turns away and refuses to speak.

'Til next, she decides she has something to say,

I'm left with no choice but to sit and obey.

Paper and ink, pen in hand, ink on paper.

Paper and ink, pen in hand, ink on paper.

How does poetry affect your life?  

Poetry affects my life in a number of ways; I find it to be a wonderful outlet for emotions. Like many poets, I find it much easier to write about darker topics than about more joyful ones. I suppose the catharsis of writing a dark poem helps to purge the negative thoughts from your soul, whereas happier thoughts are much more pleasurable to hold onto. In that sense, I admire writers that are able to express the bleaker side of life with fiery optimism that explodes the misery. I love reading and listening to their work and I really aspire to be more like them, despite how much I am tempted to embrace the darkness. That said, I really enjoy writing humorous poetry, which I find lends itself well to performance. I have written a number of gruesome poems for children, which I hope echo the work of my childhood hero - Roald Dahl. As a child, I always hoped to be a writer like him, who could make people laugh with truly grisly stories and poems. In addition to this, I have a selection of more humorous poems for adults, which go down very well at spoken word events and pub sessions alike.

Of course, music comes into this. Some of my favourite songs have lyrics that are pure poetry. ‘Planet Caravan’ by Black Sabbath and ‘Everything Goes Dark’ by The Hoosiers are two songs that stand out in my mind for the imagery they contain and the extent to which they inspire me when I am sitting down to write.

The work of Wilfred Owen has affected me deeply. On a superficial level, his poetry has given me a deeper understanding of the situations World War I soldiers endured, but on a personal level, I found not just his poetry but his letters and the many biographies written about him to be enormously interesting. I feel a profound connection both to him and to his work, which has helped me get through some extremely difficult times in my life. My love for his poetry and the connection I feel with him led me to attend the commemorations for the centenary of his death. This later inspired me to write my poem ‘Ever Wilfred x’, which was published in The Wilfred Owen Association Journal in 2020.

EVER WILFRED x

On making a pilgrimage, with the Wilfred Owen Association, to the Sambre-Oise canal: the site of Wilfred Owen's demise, on the centenary of his death: 4th November 2018.

I traced your steps in the dark,

early that frosty morning.

One hundred years had passed

since, blissful, unaware of the

horrors that lay ahead,

you lived your final awakening.

I crossed the sea to be there,

drawn by your words:

by your story.

The Forester's House, now painted white,

lit up, contrasting with the pre-dawn sky.

There, you dreamt your last dream,

holding a letter to your heart.

Your fate was sealed,

as final grains of sand

flowed through your hourglass,

to their final resting place.

I stood by that house

and I waited.

A fiddler played your elegy:

a melody echoing into my heart,

each mournful note

drifting,

haunting.

I walked the path that you had marched,

passing through the woods,

slipping through mud and frost.

I traced your footsteps in the darkness,

hoping to feel you, in the air.

I listened hard but you weren't there.

I cleared the woods, and reached the town.

Early dawn skies glowed blue and pink.

Silhouetted trees stood guard

over moonlit houses.

I reached the canal,

where you breathed your last.

Serenity reigned, where mechanical Death

had wreaked such misery.

It was eerie: a tragic mockery

or

was Nature honouring you, too?

Pastel clouds,

frosty skies,

skeletal trees

reflected in still water.

I pondered how your flame blew out,

before its time.

I imagined the achievements

denied you:

denied us.

I shed a silent tear,

hoping to feel you in the air.

I listened hard but you weren't there.

At last, I stood where you are at rest,

flanked by the graves of your peers

and I, flanked by your followers.

I blinked in the low-slung winter sun.

Footprints in frost-encrusted grass

led only to you.

I hoped to feel you in the air.

I listened hard and sensed you there,

in the corner,

by the hedge,

smiling.

One hundred years on,

you watched your pilgrims walking past

and I felt you

believing.

Do you think poetry is relevant in this current age and do you believe people still read it? 

I don’t think poetry ever stops being relevant. As long as people have emotions and feel the need to express them, poetry will have a place, whether it’s from a lone teenager releasing their frustrations in a notebook that will never see the light of day, or poetry that is written to be shared with the broadest possible audience in a book of poems or performed on a stage.

The explosion of performance poetry in the past twenty years has made poetry more accessible to a broader and younger audience. Social media, with its facility to share engaging video recordings of poetry has enabled poets to bring their poetry to the public in a more natural way, especially to those that might not have thought to pick up a book of poetry. I think there has been a tendency for poetry to come across as a little dry and inaccessible and I think this is more down to societal perceptions of poetry and the way some teachers present it in schools. The time pressure associated with the need for students to pass exams can sometimes lead to delivery of poetry lessons being conducted in a way that is less full of passion and enthusiasm than the material deserves. The popularity of rap music has also brought poetry, in a very different form, to a broader audience again. I am very happy to think that there has been a reduction in some of the perceived elitism that might have put some poets and audiences off in the past.

Is this at a cost to traditional formats, styles, structures, abstract meaning, classical imagery, text book poetry?

That’s hard to say. I wonder if that question was asked, at other points in the past, when some newer examples of what we now call traditional formats were devised. For example, when Owen was experimenting with pararhyme, were concerns raised about the impact of this on more traditional rhyme schemes? Like all things, poetry has changed and developed over time and I’m certain it will continue to do so. I suppose I’d ask the question: does it matter? As long as writers are still using language in creative and expressive ways and as long as audiences are still enjoying or gaining solace from the words they are reading or listening to, poetry will remain not just relevant but essential.

Does poetry have a future in a rational world?  

Is the world rational? The world seems to be growing more irrational in the interesting times we are living through and poetry absolutely has a place in enabling people to express themselves and to identify with the writings of others. Regardless, I think that as long as people have emotions and a need to express them, there will be a place for poetry.

What benefits does it bring, if any?  

Poetry is beneficial on so many levels. It provides humour and entertainment to people. It brings political issues to a wider audience. It enables people to express their emotions where they might otherwise have kept their feelings locked inside. Love of poetry also brings people together, both in the sense of writing it together and sharing it on a stage or at poetry festivals. The Blueway Poetry Festival in Lismore, County Waterford, Ireland is a prime example of a wonderful gathering of poets, poetry lovers, local people and tourists. It is a wonderful event, which is inclusive, friendly and truly embraces what poetry should be to all people: the creative expression of words to the benefit of everyone.

KINTSUGI HUMAN

A small, plastic pot, A paintbrush in hand.

Her broken body, no-one understands.

A dig site, soon to be excavated:

Awaiting, her womb to be evacuated.

She looks at her landscape - her peaks and her troughs.

She curses the way it just hurts when she coughs

or walks

or laughs

or cleans

or sits

or rests

or sleeps

or dreams.

She hardly even goes out any more.

When she does, it all just gets too bloody sore.

So she looks at her landscape and scans the white lines

That mark the passing of treatments gone by.

The patterns of stretched skin, from forming her kin:

Two children: two miracles, created within.

She's broken, for sure, but not done by a mile.

She fights back. She's brave, so she musters a smile.

She lifts up her brush and she fills in each scar

With gold paint to show that she's come so far:

A beautiful, human Kintsugi jar.

NOTE: Kintsugi: a Japanese method for repairing broken ceramics with a special lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum. The philosophy behind this ancient art is the idea that nothing is ever truly broken.

Lastly, Annie, what are your ambitions for your poetry?  

I hope to improve my poetry. I would like to become more confident with free verse but I am also growing more interested in experimenting with strict poetic forms. Some of my friends from The Red House Poets and I, recently challenged ourselves to write a univocalic villanelle each. This was a challenge that I really enjoyed. The process is fascinating. Where I would normally find words and phrases appearing in my mind, which I would then piece into complete poems, the constraint of writing univocalically forced me to write in a very different way. It felt much more like piecing together a puzzle than writing a poem. I found myself listing words that only had my chosen vowel in them. I then needed to select two rhymes that I had sufficient examples of, to fulfil the constraints of the villanelle’s rhyme scheme. After that, I worked to construct two lines that were strong enough to be repeated throughout the poem. Once I had constructed them, inspiration struck and I was able to form a complete poem, which was univocalic, grammatically correct and fulfilled all the criteria for a villanelle. I felt such a sense of achievement when it was completed that I now feel a huge desire to explore constraint-based writing a lot more. It is also proving to be a very useful way to bypass my current writer’s block.

I am also interested in improving the delivery of my poems and my prose pieces, as spoken word pieces, as well as using music and video to enhance the poems. I have been working with video editing software and using stop-motion animation or live filming, in the hopes that this will make my poetry more accessible to a wider audience. Recently, I used a recording of a Zoom meeting, editing it together to provide a visual expression of my poem ‘On-Screen Romance’, which is about the difficulty of sustaining a romantic relationship under Covid-19 restrictions. I also used stop-motion animation with my poem ‘Kintsugi Heart’ to give a visual representation of an extended heartbreak metaphor. The concept was of a heart made of glass being broken and pieced back together using the Japanese art of Kintsugi. This is where a broken item is reconstructed using gold and made stronger and more beautiful in the process. In addition to this, I have already adapted three of my poems into songs and am currently working on an acoustic version of a well-known heavy metal song on the theme of suicide, which will feature my poem ‘Mental Quicksand’ within it. This mixing of media is a new direction for me but an interesting one.

Thank you again for your time talking to me Annie, and I look forward to reading a lot more from you in the future.  

ABOUT ANNIE

Annie Bell is originally from Essex in England and moved to Ireland in 2019. She has a BA (Hons) in Modern Languages and MA in Linguistics from the University of Essex and has worked as an English, French, German and Spanish teacher. She is currently teaching English and German in County Waterford. When she's not teaching, Annie is a poet, novelist and writer of songs and short stories. She writes on a broad selection of subjects, ranging from death and the afterlife to bullying and mental health; fantastical vampires and lots of historical fiction. Annie loves to research local history and to dabble in the dark art of black humour, while addressing serious issues in a sometimes heartbreaking way. Annie has previously had her work published in the 'WriteNight – Colchester' and 'Prose & Cons – Poems Against the Brexit Machine' anthologies. She won the 2019 Wexworlds Creative Writing Competition and has been published in ‘The Dungarvan Leader’, 'A New Ulster Magazine’, ‘The Kleksograph’ and ‘The Wilfred Owen Association Journal’. She has also performed her poetry at a number of live events in the UK and Ireland, including: ‘Colchester Poetry - Sunday Matinee’, ‘Town to Port Festival’, ’Emotional Madness’ and ‘Big Sunday Festival’, in Colchester, Essex, and ‘Blackwater Poetry Festival’ and ‘Modwords’ in County Waterford, Ireland.

All poems © Annie Bell