I first worked with my friend, the Serbian artist Nikola Stanković, in 2018, when I opened a virtual art gallery, Glinka Gallery, in the virtual world of Second Life: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Seaforth/85/198/29

Nikola Stanković’s outstanding paintings formed our first exhibition there, where I was impressed by the variety of techniques he uses, from drawing to classical oil painting, to achieve inspirational, passionate and ecstatic work on spiritual, erotic, wild life and primeval themes.

Glinka Gallery has now held four shows of his work and the latest one, Animal Instinct, currently running, includes his picture, Fight, above, an enigmatic portrayal of two stags in deadly but seemingly nervous conflict. When we were hanging the pictures at the gallery, there was a space next to this work and Nikola asked me if I had a suitable poem to put there – one that reflected some of the themes of his show. I thought about this for a moment or two but had to say no, I had written nothing that could do that job and then, after another moment or two, I said I would try to write him a poem to hang there. The result was a new Fibonacci poem, a Fib, entitled Rutting which I dedicated to him and subsequently submitted to the excellent online poetry journal The Fib Review, https://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/ a specialist in Fibonacci poetry and a great supporter of my syllable-based work in this form.

I was particularly happy to write a poem for Nikola and I saw it as a kind of reciprocal act as a few years ago, he painted a picture for me called Remembering Blue, the title of my poetry collection and a quote from the opening poem there, my Haiku. https://www.bookdepository.com/Remembering-Blue-Colin-Bell/9781908742704

Unsurprisingly, Nikola came up with a picture that was totally unexpected, but which penetrated behind some of the things I was trying to say in my collection. It was a kind of artistic tit for tat. I hope we will work like this more often.

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A few years ago I started to record myself reading some of my poems but also poetry by greater people than me. I moved away from this idea when I ran into computer problems and then forgot about these little videos until I revived my account at Youtube a few weeks ago.

This video is of my Haiku, written and performed long before I made it the introductory poem in my newly published poetry collection Remembering Blue (Ward Wood Publishing).

I plan to do more poetry videos and this, I hope, will be my tentative toe in the water before I dive in and immerse myself.

Another recording from that time is Malcolm Arnold’s poem Dover Beach – always a favourite of mine and one that has always brought a tear to my eyes. Listening to my recording again, I think it isn’t half as bad as I thought it was. You can be the judges:

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This week sees the publication of my debut poetry collection, Remembering Blue by Ward Wood Publishing. The poems were written over a period of ten years (2008 – 2018) and, even though I am also lucky enough to have two novels published (Also by Ward Wood), with two more on the way, there is something very special about having a book of my poems in print.

My first instinct when it came out was to hide, but I’m over that now that it is time to tell people about it, and to say how thrilling it is to hold such a stylishly-produced book in my hands. Thanks are especially due to Ward Wood and its inspirational publisher Adele Ward, who was the first to suggest that I try my hand at writing poetry.

I must also thank the book’s cover designer, Kayla Bell. I think it’s simply beautiful. If you see a resemblance to the cover for my second novel, Blue Notes, Still Frames, that’s because Kayla designed that cover too. Many thanks!

When the publishers’ asked me to write some suggestions for the back cover blurb, I felt stumped, and wondered if I even knew what these poems were ‘about’ – I’m probably the last one to know but I scribbled this and it will do, I guess.

‘These poems were written during ten years recovering from a life-threatening brain haemorrhage. Poetry writing itself began for me then. The severity of the injury released hidden and repressed feelings, it began a process of rewiring my brain, focusing my mind on what life really meant, or should mean, for me.  I was warned that I would probably cry more easily than before. That was both true and beneficial. The poems began before I left hospital. They document, often tangentially, that period, from awakening from a six-hour coma with a mysteriously fractured spine, through several years of rehabilitation, remembering and decoding – the good things as well as the bad: childhood and adolescence revisited, adult relationships reassessed, and most importantly, what is important now that I am fully recovered. Awakening from that death-like coma was a rebirth. When things were difficult, it helped to remember blue.

The title comes from the opening poem:

Haiku

This blank page is grey

I shall write rain and cloud here

but remember blue.

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I have three new Fibonacci poems published today in the Fib Review, the specialist poetry journal for this intriguing style based on the Fibonacci number sequence.

I’ve been writing them now for over ten years and The Fib Review has now published 89 of them. I’m amazed and delighted to have had this long relationship with this pioneering publication. http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

My thanks, once again, to Mary-Jane Grandinetti, the editor of The Fib Review who has been guiding me on this interesting journey through a sea of numbers.

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I’ve been working with the multi-talented American composer, Tim Risher for a few years now. It’s been both stimulating but also, great fun. Most recently, we worked together on a new song cycle for tenor and piano (Fibonacci Poems) and before that we’ve also worked on short animated films which combined my poems with music and pictures.

Now Tim has brought out an music album of some of his work for music and voice and I’m honoured to have a place on there where he has sampled my voice as part of the composition. Three of my poems are given the Risher treatment but there are other interesting tracks too where he plays with the possibilities of mixing the spoken word with music.

You can buy the album here:

https://paragate.bandcamp.com/album/music-of-the-spheres

You can watch the film of one of my poems, Haiku, here.   The album has a remix of this and of our other collaborations. I never thought I’d release an album, so many thanks to Tim for making me sound almost like the real thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_0TzHGBK3k&t=8s

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It has been an interesting month for my Fibonacci poetry – first, I’ve had three new poems published in the Fib Review, see yesterday’s post, and now I have seen the splendid animated film that Joseph Nussbaum has made of one of these poems, Alcyon and Ceyx.  Joseph has made a number of films around my poetry in the past and I’m really happy that he has done this new one. It has been entered for an award in Australia and I hope it does well.  This is not only an interesting way of making movies but it’s a great way to get poetry out there to people who may not make a habit of reading poetry. whether you like poetry or not,  I hope you will like Joseph’s film about the young couple, from the Roman poet Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, whose love in anticipation of Wagner, survives beyond death.

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My thanks are due to the multi-talented Joseph Nussbaum for his film, so carefully made, of my poem Silent House. It was a great experience sharing brains with such a perceptive director. It’s great when that solitary poet life can be shared like this.  I loved Tim Risher’s music too. Here are a couple of stills and, below, a copy of the film. Hope you like it…I shall be keeping it, with the other films of my work, in the video column on the right of this page

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I’m often under scrutiny in my small Lewes urban garden but I’m getting used to it. I live next door to a one-eyed Siamese cat and, without actually being on speaking terms, we have a pleasant enough relationship which I have now recorded in one of my new Fibonacci poems published today in Issue 22 of  The Fib Review.

Sometimes it’s good to have a solid but silent relationship with someone who likes my garden as much as I do.

If you want to read my new poem along with the other three poems in The Fib Review, here’s a link:

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

Don’t just read it for my work though – there’s a lot in this excellent journal and i’m proud to be included there again for the eighteenth consecutive time.

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I’m proud to be included in this unusual new anthology published today, In The Night Count The Stars (Bittersweet Editions  http://www.bittersweeteditions.com/ ). It’s the first time my work has appeared in a custom-made e-book and I’m feeling very cutting-edge seeing my name on the cover. The editor, an extraordinarily energetic New Yorker now living in Moscow, describes the project as ‘an uncommon anthology’ and everything about it including my involvement has definitely been uncommon.

Now I’m very happy that I said yes to Marco’s persuasions. If you want to get an idea of the quality of this project, take a look at this, one of the video promos for the book:

“The stories and images thrive independently, each defining “in the night count the stars” in their own way. In addition to well-crafted short stories and a stunning photo essay of rural Russia, there is a portentous restaurant receipt; a love letter; a mantra; a redacted document; a judicial order; a crime scene photograph. Many of the contributors hail from surprising origins – a court clerk, an oral surgeon, an expat, an assisted living worker and an Italian forest worker alongside well-established authors and artists, all juxtaposed with a celebration of their rough edges. Their differences deliver rare insights, often a revelation.”

So it’s now out there – if you want to get a copy it’s available via the following links:

Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/In-Night-Count-Stars-anthology-ebook/dp/B00ISRLJ6Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394443820&sr=8-1&keywords=In+the+night+count+the+stars

iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/in-the-night-count-the-stars/id825457423?mt=11

Barnes & Noble:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/in-the-night-count-the-stars-marco-north/1118866780?ean=2940149535514

While I’m on here selling books, my novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

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I live in the small country town of Lewes, Sussex, in south east England – it’s an inspiring to place to have your home. Not only is it a lovely town with a rich history and well preserved architecture, it is also bordered by the wonderful Sussex Downs – we are in England’s newest national park.

If that isn’t enough to make anyone want to live here, it is also a town full of artists many of whom are also my friends. Two of them, Dawn and David Stacey (Dave to me), have just opened their latest exhibition, Shared Encounters,  round the corner from my house at Lewes’ excellent Hop Gallery. It runs until 13th March.

Dawn is a painter and Dave is a photographer and they have collaborated on a show that explores the many moods of the reclaimed Railway Land on the edge of town that is now a twenty acre nature reserve, ten minutes walk from my house. It is an inspiring place to visit but then so is this exhibition.

I have one of Dawn’s paintings on my living room wall and I’m lucky to be able to look at it every day. It depicts, in Dawn’s very distinctive style, a red dawn in November on the Railway Land Nature Reserve. Dawn’s work is an intriguing mixture of landscape and intense close-up which mixes realism and reductionism with near abstraction. It’s a style that reveals something new no matter how many times you return to look.

When she had a significant birthday last November, I thought I’d mark it with a poem, Red November, and, fortunately, both Dawn and Dave liked it sufficiently to get it framed and they asked if they could include it in the exhibition. I was proud to be part of their show but also thrilled to see poetry up there on the wall in a frame like any other work of art. I’d like to do more of this.

It’s fascinating to see Dawn’s railway land work alongside her husband Dave’s photography of the same location. Dave’s natural melancholy is not often on display when you talk to him but it is often the mood of his work. This cow is not just chewing the cud – things are seldom what they seem in Dave’s work. It was this quality, also found in Dawn’s paintings, that inspired the tone of my poem. I was very happy to be invited to the gallery on Saturday afternoon to read Red November surrounded by Dawn and Dave’s work.  If you can, do go along and take a look before the show ends on 14th March.

My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

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