Roger Bell
By Jacob Bachinger
Roger Bell launched his most recent volume of poetry, You Tell Me, in early April 2009. His three previous full-length collections, Real Lives (1997), When the Devil Calls (2000), and The Pissing Women of Lafontaine (2005), as well as You Tell Me, are all published by Black Moss Press of Windsor, Ontario. Bell’s work has been featured in various journals and anthologies, including Going Top Shelf (Heritage House, 2005) and Bonjour Burgundy (Mosaic, 2008). A retired high school English teacher, Bell now writes full time. He lives just outside of Midland, Ontario.
Jacob Bachinger interviewed Roger Bell by email in April 2009.
The poems in You Tell Me share a particular origin. Could you tell me more about that?
The genesis of each and every one of these poems is simply that people are always telling me things, often not at my urging. They spill their guts to me. They must feel I'm a good listener, or a sympathetic ear; they must feel they can trust me, that there are no barriers. That I am a kindred spirit, perhaps. Or that I won't judge them (a mistake, I'm quite judgmental, though I keep trying not to be). Sometimes what I'm told is intensely personal. Often, it is inspirational. I gradually began to realize that I could and should profit from all these stories.
The poem "Where Does It Go?" came from a friend telling me about her grandfather and grandmother, their marriage at a young age, their lives apart and together, and how her grandfather, in old age, moved in with her family. Each Saturday he'd listen to opera live from the Met on the big radio, with his grandkids in his lap. He made an opera lover of her, taught her Italian. But she had, sadly, forgotten that language. That made me think of my grandfather, a dentist, letting me play with mercury, which always disappeared, and all he taught me. All this ends up blended in the poem.
Some of the poems don't include me or my persona; some are solely others' stories; some were told to me in great detail. "The Days of Our Lives" is an example of that. Though I must confess I never actually saw any of the diary entries described in that poem; I fabricated them to suit my ends. Other stories, for example, “The Blow-Job Funeral,” were mere sketches, and I had to fill in most of the fine points.
So, to make a short answer long, I have taken the tales of others and made them my own, temporarily, for gestational purposes, then given them back, not only to the original teller, but to everyone. Art is echoes.
As people tell their stories to you, they're sharing their memories. As a result, in You Tell Me the gaze is often backward, into the past. Is there an element of nostalgia at work? And by nostalgia, I don't mean sentimentality, but longing.
When someone asks me to describe my work, I can say that it usually contains the element of longing. I yearn all the time. As a prelude to my poem "Never Enough" in The Pissing Women of Lafontaine, I quote local visual artist (also friend and inspiration) John Hartman: "I want to get the whole world into every one of my paintings." I think most people want to absorb the whole world, every speck of it, every rose, every turd. Life may sometimes be miserable, but it is also so indescribably wonderful, so beautiful and sad and mystifying. And it's all we have. To paraphrase, I live, therefore I am. I suspect that yearning is magnified in artists. Am I digressing here from your question?
You wonder about nostalgia. Well, the past being just that, we can only re-create it. We are all retro-trendies in some way. We know life is short, and that we will die. That is heightened if you, as I do, have no belief in an afterlife; this is it, baby, and it is fleeting. So of course when a piece of that life is gone into the past, it's gone. As you age (I'm sixty now, oh my!) you have much more past than future. You shouldn't live in the past, that is unhealthy, but why not look back? And why not look back fondly? Why not yearn a bit? To return to the aforementioned poem "Where Does It Go?", two people in the fading years look lovingly back at dead grandparents, and lament that passing of a certain "Golden" age. The woman who was the girl in "The Speed of Being" yearns for the innocent boy she summer-loved, not the thug who tried to rape her. The last poem in the book (and it was placed there deliberately), "Nearly There", comes to the conclusion that the past can't be recaptured and maybe one ought not to attempt to. Is that Roger Bell providing a cautionary tale? Or is it just the way poem developed? I'd say the latter. Nonetheless, it says you can look back softly, but that retrospection ought not to squeeze out the here and now.
Speaking of longing, there are a number of poems on sex and death. In "Blow -Job Funeral" we have sex and death right on top of each other. I know this will sound facetious, but are you worried about something?
Sex and death appear in nearly half of the poems. So it must mean something, right? I ride a motorcycle, so of course death is always on my mind. It's just a slip on sand, a moment of inattention, a runaway gravel truck away. And, as I said, I'm in my seventh decade, so my odds are gradually getting less favourable. But I'm not worried about dying, not preoccupied by it.
I'm male, so I think of sex three thousand times an hour. Will I die having sex? Jeez, I hope so. (I think the deceased guy in "The Blow-Job Funeral" is lucky. His cunnilinguist, not so much.) Or playing hockey, having just scored a goal. Scored, get it? Or at high speed on a winding road pushing my Honda Shadow into the receding sunset. How Freudian is that? Both sex and death are totally losing yourself in something very deep and warm. What's not to like? What’s not to write about?
In the poem "Days of Our Lives," there is the line, "You have to pull things from their regular places to get at it." In context, the line refers to house cleaning, but it also suggests something more. Is that what poetry and story telling are all about, pulling things from their regular places to get at them?
You have gleaned exactly what I wanted you to from that line. And I'm happy about that, as long as it isn't too obvious. I often describe my poetry as finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. In fact, maybe that describes all art. It's easier to accept the surface, but to really get at the truth of things, you must get down on your hands and knees and look underneath. It never fails to amaze me: I clean the house, at least it looks clean, but if I bend down, peek under the dresser or behind the buffet, I see dust bunnies, dimes, slips of paper. As a writer you need to dig down, burrow. Look at all the buried treasure. Pick it up, hold it to the light. Listen not just to the conversation you're involved in, but to the one off to the side; it may contain some nugget you can use. The main fault of beginning writers is thinking that the surfaces of their lives are interesting to others. Nope. Borrrrrring! What people are seeking is that which lies beneath. That's where our vital commonalities lie, and writing is appealing to those commonalities.
Your poetry collections often feature central, unifying topics or themes. In The Pissing Women of Lafontaine, there are "the Pissing Poems," all about micturition. In When The Devil Calls, there is "Crossing the Y'All Line," a suite of poems about travelling through the southern U.S. And in Real Lives, a considerable number of the pieces are hockey poems. How necessary is it for you to have these central, unifying themes - do they help "the muse" along?
It is not absolutely necessary to have these unifying elements. I mean, I write one poem at a time. True, Luke and the Wolf, the chapbook that really launched me, was focused on one tortured soul. However, I wrote the first pissing poem "The Pissing Women of Lafontaine" in complete isolation from the others. I read it in a few places and the reaction was so good that I thought I'd better mine that vein further. My publisher dared / encouraged me to. So if you have a direction, or a hub with poems spoking off, then I suppose it's easier in some ways to write. But even when I'm in the middle of a series of linked poems, unrelated poems pop up, needing writing. In the case of You Tell Me, a couple of the longer poems pre-existed, and I began to think about the concept and elongating it, and away it went. So, yes, in this case, having the concept in mind did help me write, helped me focus.
A book of totally unrelated poems can be wonderful (each poem is its own entity, after all). But since readers are becoming so novel-oriented, I think they like having a unified book. I must admit, I like reading from this book. There is a certain symmetry.
Returning to "the Pissing Poems," humour obviously plays an important role in your poetry. But is humour at odds with poetry?
No, I don't think humour is at all at odds with poetry. The humour in this new book is blacker, perhaps. And there isn't as much of it. The flat-out funniest poem I wrote for this book didn't make the final cut, not because it was funny but because it didn't fit stylistically with the others. It gets big laughs when I read it to audiences, but it did not work as well on the page. I think you have to be very careful with humorous poetry, not let it degenerate into stand-up. I have heard / read very poetic humour, but I have also heard / read comedy masquerading as poetry. It's easy to lose your way, to cross the fine line. I'm overjoyed when I write a really funny and poetic poem. I think are fewer good comic films than dramas because comedy is harder to master. Back to where I started, there is laughter in You Tell Me, but it is mostly rueful.
You Tell Me features a noticeable number of prose poems, which marks a new direction for you. Is this a sign of things to come? Is there more prose on the horizon?
To say that prose poems mark "a new direction" for me isn't quite accurate. Real Lives contains a series of seven prose poems on hockey from an adult perspective. I was very happy with those, and they were finalists for the CBC Literary Awards, so others obviously liked them too. This new book was so narrative that long lines seemed an obvious choice, then wrapped lines evolved. I fooled around with all the poems in You Tell Me, trying to structure them all as prose-poems. It didn't work. Still, almost half the book is prose-poetry. And all the others (with the exception of "Small Talk" which my editors decided they liked better in its original form, though I offered it in a prosey guise) are long-lined. Friend and fellow poet Betsy Struthers suggested long-lining to me. I liked what she had accomplished doing that in her book In Her Fifties. And I'm open to experimentation. Remember? Look underneath and see what you find.
Besides all that, I am working on a memoir, a prose memoir. So I was working already in the prose form; it wasn't such a leap for me. And I have written short stories. As well, a novel is gestating. Yesterday I wrote a very prosey five-sectioned poem. I am beginning to steer away from short-lined poetry, I feel. I'm beginning to like the uninterrupted sound of my own voice.
Jacob Bachinger currently lives in northern Manitoba, where he teaches English with the University College of the North. He has had creative work and reviews published in Existere, the Fiddlehead, the Northern Poetry Review website and the Prairie Journal.
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