Billy
Ramsell was born in Cork in 1977 and educated at the North Monastery
and UCC. He holds the Chair of Ireland Bursary for 2013 and has been
shortlisted for several other prizes. He edits the Irish section of the
Poetry International website and recently judged the Shine Strong award
for best first collection by an Irish poet. He has been invited to read
his work at many festivals and literary events around the world.
Complicated Pleasures, his first collection, was published by the Dedalus Press in 2007 and a second,
The Architect’s Dream of Winter, is forthcoming. He lives in Cork where he co-runs an educational publishing company.
Hello Billy and thanks for agreeing to be interviewed.
How did you first get into poetry?
It
began for me in Barcelona in September of the year 2000. I’d just moved
there, to the village-like suburb of Gracia, and I was renting a room
from what had to be Spain’s most boring woman. Montse. I’ve never
managed to meet an interesting woman with that name. I was still making
good my arrival in the city. I spoke only the tiniest amount of Spanish
and precisely two words of Catalan. I knew no one of course, though
that changed after a few months when I managed to land a job in one of
the world’s worst language schools. In such isolated circumstances you
tend to turn inwards. Or at least that’s what happened to me. I watched
poetry -and the composition of poetry, the self-pleasuring interiority
the craft – become increasingly important to my mental health.
Those were the circumstances in which I wrote my first published poem, which was entitled ‘An Otter’. It came out in
The Shop
the following September, during the week of the 9/11 attacks. I was
back in Ireland then, working in a call centre. Bertie Ahern gave
everybody the Friday off; a national day of mourning entirely
appropriate to the atrocity we’d all remotely witnessed.
I woke
that morning in a friend’s apartment on Barrack Street. She had the
strangest accommodation; sort of a disused auctioneer’s office with flat
colourless mushrooms sprouting in the corners. I’ll always remember
coming to in her living room that Friday. I’d been drinking fairly
heavily the night before and I awoke to a peculiar sense of
disembodiment, mingled with the conviction that I was in my own bed
somewhere else.
I walked into Waterstone’s that morning and came upon a copy of
The Shop with my poem in it. I was thrilled. I had no idea I’d been accepted. I walked around the block before purchasing a copy,
I'd
dabbled in a number of different areas before poetry. I'd been in a
band. I'd written several acts of what was surely the worst play in the
history of Irish letters. It was about a once-successful but
long-broken-up band reuniting to play at their drummer's funeral. I'd
written a few poems.
One thing I knew for certain is that I was no
scholar: At college I was willing to read almost any book in the
library on almost any subject; architecture, marketing, chemistry. You
name it. However, once a given title was prescribed or placed on any
kind of official reading list, I found myself almost physically unable
to take it off the shelf. It was a kind of allergy. I overcame it in the
end and managed to do a reasonable amount of course-related study. But
it was always minimal and always a struggle.
That's one of the
great things about poetry. It rewards wide, broad and deep reading,
especially into topics normally considered non-poetic; information
technology for instance, or population studies. But you don't have to
pursue knowledge in any structured way. You can follow your nose, hunt
and gather. You're building a silo of facts and fantasies, of theories
and information, which can be used to fuel and nourish your creative
work. The richer such a storehouse becomes, the less the poet has to
draw from the accidents of his or her biography.
I suppose it'd
fair to say an interest in poetry was always native to my operating
system. By 'poetry' here I suppose mean the micro level interaction of
linguistic elements: the crunch of certain consonant clusters, the
interplay of fricatives, what might be described as the pentameter's
inevitable cadence and so on.
I guess some brains ship with
software for recognizing and responding to such things, just as others
are optimised for plot or character psychology or for manipulating
musical intervals. It was only while living in Barcelona, however, that I
seriously applied myself to the craft of actually making poems. And
it's a ridiculously finicky, fiddly and miniaturist business: like
making superbly-detailed ships in empty bottles.
Love this. Spain’s most boring woman...
What
do you mean by: I awoke to a peculiar sense of disembodiment, mingled
with the conviction that I was in my own bed somewhere else.
There
had been and would be other memorable awakenings, more or less
traumatic or tragicomic. But that’s one that sticks out. It was, I
guess, a combination of the chemicals in my system and the
quicksand-armchair in which I’d nodded off. Or maybe the room was filled
with fungal spores from the mushrooms in the corner. I don’t know. But
for whatever reason I seemed to float at some length and with unusual
potency right at the meniscus between sleep and waking. For a few
seconds I felt almost capable of shaping the waking world the way you
can sometimes manipulate dreams; that I might will myself to wake up
anywhere: Limerick, the Taj Mahal, Las Vegas. Of course half my
half-asleep self knew that this was all nonsense. But that didn’t
matter. It was an incredible moment. Impossible to convey, really. I’ll
never forget it.
Did The Shop not tell you you’d been
selected? Actually, that’s happened to me a couple of times. Not with
the Shop though. It’s all the sweeter, I think
It was
indeed a sweet one. I’d been living in Spain when I submitted and I
suppose by the time their acceptance reached my Spanish address I’d
moved back to Ireland. As late as 2001, the bulk of such correspondence
took place via the old snail-mail. It’s kind of hard to believe now.
Someone
asked me this recently and I thought it was interesting, “If you could
see a dead poet reading, which 3 would you pick?” Obviously they would
be alive....
Well let me go right back to basics and choose
Amergin,
the bard who accompanied the initial Celtic invasion of Ireland. They
say his verses soothed the very ocean. That’s a performance worth
checking out, eh? The original slam champion.
My second choice is
James Clarence Mangan, just because he’s probably Irish poetry’s greatest enigma, and I’d wrap it up with the wheezy aspirations of
Seán Ó Riordáin. Can I be greedy and ask
Beckett
to be MC for the night? I think they’d all get along. It’d be some
evening. Well, I think Beckett and Ó Riordáin would get along.
We'll let you have Beckett. Can you tell me a bit about Poetry International? How did you get involved?
Poetry
International Web is an online project based in Rotterdam, an offshoot
or adjunct of the long-running eponymous festival. The project was
founded in 2002 and has gradually attracted contributing editors from
around the world: from Denmark, the United Kingdom, Iran, India and so
forth. Ireland joined the club in 2005. We’re excited because it now
looks like France are finally coming on board too; that’s a major poetry
vacuum plugged.
Each contributing country is awarded a number of
'slots' per year during which they forward material to the central
editorial staff in the Netherlands to be processed and uploaded to the
site. At the moment Ireland has three such slots: one in January, one in
June and one in November. Or thereabouts.
I have funding to fill those slots with the work of eight poets: six writing in English, generously funded by the
Munster Literature Centre,
and two writing in Irish, generously funded by Foras na Gaeilge. It's
more or less a condition of the project that everyone involved be paid
for their work. Except me. Like several other national editors, I'm a
volunteer.
The Irish domain is administered by the Munster Literature Centre and until January 2012 was edited by its director
Patrick Cotter. Then I took over. I’ve tried to impose my stamp on it but the constraints of space and funding make it frustrating.
Y’see
it’s’ all about balance. In both the English and Irish categories I
can't just add my favourite poets or indeed the poets with the greatest
critical reputations. It's got to be fairly evenly measured between old
and young, famous and not so famous, straight and gay, emigrant and
immigrant, conservative and experimental, Dublin-based or otherwise. And
so on. My goal is to be representative rather than canonical.
Who have you chosen for Poetry International already and are you allowed to say who is coming up?
It’s been a good mix so far I think:
Dave Lordan, Máire Mhac an tSaoí, Mary O’Donoghue, Harry Clifton, Simon Ó Faoláin, Trevor Joyce, Bríd Ni Mhorain, and
Paul Perry. I’d like to think it reflects at least some of the Irish scene’s diversity.
In July we had
Alan Gillis and
Eileen Sheehan. After that who knows?
What do you enjoy doing outside of poetry? Do you find it crosses over?
I’m
a sports fan and you’d be surprised how often that seems to make its
way into my writing. I’m also a small bit of history bore but strangely
enough historical characters and situations never seem to feature in my
stuff. In about 2008 I rediscovered music in a big way, especially trad
and electronic/modern classical/ambient stuff. I’d be happy if that
particular interest came through in the work, an attraction to noises,
patterns, acoustic images and so on.
I run as far and as
frequently as I can and in recent years that’s become a big part of my
approach to writing. Of course the endorphins and adrenaline provide a
creative boost. But it’s amazing what drifts across the mental heads up
display when you start to motor, when you start to push it in that
rhythmic way: stray words and phrases, idea-germs, ways out of
compositional problems. I highly recommend it.
Lastly, what have you got coming up yourself?
Well
I just judged the Strong / Shine Award for best first collection by an
Irish poet, which was an enjoyable but challenging experience; it's hard
to trust your refereeing instincts when you're sole arbiter, there's no
linesmen, umpires or replay-technology to act as sounding board for
your decision-making process. And in this instance there were some
agonising decisions to be made. I must admit though that in the end I'm
delighted with the winner:
Michelle O'Sullivan is a special poet, one who has applied herself to the art-form with unusual seriousness and zeal.
Now that's out of the way I'm focused on seeing my next book,
The Architect's Dream of Winter, through the final stages of production. It'll hopefully be coming out with
Dedalus Press in the next couple of months.
There's
a few other bits and pieces too: putting together the next upload for
Poetry International, completing a couple of modesty overdue reviews,
helping as best I can to organise
The Winter Warmer, a weekend of poetry in Cork this November that's being produced by
O Bheal. And there's another big project waiting the wings that I'm excited about but can't really discuss yet...
I've got a few outings coming up as well. I was delighted to be reading at the
Bandon Arts Festival alongside
Matthew Sweeney in September. I'll also be appearing at the Model Gallery in Sligo as part of
Kate Ellis's Resound collective,
which is an ongoing collaboration involving music, art and spoken word
and is an incredible project to be involved in. Then I'm off to the
Poetry Africa festival in Durban. After that it'll be time to sit down, shut up and try to write a few poems.
Thanks a million, Billy and good luck with all of that.
Here are some links to Billy's poetry in
wordlegs
and on his
website
and in
southword
