Hello and welcome! I am Colin Bell, a novelist and poet, previously a TV producer-director of arts programmes, also known as the blogger Wolfie Wolfgang. My novel Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love was published in 2013, my next novel Blue Notes, Still Frames will be published in October 2016 - check them out on Amazon. I hope you find something here among my daily blogs. I write about anything that interests me - I hope it interests you too. Let me know.
I'm thrilled this week to be told that I've been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize by American publisher Musepie Press who have been publishing my poetry in two of their journals, Shot Glass Journal and The Fib Review since 2009.
The nominated poem, Visitation, is published with three of my other new Fibonacci poems in the new issue of The Fib Review which has now published 57 of my Fibs, short poems written to a syllable count according to the Hindu-Arabic numerical system introduced to the West by the Medieval mathematician Leonardo Bonacci (c.1170 - c.1250), known as Fibonacci.
Fibonacci's statue in Pisa.
The Fibonacci Sequence finds a pattern in numbers - one that is repeated in nature but which can also be an exacting but satisfying master for short form poetry. It has been my personal passion for some years now discovering how varied the possibilities are in writing within such a tight set of criteria.
My Pushcart nominated poem, Visitation can be found by following this link:
So thank you Musepie Press, on behalf of all Fibonacci poets, for nominating my poem.
Here is some information about the Pushcart Prize:
'The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America.
Since 1976, hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in our annual collections. Each year most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series. Every volume contains an index of past selections, plus lists of outstanding presses with addresses.
The Pushcart Prize has been a labor of love and independent spirits since its founding. It is one of the last surviving literary co-ops from the 60's and 70's. Our legacy is assured by donations to our Fellowships endowment.'
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:
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.
I got my copy of a new anthology today, The Four Seasons published by Kind of a Hurricane Press in Florida, USA. I'm happy that they wanted to publish my short poem, Gardening Tips, in this collection of season-themed poetry. The poem's main theme is the impulse to plant daffodil bulbs in the cold days of Autumn so it was a pleasant coincidence that the book arrived around the same time that I took delivery of next spring's daffodil and tulip bulbs for my small Lewes town garden.
I have put the box in my garden shed where it will sit until mid-November when I shall plant them in the cold earth. Why do I do this every Autumn? There's a clue in the photograph below.
If you want to buy a copy of the paperback, here are some links to Amazon:
I own a number of pens, ball point, felt-tip and fountain, and they all have their function in my life. Also, a lot of my time is spent at the computer and I'm perfectly happy typing away all day. There is, however, a special relationship in my working life and that is the bond between me and my pencil. There is something especially intimate and natural about writing poetry with a pencil and I have a number of little note books which I keep with me and where I do exactly that. Over the last few years I've written over seventy Fibonacci poems, many of them published in the specialist Fibonacci poetry journal, The Fib Review, http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/ and most of them begin life in this rain-spattered book. It's interesting sometimes to look back and see how these little syllable-count poems began.
I have a number of pencils but the one in the photograph has been companion for some time now and, silly though it might sound, I've grown attached to it. I feel that we know each other very well and I respect the way it puts up with my terrible hand-writing and the often intense pressure I put on it when I write. It is also tolerant about being chewed during those thoughtful moments when, in olden times, I might well have simply lit a cigarette. So this little pencil and I are friends.
I have my rather superior pencil sharpener too - it's a souvenir from the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice and, over time, it has sharpened but also whittled down my pencil many times a day until now I'm brought to a sad moment of parting.
My old friend is now getting so small that I fear it's reaching the end of its working life. Just how much smaller can I make it before it ceases to function as a writing implement? What do you think? Is it time to chuck it? Should I retire it to the back of my stationery drawer or just throw it into the bin? I have plenty more pencils so I should stop being sentimental perhaps.
Recently I was given a posh Edwardian propelling pencil as a birthday present. It's made of silver and is elegantly ornamented so it's the type of pencil that should be used on special occasions like noting down a telephone number, scribbling an aide-memoire, making a light-handed and desultory doodle or, best of all, it's perfect when I'm in the mood to write a gentle and thoughtful poem conceived in tranquillity. If I'm in my usual writing gusto though, the leads just break on first contact with the paper.
No, my little pencil does that job best but I know that I am going to have to make a decision. Which of these lovely new pencils, another present, should I choose next? It's an important moment because whichever it is, it might be with me for a long time and through many writing adventures - both good and bad. Farewell little pencil.
I've been looking at some of my answers published on-line yesterday, pleased to remember those foothill years as a novelist when I was planning my first novel, Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love.
Sometimes, I'm amazed that I ever got it together and that it finally made it into print. Amazed and thrilled.
My fellow Ward Wood novelist, the Irish writer, Shauna Gilligan came up with some great questions when she asked me to do an interview with her for her blog, A Girl's Writing Is Never Done. We did a question and answer session on my novel, Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love and it was a useful exercise for me to go back into my memory to find some of the reasons and motivations for my writing about Stephen and his progress through the late 1960s in his hometown of Brighton, Sussex. Shauna's impressively sharp line of questioning drew out of me thoughts I didn't know I'd had or that I'd forgotten. So thanks Shauna - much appreciated, especially the stuff about James Joyce and one of my favourite books, The Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man.
Shauna Gilligan
I hope, some time, that she will let me pose her a series of questions about her terrific novel, Happiness Comes From Nowhere.
If you'd like to read our interview, here's the link to Shauna's blog:
The lively online writers' community, Virtual Writers, has asked me to do a questions and answers session about my novel Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love (published by Ward Wood Publishing). It was enjoyable thinking back over the time when I wrote it just when I'm finishing my new novel, Blue Notes, Still Frames (soon to be published by Ward Wood Publishing), and working on the third one, Over The Hills Is A Long Way Off. All three novels are based in Brighton, UK, but in different decades - 1967, 1994 and 2017. Sometimes, it's difficult to remember what year I'm living in.
I'm grateful to Virtual Writers for encouraging me to go back to my first published novel and to remember or try to remember the impulses that led me to write it. If you'd like to find out what I said, here's the link:
My prose poem, On Gloucester Road, has had an interesting life so far. I wrote it after being contacted with the Moscow-based American publisher, Marco North who was compiling an anthology and asked me if I would write him a prose poem.
Marco North
I told him I didn't really know what a prose poem is but he was very kind about my writing here on these blogs and insisted that I should try my hand at one. Well, thanks to the charismatic and highly persuasive Marco North, the poem was born and published in a splendid collection called In The Night Count The Stars Night published by Bittersweet Editions http://www.bittersweeteditions.com/
Recently, I was approached by another persuasive American, the Californian composer and film-maker, Tim Risher, who said he'd like to make a short animated film of the poem for which he intended to write the music too. So my poem has born again, this time as a movie made with the computer graphics as supplied by the vibrant artistic community from the virtual computer world, Second Life, where I do weekly poetry events under the name of Wolfgang Glinka. Tim Risher has a presence there too as Joseph Nussbaum. Here's a link to his other music: http://www.wehrs-music-house.com/?page_id=613
Tim Risher (aka Joseph Nussbaum)
This is my third collaboration with Tim and i'm really pleased, yet again, with the results. You can see the others on the right hand column of this page. The film is out on YouTube today. Here it is - hope you enjoy your dinner at Sloppie Joe's.
My three new Fibonacci poems about the Russian composer Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893) were published yesterday in that pioneering and Fibonacci-dedicated online journal, The Fib Review. I hope you'll take a moment to follow the link and read them and the other poems there. My poems were written as I came to the end of Tchaikovsky's life in my seventeen year chronological journey through the history of classical music from the year 1100 until my planned ending date 1897 (Brahms' death) - this project has been often discussed in these blogs. I have now moved on to 1894 - only three years to go - and with the closing of 1893 came the end of Tchaikovsky after I have listened to almost all of his works in time order. I used to sneer at Tchaikovsky when I was a teenager, thinking him a tunesmith but little more. I've changed my mind and now, while still recognising that his worst works are extremely dull, his greatest pieces are truly original and very great indeed. I'm listing some of the very best here and they stand up as powerful works of genius. So, if for nothing else and if you still don't believe me, listen (or listen again) to the 6th symphony (Pathetique), the ballet score for The Sleeping Beauty, the opera Eugene Onegin and, for all its organisational flaws, the always brashly brilliant, First Piano Concerto. I shall return to them often. It was a tough project to try and say anything worthwhile about the man in the challenging miniature form of Fibonacci poetry.
Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck (1831 - 1894)
I've also written a Fibonacci poem about Tchaikovsky's patroness, the enigmatic Baroness Nadezhda von Meck (1831 - 1894) who supported Tchaikovsky for years after hearing an early performance of the First Piano Concerto in a concert only weeks after the death of her husband. It was a passionate relationship conducted by letter because the Baroness insisted that they should never meet.
Pierre Moskaleff
The third Fibonacci poem deals with the dedication of one of the composer's last piano pieces, the melancholy Berceuse, Op. 72 No. 2 written in the last year of Tchaikovsky's life. This lullaby is dedicated to a man called Pierre Moskaleff from Odessa. No one has managed to trace this man so all we have is his name, the town he came from and this lovely piece. We can only guess at the nature of their relationship but the piece has a feverish passion which certainly supplies a few clues.
So, please take a look at my three Tchaikovsky poems and enjoy The Fib Review. This is its 21st issue and my sixteenth consecutive appearance in it. Thanks are due, yet again, to its editor, the always energetic Mary-Jane Grandinetti.
If you'd like to hear that piano piece, Tchaikovsky's Berceuse Op. 72 No. 2, here it is played by the young Russian pianist Konstantin Shamray:
And, go on, I know you want to hear at least the opening of the First Piano Concerto and here it is performed by the legendary American pianist Van Cliburn in Moscow, 1962. He was accompanied by Kirill Kondrashin:
I've had a mini-run on poetry publication over the weekend. I've just received a copy of a new poetry anthology, Tic Toc, published by the American company Kind Of Hurricane Press and including my poem Over Time. All the poems are, in different ways, "time tunnels" and I'm proud to be included. It was a good weekend because I also heard that I have a new Fibonacci poem, The Kiss, in #18 of the specialist Fibonacci poetry journal, The Fib Review published by another American publisher, Musepie Press. I'm especially proud of being there because it continues my relationship with this pioneering venture, the World's premier Fibonacci publisher. I have had my Fib poems included in every issue since #5 so this is my lucky thirteenth appearance. It's great when I'm so involved in my novel writing that poetry keeps encouraging me to keep the poems coming too. Here's the link:
I spent a week in the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, recently. It was my first time in this interesting country, the only Western European state that I hadn't visited before. I wasn't really there on holiday, enjoyable though it was, I was doing a week-long poetry workshop with the British poet, Ruth O' Callaghan in the small post-industrial town of Barreiro, on the other side of the vast River Tagus.
Barreiro may not have Lisbon's architectural splendours but it was pure Portugal - far from the tourist crowds - and a good place to immerse oneself in poetry.
We were a group of four working with Ruth O' Callaghan and it was truly absorbing - especially when we studied and responded to the work of the great 20th Century Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.
Fernando Pessoa (1888 - 1935)
We spent half a day at the Fernando Pessoa House, in the centre of Lisbon where we could access books and visual material on the poet.
This was after we given given an introduction to Pessoa by Pessoa expert, the exuberant and erudite Ricardo de Morais.
Ricardo de Morais
Back at our base in Barreiro, we proceeded to write a series of Pessoa related poems of our own having to produced first drafts within a strictly observed time limit - 40 minutes was a long time for some projects but sometimes the clock was set for 20 minutes. It was always surprizing how much we could get done within these constraints. I think everyone there went away with a bundle of poems which we can carry on polishing back in the UK.
There was time to socialise too when the writing was over for the day. There were opportunities to go off on our own into Lisbon or just to hang around outside our apartment in Barreiro's pleasant town square. Fellow poet, Chris and I failed to look very Portuguese, I suspect, but our new friend, Ben could almost have been taken for a Barriero native. Especially after that 10 Euro note 'miraculously' appeared inside his fruity croissant's paper bag.
We had time to talk about the poetry too and to discuss how it was going - here Chris and I are discussing something deeply poetic (perhaps) over coffee and tea with Annie, the fourth poet in our group, accompanied by one of Portugal's wonderful custard tarts.
Over the River Tagus in Lisbon itself, there was time enough for relaxation and to enjoy some excellent Portuguese wine.
I also had the very best King prawns that I have ever tasted - it was served in a typically unpretentious restaurant that felt no need to glamourise what was already world-class cuisine.
I used my weekend off wisely, I think, taking in some of Lisbon's cultural history. This archaeological site was a rediscovered street with Roman and Medieval Islamic urban remains.
I spent Sunday at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (see my previous blog) enjoying the magnificent collection assembled by the Anglo-American oil magnate, Calouste Gulbenkian (1869 - 1955) who settled in Portugal and bequeathed his art collection to the Portuguese state where it is now housed in a splendid modernist museum.
I also spent time in Lisbon's impressive Gothic Cathedral, mostly free from all those sinister images of bleeding crucifixions and saintly martyrdoms that tend to dominate dark Iberian peninsular churches. I particularly loved the atmospheric cloisters - fortunately undamaged by Lisbon's catastrophic 18th Century earthquake and subsequent tsunami.
Medieval Lisbon monks don't seem to have locked themselves away from the world as the cloisters here have elegant windows looking over the city and beyond. I like the idea of a church with a view.
My mornings, in Portugal on this trip always began with an opportunity to go into the little park in front of our living quarters for an hour of martial arts practice. Here under the trees, I could watch the rising sun and put my mind in order for the day ahead.
The citizens of Barriero, on their way to work, remained unphased by my activities and I stopped being embarrassed by such things a long time ago.
My White Crane Kungfu style puts great emphasis on earthing your body and, wherever on my travels I do these patterns, no matter how imperfectly, I feel that the small plot of ground beneath my feet becomes a part of myself and I like to think I take a bit of all these places away with me. It is of course a form of meditation.
There was also time for another kind of poetry while I was in Lisbon and some of us were able to sneak away to a restaurant in the enjoyably bohemian Alfama district, the traditional birthplace of the famous Portuguese music called Fado. Here's a taste - I was enthralled by the virtuosity and artistry of the musicians performing this seductive mixture of art song, folk music and, as some people claim, the blues.
