“The Death Issue” December 2015 1

older. Do you feel it's a channelling, that it's a conversation with something much,
much older?
JB: yeah. It sounds odd to say it, but growing up we had texts. We were quite poor
working class, certainly when I was a younger child the bible was the only book we had
available to hand, maybe a couple of children's classics and things like that, some
almanacs and that kind of stuff. And I read the bible, when I was a kid. My mother was
religious. My father wasn't religious in fact – I guess alcohol and gambling are religions.
But, I read the bible. It was the King James Bible, my mother liked the KJB so we had that.
For the music. For the rhetoric. [there's that dog barking, joining in].
OV: a recurring pest -
JB: well, all dogs are [laughs]. When it came to writing those poems, it was fortunate in a
way because a lot of people in the south, for their audiences, the bible would be the point
of reference. Which was as much to them an alien text imposed upon them by a culture as
it was to the likes of me. But, in that culture it was used to reinvent. 'Go Down Moses', you
know. [sadly, this section of the conversation – where we turn briefly to actor Christian
Bale, was lost – Ed.]
OV: yeah, he's from Pembrokeshire.
JB: well, no white person in the world could know that story, for black people in
American, the story of Exodus. A story of a whole people being held in slavery. So, you
can't write anything, from the bible, that hasn't been written already. In context of blues
songs, there are other things to. I think it was in that book, a poem about a travelling fare
comes to town, which was in the American mid-west and the south, those things were the
accommodation of thrills, rides, maybe travelling musicians, and also musicians. They had
that mixture. And there's supposed to be a movie, where a young girl goes out for the day
and disappears, and the mother doesn't know where she is and at the same time mixed
that scenario with the mother, the man and wife.
OV: thinking back to what you said about, in the blues, references to the bible, in your
poems you've got the bible, but there are also other texts present. And there are other
writers, quotations, sometimes embedded in the poem, sometimes as a prologue. How
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