“The Death Issue” December 2015 1

ecently about the “benefit” they're doing to the Arctic
JB: oh yeah, yeah, that's right.
OV: as a poet, because you've been interested in landscapes and writing about
landscape, and in talking about green washing, have you ever been approached by
companies asking for that kind of thing, copy to be written?
JB: I've had, I think people expect that I'll sympathies with a certain kind of principle. One
guy that I knew who was a friend of the environment, somebody that I trusted, was
approached with some kind of project which had something to do with looking at,
objectively, interrogating the impact of wind turbines on landscapes aesthetically and I
took a look at this and wrote to him and said you can't look at this separately, in terms of
aesthetics, as if looking at the aesthetics of zyklon B or something, because you can't
separate the aesthetics from the obscene amounts of money paid by landowners, to block
applications on their land, and the people who live with that nearby and its impact on
birds, and the ground which is ruined by the huge plugs of concrete that go into the
ground to support them. And the problem is that we should be investing in something
else, other things. But this guy said, I understand what you're saying but I'm being asked
to look only at aesthetics, and I don't understand that because again you can't isolate, you
can't say once you've published the poem well that's, you can't read in a political way
because you didn't intend that, you also can't say I can only explicitly write about this
aspect about a subject without taking the whole subject into account, you know. So there is
that kind of temptation I suppose, because you will get grants from that, because it's a
process really and the people who'll put the money what at the other end are politicians,
really. I remember someone saying to me so, 'what's your next grant proposal going to be?
Is it going to be Big Society or First World War?'. I just' went, 'excuse me?' If you want to
get a grant, propose that you're writing something about the fist world war because that's
coming up, or with tory politicians the big society idea. You can write poetry and stories
and stuff like that about how wonderful old fashioned hierarchical society is and you get
money. And it's true enough. The commercial one is more round about. If you're a big oil
company, you're going to rather have Bono say something good about you than some poet.
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