“The Death Issue” December 2015 1

different from that solitary experience. If I write a poem and somebody says to me what
do you, how do you imagine it being heard, I'd say it was individual. I wouldn't think of
that in a group. Too many things in group form these days. You'd never do it in my day.
You know, or people who want to go on vacation and only go when they've got six friends
to go with.
JB: it's one of the nice things about cities, that cities allow you to be amongst millions of
people but completely alone if you want to be
JB: that's true, isn't it.
OV: and then small places, when I go out to the village where my parents live now, it's
quite stifling and I want to go back to somewhere you can feel a little bit more alone
JB: well there's nothing much worse than living in a society that is essentially hierarchical
in a small group, because the power structure becomes much more visible. The place we
left to come here was repellent, truly repellent, near Fife. Lovely people, in the village, but
they were, their niceness couldn't really flower because they were trapped within a
hierarchical structure so the people who had the power and got themselves into position
making powers that I couldn't understand. Busy-bodies, basically. There was one
particular who was so particularly stupid I couldn't believe it, but seen by the local
community as – well, not only stupid but also self serving. You know, that happens in
cities and towns and we know that, hierarchical, but its less visible and you can ignore
them more. And it's getting more and more. But power is always there. The nakedness of
it in a rural, small, villagey kind of place is constant, you see it all the time.
OV: I wonder if, switching back to this, in my head was a sense of a power but maybe
in a different sense, almost – I wouldn't use the phrase witch doctor -, but a sense of
incantation, magic, the channelling of magic, the transformation of bodies. There's a lot
of raw power that seems quite profound. Does that come from the rural?
JB: this is your Orphic figure, maybe. Or your blues man figure, who isn't given any
power by the hierarchy, isn't part of the social structure at all, really, rejects it,and gets their
own individual power from living in a separate balance with the natural world. I mean
you find that, you know the John Clare poem The Tramp? Well, the tramp is – well, I wrote
21