You grew up in Hampstead, was that Hampstead Heath?

Yes, that’s right I went to primary school on one side of Hampstead Heath and then the secondary school on the other side. So my whole childhood has basically been based around Hampstead Heath. It's such a mystical spot. It's right in the center of London, but you are surrounded by trees and if you climb to the top of the hill you can see the city. It’s sort of old and Dickensian, a kind of Turner painting.

That must have been a great inspiration for your work.

There is something about being in a city, but feeling slightly removed from it at the same time. Seeing the lights of the city from the park but not being in them. Hearing the noises outside your window but feeling young and unaware. There is a nice juxtaposition to being in a city. There’s a longing to it.

That’s very romantic. Was that when you fell in love with Shelley and Keats?

Keat’s has always been part of my childhood. Keats' House is very close to where I went to secondary school. Next door to Keats' house there's a little library where I would go and study and they'd have Keats poetry written on the walls and through the window you could see the tree where he wrote his poem “Ode to a Nightingale”. Keat has always sort of been there in the background, like a guiding light. I've always been interested in how profound he was at such a young age, writing about nature and the renewal of nature and the redemption within it. That sort of theme threads though the poets I love. This idea of redemption in nature and sunlight and dawn and the morning, I think Keats and Shelley were doing that at the beginning.

You were very much inspired by the Beat Generation poets in America as well, right?

I'm particularly inspired by Ginsberg as a poet. His book 'Howl' is probably one of my favorite poetry collections. There's a poem at the beginning as a footnote called 'Holy'. It says "holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, holy. The world is holy, the soul is holy, the skin is holy, the nose is holy. The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy, everything holy, everybody holy Everywhere is holy. Every day is an eternity. Every man is an angel."

When I read that poem, there was something about the honesty and the utter celebration of being here. And in my latest collection, “Tomorrow's Woman”, I started off with a homage to that poem called ‘Church’. I think the Beats were just an amazing tribe of writers at that time who were writing about the world they were living in and they became sort of pop stars of their time. I was quite fascinated by that community of writers. I always longed for that growing up.

I was good friends with one of the poets, Michael Horovitz, who sadly just died. He and I performed many times, and he organized the big holy commune in London at the Royal Albert Hall, where he brought Beat poets over like Ginsberg. And they did a mass poetry reading. For me, when I edit my work and write it is sort of performing and hearing the word spoken and listening to it through the eyes of an audience. A lot of those poems were the most incredible performances. You just hear the audience's responses, it's so immediate and honest.

Sometimes the ideas come to you when you perform?

Well, no. Most of the time I start with the idea of a poem and then I'll have an ongoing PDF that is forever evolving. It’s almost like a painting. You have the idea of what you want to say, but then you have to give it enough light and dark shade and brokenness for it to have any meaning. And then performing is sort of another way to hear them come alive. Because I think you don't just write poetry for the page, a lot of the time you're writing it to be spoken and to be read from a book, it’s that eternal voice. There's an editing process in writing it. But then saying it aloud as well is another part of that.

You wrote 'Points for Time in the Sky’ with your husband Robert Montgomery, how was that?

Writing with Robert was a very immediate thing. I had never written with another poet before. It’s strange because in most art forms like music, you write together, you collaborate. But for some reason, poetry has always felt like a solitary act. Whereas in France, they have a kind of a big tradition of surrealist poets writing together, like André Breton and Rene Ricard, those sort of poets were doing that already. Whereas when we started writing together, I would write something down, and then he'd be like, “Oh my God, I know the next line”. And it was this push and pull process. And whilst we were doing it, it really felt like you were getting closer to a subject because you weren't hindered by your own voice, because sometimes you can be so aware of what you're trying to say. So what I found at the end of doing it together, when we read them back we didn't remember who wrote what. It felt like there was this ghost voice, this third voice that came out of it. And these poems had their own language. It was just a really interesting experience, because writing is so attached to ego and self. And I think as soon as you step away and someone can say, “no, no, no, get rid of that, do this”, you can move forward in the thought in a meditative way. There’s also something quite nice about a male and female voice merging together and creating this balance of words.

You are searching for that balance.

I think it's one of those things where especially with poetry… life is hard. And I think that’s why I was drawn to poetry because poetry has a complicated language and life is complicated and we need a complicated language for it. We need to have a language which is hard and complex. You can be very profound with poetry in just a few words. I was always drawn to the harshness of poetry because I realized that poetry seems to be the language of life, but also death. And I think about my good friend who most recently passed away the Irish poet Niall McDevitt. At his funeral, everybody was reading from his latest collection. Poetry has an eternal voice. It's sort of like the voice beyond the grave, it’s able to tell you things over and over again and give you completely different meanings. There's a lot of disguises within poetry. There's a lot of shadows. It was like she was there in the room.

There's a lot of mystery as well. Depends how you feel and what you see. And that's the beauty.

With cinema as well, I think it's a similar thing. There’s a lot of poetry within cinema. Those moments where there's no language and it's all in the brain. It’s all in a thought process. You're not necessarily saying the literal feeling. You're showing it through the eyes or through a hand gesture. It's that other language that explains everything but doesn't give it all away because ultimately we are always disguising ourselves in many different ways.

In 'Hurt by Paradise', you said that poetry can't be taught, it’s not science.

When you find true love, it’s very unique to you. I think some things are just mystical. It’s not black and white. So there has to be this feeling of being able to break away from normality. With poetry, what we're doing over and over it is about finding the magic within the mundane. You're finding different ways of explaining the same thing over and over, trying to reinvent the language that you were taught. So you're basically having to forget it all and start again.

***dress*** *Patou* ***boots*** *La DoubleJ*

You collaborated with Pierpaolo Piccioli for Valentino, how was that?

He saw my poetry and just wrote to me and said that he would love to collaborate. There's something magical about collaboration in a way, and again, it's that thing about when we did ‘Points for Time in the Sky', it's about allowing another voice to come in and it can be unexpected sometimes, but it’s pushing out and giving space, and that’s the beauty of a collaboration. Pierpaolo is incredible. His clothes are pieces of art. There's so much thought into each individual garment, they are like poems. He's creating things that have their own time. He's not creating things for now or the future. It just feels like he's created his own world.

We couldn't not talk about Harry Potter. You were 13, was that the first time you were in a movie?

Yes, I went to drama school, a theater school every Saturday, and they did auditions there. Looking back, it was like a big commitment many early mornings, at 4:00 am, traveling to the film studios and eating fry ups every morning and loads of waiting around. But I just had so much fun because it was the first time I felt like I was with other creative people and making something. I felt like myself for the first time. And there were so many iconic actors who were pulled together for it. It just felt like an honor to watch them perform.

And the set must have been like a dream.

The set was this old airport. So they would say, “Right, Greta, we're going to Car Park five to do this scene. Then we're going to Terminal three to shoot this scene”, which is quite surreal in a way. It was such a special experience, I made so many friends. It almost felt like going to school, because every morning you'd wake up and then you'd put on your uniform and your cloak and then you'd go to school for 3 hours, because if you're under 16, you legally had to.

What projects are you working on right now?

I am about to go to Rome for the premiere of ‘Commedia’ directed by the great avant-garde Italian director Riccardo Vannuccini. We shot it on the outskirts of Rome, not a romantic Rome. I play the lead ‘Irene’ a mental patient who dreams of being in a movie and she persuades another mental patient in the hospital to make this film with her, ‘Rocco’ played by Vannuccini. At times we see her almost like a child and at other moments bordering on insane. It is Riccardo’s first English speaking film; I recently won the Stanley Kubrick prize for Best Actress for it which I am very proud of.

Also the British indie movie 'Tell That to the Winter Sea’, will be going to film festivals. The film is directed by Emmy-Award winning director Jacyln Bethany, It’s about two friends who meet at school and they become each other's first love, and they share a love of dance. The film has an entirely female cast. I play ‘Jo’ alongside Amber Anderson who plays ‘Scarlet’. It’s sort of a bittersweet love story, one of them becomes a big dancer, and the other one stays in their hometown. They reunite at a hen party weekend as Jo is getting married and we see the story of their friendship unfold.

Greta Bellamacina for French Fries #6

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