Greta Bellamacina: 'Poetry is a sacred space — you can be a child again'

Poet and she knows it: Greta Bellamacina has worked with Naomi Campbell and Florence Welch performed at her wedding
Guy Pewsey21 May 2018

Last month the London Book Fair threw its first Poetry Summit, announcing a 66 per cent sales increase in the past five years. Have we reached a new golden era of poetry? Poet Greta Bellamacina, 28, is not surprised the public is returning to verse.

“Everything feels so chaotic right now,” she says, although it feels anything but: we are sitting in the quiet sanctuary of the Kensal Rise art studio that belongs to her artist husband, Robert Montgomery. “On the internet, on the news, every single day we look at our phone and there’s another horror, another dark cloud over the world, and for some reason poetry seems to be the quiet, sacred space where you can be a child again.”

Bellamacina, perched on a wooden chair and striking in a slightly swamping leopard print coat, may not immediately come across as a natural to steer a revolution in modern poetry, but she is a strong candidate. She grew up in Hampstead, reading Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot and Anne Sexton, writing plays before cajoling her siblings to perform them. She toyed with modelling, and dabbles in acting, but her heart is firmly set on poetry: she and Montgomery set up New River Press and work to lend exposure to a wide spectrum of poets.

“It’s so hard to make a living in poetry. Even if you have your book published by a huge publisher you still don’t get that much from it,” she explains. “It can be three years of work for what ends up as £500, which is insane.” The Press gives 50 per cent of profits back to the poets themselves, some of whom were established names who had fallen by the wayside. “Their stuff was too political and the other publishing houses wanted it to be censored,” she says. “And poetry should never be censored.”

When not fighting for others in her field, though, she finds her own ways to put her work out there. When we meet she is fresh off the plane from Cannes, where her poems provided the backdrop to Naomi Campbell’s Fashion for Relief fashion show. “Cannes is such a scary thing”, she says, eyes wide. “It was great to see the poems in that space. But it’s like a circus, it’s mania! There’s so much hysteria there.”

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Next, she will pursue a new method of taking her work to a new space: she is on the roster for Moët Summer House, a pop-up destination in Mayfair that unites dancers, cooks, poets and podcasters for a three-day culture clash. Bellamacina is raring to go. “It’s really nice to bring poetry into unexpected scenarios and places,” she says. “This feels like one of those old-fashioned literary salons where everyone gets slightly drunk, listens to some poetry and then, maybe, people can pluck up the courage to rattle of their own favourite poem. Maybe there’ll be a bit of heckling,” she adds. “But it all feels very organic. That’s the appeal for me.”

This commitment to discovering and utilising new, contrasting locations to extend the reach of her work could be a lucrative way forward: her next collection, Selected Poems 2015-2017, and a feminist anthology, Smear, will launch soon with Urban Outfitters, with Bellamacina focusing on the hidden potential of teenage high street shoppers. “Maybe they write poetry and don’t know if there’s a space for it,” she says, “but then they see a model for it, somewhere, in this unexpected space.”

​Bellamacina and Montgomery married in 2017 in what sounds an achingly cool ceremony at Eggbeer Farm in Exeter. The bride held a single black rose, wore a dress with a train adorned with one of her poems, and Florence Welch performed Leonard Cohen songs at the reception. The pair had already had their son, Lorca, named after poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, and there are several works about motherhood in her opus, but having Lorca has changed her work in ways more profound than content.

“I’m such an emotional person,” she says. “Becoming a mother, you feel like you felt every emotion. Then suddenly you have a whole new field of feeling that you just didn’t know you could feel. So in that sense it’s really inspiring, it can be a real surge.”

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Despite this shift, her commitment to social justice remains a constant, and she is particularly passionate on issues of housing and keeping public libraries open. “We live across the road from the BT Tower,” she says. “It’s a very small attic, it’s a cocoon really, and across the street there’s a family who sleep under the tower every night — a full family, the mum, the dad, the children. The homelessness in the area is horrible.” Her film about libraries, The Safe House: A Decline, came out in 2016.

Next, she will make a feature film on a young woman struggling to publish her book — “it’s the British Frances Ha,” she says, with a chuckle, as if to belittle herself for comparing her work to her namesake, that film’s Oscar-nominated director, Greta Gerwig. Judging by her track record, though, she may have the last laugh.

Greta Bellamacina will perform at Moët Summer House (moetsummerhouse.com), which runs June 8-10. The location will be announced on Thursday

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