:: Bruce Rimell - Poet Bio ::

Bruce Rimell is an internationally-exhibited visual artist, poet, independent researcher and occasional ambient musician, based in Leeds-Bradford in the UK. His work focuses upon the interplay between visionary experiences, mythology as a vehicle for self-transformation, archaeology, ethnography and the humanist confluences of cognition, neurodiversities and the Queer.

He is principally a narrative poet: psychogeographic travelogues, creative mythologies and long-ranging inner journeys feature strongly, and he often fuses dreams, visions and half-remembered mythical images to evoke surreal sensations of prehistoric human feelings buried deep within the modern mind.

His early work sometimes had the feel of archaic liturgy in its repetitive terseness, however currently he is experimenting with frenetically composed free verse forms and storytelling styles in order to authentically reproduce the fractured and hyperactive stream-of-consciousness mental movements that characterise his experience of living with ADHD.

His poetry sits a long way from the mainstreams of the literary zeitgeist! His influences reflect this distance: from Taliesin to Keith Bosley, world mythology from the Graeco-Roman to Mayan (both ancient and modern), as well as poets such as Qwo-Li Driskill, Dorothy Porter and the colourful prose of Derek Jarman all run as currents into his unconventional styles. The rhythms of modern performance poets Kae Tempest, John Cooper-Clarke and Benjamin Zephaniah are also rising influences in the cadence of his work.

Previously published volumes have included: ‘The Fernal Songs’, a body of queer, psychedelic and mythical song cycles; ‘Ta Sba Balamil Ta Ch’ulel: On The Face Of The Earth And In The Soul’, a dreamlike illustrated travelogue of his 2014 journey to Chiapas, Mexico; and ‘Reveries, Dreams, Refractions’, a retrospective of miscellaneous poems from 1994 to 2021.