Greta Bellamacina on Poetry, Time, and Motherhood

To celebrate the upcoming Mother's Day, we spend time with Greta Bellamacina, poet, actress, filmmaker, and mother of three. Moving between poetry, film, and family life, Greta reflects on creativity, time, and the quiet cycles of nature that inspired her latest poetry collection, Who Will Make the Fire.

Q:  You grew up in a large, deeply artistic family, and are now raising three children of your own. How has your childhood shaped the creative atmosphere you’re building at home today?

A:  I am one of five siblings, we were always making up shows and making little films, I loved having this creative community around me all the time. I never felt lonely because we always had each other. I love that sense of belonging. I try to make sure my children have this same sense of creative community by bringing them along and involving them when I travel for projects- we’ve just got back from a photoshoot in Palermo and shooting an indie movie in Wales, and the children were with us the whole time. We are like a little travelling circus, I want them to feel like acting, painting, making music are very normal things to do. 

Q:  You write so beautifully about the emotional landscape of motherhood. Has becoming a mother changed the way you observe the world, or the way poetry arrives to you?

A:  Yes, the way I experience the world is a lot less linear. Children are great portals to the past- they grow up so fast and they carry pictures and memories that seem to reconnect you back to lost time, as well as throw you into the present moment without mercy. Children are like time machines. I like this broken timeline, it allows for new space to exist. It’s what I hope I can translate into my poetry, the way time isn’t linear, how the present contains the whole past…  

Q:  Your latest poetry collection, Who Will Make the Fire, feels both intimate and elemental. What inspired this body of work, and what were you exploring as you wrote it?

A:  I was thinking about cycles- the life of a flower, a heart beat, a pregnancy. There is an apple tree in front of our kitchen window, I was thinking about all of its changes. The tree in winter, bare, its great old arms tangled in darkness. Then the spring and its little white flowers that blossom with the flowers that make an apple, the flowers inside an apple, to the apples in autumn that seem to have an urgent plea to them, a harvest plea. I love these cycles, I sometime forget them, so I started to write them down, and Who Will Make the Fire came from that. It’s a book about placing the self in nature or reconnecting with nature. 

Q:  Your creative life moves between acting, poetry, filmmaking, and performance. Do these different forms speak to different parts of you, or do they all feel like part of the same conversation?

A:  I think poetry, acting and filmmaking are all about balancing external voice, and internal voice- the duality between what is said and what is thought ‘between the lines’ or held back. Although poetry is solitary and acting is collaborative they are both about tuning and balancing these voices. In poetry I probably let myself go to the depths and say the socially unsayable, the depths of the heart, in acting the lines are more limited and pre-defined and the depths of the heart has to be in the eyes, as it were, in the unspoken.