For whom Josh Bell tolls
As a boy, poet Josh Bell says he was “quiet, timid, nervous … the same as I am now.” So it’s a tad surprising that Bell, the new Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English, has been inspired by bad boy and Mötley Crüe vocalist Vince Neil for the past few years, turning the onetime god of late ’80s hair metal — eponymously bedecked in studded leather and a rotating assortment of women and bandanas — into a poetic vehicle to explore, well, Josh Bell. “All the poems I write are autobiographical,” he admits, “but I can’t get interested in a poem if I start talking about anything actually happening in my life verbatim. So I always have to create a distance in order to be able to write at all. It’s easier for me to get interested in myself if I see it from the outside somehow.” The Vince Neil poems make up Bell’s as-yet-untitled...