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James Arthur Biography

James Andrew Arthur (born 2 March 1988) is a British singer and songwriter who won the ninth series of The X Factor in 2012. His debut single, "Impossible", was released by Syco Music after the final and debuted at number one on the UK Singles Chart in its first week of release. Since then, it has gone on to sell over 1.4 million copies in the UK, making it the most successful winner's single in the show's history and has sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide. The follow-up single "You're Nobody 'til Somebody Loves You" reached number 2 on the UK Singles Chart. He released his self-titled debut studio album in November 2013. The album debuted and peaked at number two on the UK Albums Chart.

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James Arthur Quotes

I think that being mindful of your own biases tends to lead you into ambiguity, not clarity, and that following those ambiguities is the only way to approach the universal.

Ambiguity, Clarity, Following, Lead, Mindful, Thinking

I want to reiterate that my understanding of the poem is not the poem's core, true meaning. Once a poem goes out into the world, the poet is just one more reader.

Meaning, Poet, True, Understanding, World

It's true, there aren't many explicit references to Canada in my book. And not many explicit references to the U. S. , either. I try to fill my poems with enough real, observed detail that the poems create a believable world - but I don't write poems for the sake of telling my own story. My life is not important or interesting enough to warrant that kind of documentary. Instead I try to use my experience as a way of understanding situations that are common to many people. I want readers to project their own lives onto my poems.

Book, Common, Poems, Project, Real, Writing

And treating poetry as a performing art emphasizes its ephemerality. A printed poem can be endlessly reprinted, photocopied, scanned, uploaded, cut and pasted - but a performance, even if somebody's there with a video camera, is one time only: the audience experiences something that won't exist when the performance is over, and which won't ever be reproduced in exactly the same form. I find that appealing.

Art, Cameras, Cutting, Exactly, Treating

Maybe because I can't even put together an IKEA desk, I've never been tempted to think of my own poems as built objects - but I do sometimes imagine them as mathematical constructs.

Ikea, Imagine, Objects, Think, Thinking, Together

I don't think I did write any poems to fill narrative gaps. Not consciously, anyway. As much as possible, I try to discover my poems' subject matter through the act of writing, instead of deciding ahead of time what my poems will be about.

Deciding, Possible, Thinking, Trying, Write, Writing

My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn't be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number.

Beautiful, Believe, Dad, Math, Raised, Terrain

I believe strongly in what John Keats called negative capability: the trait or practice that allows a poet to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. For Keats, William Shakespeare exemplified negative capability, and I do think it's extraordinary that for all the thousands of pages Shakespeare left behind, we really don't know much about Shakespeare's own personality or opinions.

Believe, John, Mysteries, Pages, Personality, Thinking

Whenever I visit my family in Canada, I remind myself that what many Americans would consider forthright, many Canadians would consider overbearing.

Americans, Canadians, Forthright, My Family, Visit, Whenever

I want each poem to be ambiguous enough that its meaning can shift, depending on the reader's own frame of reference, and depending on the reader's mood. That's why negative capability matters; if the poet stops short of fully controlling each poem's meaning, the reader can make the poem his or her own.

Fully, Meaning, Mood, Negative, Poet

I do like Canadian poetry. Christian Bök, Anne Carson, Carmine Starnino, and Don McKay are a few of the Canadian poets whose work has been important to me. But I'm not sure that I do see poetry as a world apart. Some of my metaphors are based in the fantastic, but I try to be true to life as I understand it. That understanding is affected by my Canadianness, my Americanness, my whiteness, my gender, my age, my education, my experience. . . everything about me affects my view of reality. But I try to wrestle against those partialities, not embrace them.

Carson, Christian, Reality, True Life, Understanding, World

As a species, we create tools to control our environment. What excites my imagination is wilderness: our materials' ability to escape our control.

Control, Environment, Excites, Imagination, Species, Tools

When I'm most deeply involved in my writing, sometimes I do dream about poetry, and occasionally I wake up from a dream with a phrase that I like well enough to put it in a poem.

Dream, Like, Poem, Wake, Wake Up, Writing

It is hard to compare cultures without overgeneralizing, but I think a lot of American poetry has an assertiveness - an upbeat quality - that's less typical of Canadian poetry. Of course there are poets in both countries to whom that generalization does not apply. Speaking broadly, I'd describe Canadians as being a bit more reserved than Americans. Not less opinionated - just less direct.

Assertiveness, Countries, Country, Quality, Speaking, Thinking

If art doesn't require an audience, can an intimate conversation be a work of art? Can a thought be a work of art? Maybe. I don't know. These questions are completely hypothetical for me, because I love interacting with audiences. I want my poems to be heard.

Art, Conversation, Intimate Conversation, Love, Questions, Want

Years ago I used to set my alarm for 4 am, so that I could wake up in the middle of a dream and move directly into writing. I guess my favorite poems contain a mixture of intuitive and analytical thought.

Dream, Intuitive, Middle, Moving, Poems, Writing

For me, intuitive thinking means associative thinking; intuition causes us to introduce narrative or figurative elements into a poem before we're able to explain why those elements belong.

Belong, Introduce, Intuition, Mean, Thinking

I try not to think in terms of what poems or poets should do. Most of us appreciate a wide diversity in music, in cooking, in movies, but in our own medium, poetry, we often fail to make allowances for tastes and projects other than our own.

Appreciate, Cooking, Diversity, Poetry, Projects, Thinking

I can't read my poem "Distracted by an Ergonomic Bicycle" without thinking of Seattle, where the events of the poem took place, and I can't read "In Defense of the Semicolon" without thinking of Toronto - but why should that matter to anyone else? If another reader imagines "In Defense of the Semicolon" taking place in New Orleans, great.

Bicycle, Defense, Distracted, Imagine, Thinking

Memorizing the work of others definitely made me a better writer.

Definitely, Made, Memorizing, Work, Writer

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