A recent wave of work attempts to take up the story once more. Luke Roberts’s essay “ Driven Out of the Town ” traces the impact of Allen Ginsberg’s iconic 1965 reading at the Royal Albert Hall and the contemporaneous queer poems of Harwood and Fainlight. The recent anthology 100 Queer Poems (2022) , edited by Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan, does a valuable service in connecting some of the better-known poets mentioned at the start of this essay to younger poets, such as Kae Tempest, Jay Bernard, and Verity Spott , whose work forms part of a thriving scene of underground queer writers fiercely critical of gender and sexual norms. (Also exemplary here is the work of Nat Raha , Sophie Robinson , Timothy Thornton , and Laurel Uziell.) I think one of the odd things is that when a book has demonstrable themes you’re suddenly asked to speak on those subjects, so people ask if I can speak to masculinity, or queer northern identity or whatever it may be. I think partly in those situations there’s a danger that you just begin to paraphrase your own poetry – I once tried to write some essays around those themes that the poetry contains and they never really worked. It’s in the poetry, maybe that’s the only way I know to say it.

Much of the poetry in Sergius Seeks Bacchus is freeform, unrestrained by rhyme and metre as, perhaps, the lives of the queer people of Indonesia should be allowed to be. I don’t feel like I am a role model, or I certainly never wanted to be one, but I guess there are periods of professional success which make you more visible than at other times, and to that end I try to be as generous as I can, with formal and informal mentoring, with blurbs and trying to help share other poets’ work. I’m trying to imitate the generosity I had from so many at the start of my career, and what is the worth of that, if it isn’t something you can pass forward? I think in the past I’ve felt more compelled to speak out on things even though I wasn’t necessarily, beyond a purely personal sense, qualified to contribute to the conversation. Perhaps it’s just getting older, in literary and literal terms, that makes me feel less compelled to do that – I’d rather learn, read, donate, highlight other people who can use their voices in a much more constructive way than I can.Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author. Hyatt had never been to school, so Lindsay taught him to read and write. They had a son, Dylan, the following year. Hyatt’s other lovers included the bisexual author, publisher, and sometime politician Anthony Blond, with whom Lindsay also had a son. Hyatt allegedly went off with James Baldwin, then at the height of his fame, at the UK launch for Giovanni’s Room. In Hyatt’s own words, They added: “It will be interesting to see what poets today capture of this moment and how things shift in 10 or 20 years.” McMillan’s measured reading adds to the cadence and insights we can draw from his work; the wants, the uncertainties, the spaces in-between, many, complex, brave and truthful.

In You Better Be Lightning, you’ll find longer narrative poems that tell specific tales of experiences both personal and universal. I remember first coming across the seminal Staying Alive anthology published by Bloodaxe Books, and carrying it around with me for weeks because the physical object of the anthology offered me a kind of solace and reassurance that still feels miraculous to me. There were poets I knew and loved whose work I relished reading again, and others whose poetry I only discovered because they were in conversation with names I already recognised. Together they edited 100 Queer Poems, which publishes on 2 June 2022. In this correspondence, undertaken over spring 2022, the authors discuss the state of queer poetry in Britain. Writers at York and the department of English and Related Literature are proud to host this special poetry reading and launch event, in honour of 100 Queer Poems - an anthology edited by Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan and published earlier this year by Vintage.I’ve been thinking too about the poets I didn’t read when I was younger, whom didn’t I encounter – I just finished writing a little thing about Harold Norse for a book, and recently someone got me reading Tim Dlugos. There are so many queer names who aren’t passed down to us through the canon. I partly think that often the voices who survive are the ones who have another claim on them, so we don’t know them as a ‘queer poet’, but we know of them as a member of another ‘school’ of poetry – so we might remember Thom Gunn as an early member of the Movement, or as an elegist, or a formalist, but not the radical queer poet of the body, or we might remember Auden as a poet of a particular kind of Englishness, or Wilfred Owen the war poet, Langston Hughes as part of the Harlem Renaissance – the queer voices are there throughout history, but often there’s another layer, or another coat of identity, laid over the top of them. Were there any surprises for you in our process of assembling this anthology? To marry his mother, his father had sold a motorbike he’d been leasing from his employer. He hopes to use the royalties from his books to marry you. Ocean Vuong is arguably one of the most famous, beloved, and impactful poetry writing today, especially within the queer community. It is a collection that begins with a celebration of queer sex, lust, and desire, before moving into how we build our families and friendships. How things fall apart, and how we mend ourselves.

The anthology is split into various sections, covering everything from domesticity and history to the city and nature. Non-binary American poet Andrea Gibson has gathered together here a collection of lyrical, sometimes surreal, sometimes narrative poems about love, identity, growth, and so much more. Meanwhile, Fan was surprised when Chan and McMillan chose his poem Hokkaido for the book, but says when he thought about it, it made sense. There is a wider breadth to the wanderings of these poems, too, as they concern themselves with the broad strokes of love as it exists today.The poem asks a number of questions, says Bernard: “What has passed away and what will transpire? Can we allow for a radical inner transformation that appears ugly to us, or that might render us undesirable?”

queer poems’ is split into seven sections, which i admit i was dubious of first (for how can one define poetry?) but they make perfect sense, and have a real balance to them. one thing in particular i loved was the inclusion of translated works, which are so often overlooked in poetry collections, but hold such beauty. this was a fantastic choice. Self-forgiveness when it comes to pain and trauma is something that takes courage, and Purcell invites you to try. His initial poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, made such a huge splash that it felt as though the world suddenly held its breath. I should also say that when I first read physical, it made me cry, and that your book also felt like a friend, even though I hadn’t yet met you at the time. How did you feel after physical came out, when it received such widespread acclaim? Did it make you feel more visible as a queer poet? Did writing playtime and pandemonium feel easier, or perhaps harder, as a result of that?As he approached his twenty-third birthday, for some reason he felt that he was male. And he saw it wasn’t bad. These are relatable experiences but the way that Jason digests and expels them gives them a new light, and a possible new way for you to understand them. It’s not directly queer or about sexuality, but when they chose it, it immediately gave me a sense of epiphany,” said Fan. “And of course it is about the body and it is about how we experience ourselves being naked.” He made it into the best high school in the city – where the government officials sent their kids. His only friend from middle school started avoiding him. The bud of loneliness blossomed into first love.