A little forewarning here that although this post begins general, that’s just a way for me to get started, before narrowing focus and being very specific and self-involved. But there is a story I wanted to tell which I’ve told before, to a few people; for some, for too many, it has resonated, depressingly. If it doesn’t resonate with you, well — I’m glad to hear it.
Lately, I have been gathering thoughts for an article or essay I’m unlikely to write. It’s about queer poetry, or what it is that is called ‘queer poetry’, especially recently, and especially in the UK. It’s about how frustrated I am getting with what is called ‘queer poetry’. I love poetry, and I love queer people, so what could be my problem with the fact that the former, done by the latter, is getting more exposure? Why, as a queer person who writes poetry which is queer, am I beginning to feel that the label ‘queer poetry’ is something I want to actively resist?
Though I kind of want to use it for something about Saki, I think it would be fun to start an imaginary article on queer poetry with the infamous, wonderful poem by “Nael, age 6” for an epigraph:
The tiger
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The tiger is out
But we are not in the good timeline, are we; and I would be more tempted to begin a note on queer poetry with Quentin Crisp:
Unfortunately, of course, toleration has come in a form that is slightly insulting. That is to say, one imagines that the message when it came would read: ‘Forgive us for having for so long allowed our prejudices to blind us to your true worth, and cross our unworthy threshold with your broad-minded feet.’ Instead, the message now reads: ‘Oh, come in. The place is a mess. You’ll love it.’
It feels grimly inevitable in whatever stage of capitalism this is that the term ‘queer poetry’ seems to have been crystallizing lately around a few recognizable behaviours and habits. Broadly speaking, I find these tendencies to be boring, or worse; and I suspect that they are part of a project to welcome something called ‘queer poetry’ into the fold of lucrative publishing by installing figureheads and arbiters, narrowing its parameters, secateuring off its sharp edges, docking its experimental tendencies, and neutralizing its politics. The twin bourgeois angels of opportunism and respectability not only have pound signs in their glowing eyes, but also a gym membership, a sunny flat in Haggerston, and a bottle of poppers by their monstera. And should be the case that you’re not into this work, that’s at best a disavowal of solidarity, and, at worst, pretty homophobic of you, actually.
My problem with trying to gather ideas on something like this is that the questions get bigger and bigger: Where does a critique of some frustrating, disappointing text ‘as a queer poem’ end, and a critique of it as simply a poem begin? What’s the interaction between those two critiques? When ‘queering’ is something so often thought of as a mode of deviation, porosity, transgression, what in formal terms can ‘queer poetry’ do after a couple of centuries of formal experimentation? Is that why its queerness has to be so ostentatiously asserted in other ways, and why the obvious appeals to a recognizable taxonomy of contemporary queer life stick so cloyingly out of the page? How about this: What was queer poetry? What did that mean, in, say, 1910, 1930, 1950, 1970? What did AIDS do to queer poetry? (Even feeling for the size and shape of that question is many lifetimes’ work.)
Is there any chance that this new ‘queer poetry’, when you stroll up to those shelves, will not be predominantly white, cisgender, male? (Yes, I am all three of those things, but that makes it more, not less, of a moral duty to remark on it.) Is there any chance that it won’t feel, in a word, so fucking assimilationist? Is the broad trajectory of what is called ‘queer poetry’ away from anything meaningfully queer?
And besides, you grouchy prick, so what if you’re not personally into this kind of writing? A lot of people are, evidently. What do you want from poetry? And so on. Until something which had started as a small meditation — on a genre which seems to be purposefully making itself into “glib, soothing, so long as it’s gay” lifestyle snapshots, delivered alongside thirst-traps — threatens instead to become an insular and bad-tempered manifesto for, what, well, for what? For “not that”? What use is that to anyone? More likely, if I tried to do it, it would end up as my simply saying nothing, because I was too wary of hurting anyone’s feelings, or being accused of being bitter, or something. I’m not bitter, by the way: in terms of my own writing, of who likes it and who reads it, I am a very lucky man and could ask for nothing more. Bottom line, though, is a sincere belief (and I am absolutely not alone in this, it’s important to say) that for a lot of what is called ‘queer poetry’, queers, and poetry, deserve much, much better.
It doesn’t help that the online reaction to poetry can be so wildly unpredictable: from swathes of people who have convinced themselves for reasons obscure to me that fictional sex between characters born more than a year apart is tantamont to statutory rape, to a febrile atmosphere in which any critique of a text or cultural object is read as if it’s a savage character assassination not just of its its creator but also of anyone who ever enjoys it.
Anyway, all this is to say that, in recent weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about writing, and a lot about my own writing. I feel that if I am to even consider writing something which at turns must be pretty harshly critical of writing which is given the same name as my own could be given (though, as I say, I would by now perhaps resist that) then I ought to angle my criticisms at my own work and my own attitude too. I mean, maybe. Maybe not. I don’t think I’m ‘above’ hypocrisy, but I’d certainly like to avoid it if I can.
The boldest claim I’m willing to make about — and, I think, for — my own poetry is this: it is nothing to do with my queerness, or the poetry’s queerness, that I have always felt like an outsider, and that it (the work) has always felt as if it went against a prevailing grain. Even among the poetical communities which have been so nourishing and generous.
And I should say that this outsiderness was never a deliberate posture or rebellion on my part: I just, for better or worse, don’t fit in. This has been my way since childhood. I am, simply, a bit strange, and not in a wilful or enjoyable way; I’m not proud of it, and it’s not something I embrace, because it has so often led me deep into failure and shame and regret, where other people seem to go through the same phases and chapters of life without fucking them up, without so often suffering through them, as if the very same things for some people are just straightforwardly possible. I genuinely think they are, in many cases: people cope differently. People cope. (I’m in my late thirties now, and have had about five years of people saying to me: You do know you’re autistic, don’t you? I have no problem with this, but once again I don’t actively embrace it, and haven’t sought professional diagnoses for that, nor for my even bigger ignored elephant, ADHD.)
So, that’s the boldest claim. That my poetry — and maybe even more so, my prose — whether it wants to be or not, is intransigently weird, basically, and that I am something of a fish out of water, even among the community I “grew up” in, as a writer. Personally I feel that’s an emotionally neutral thing to say, but I’m aware that it might land boastfully, or even worse, ungratefully. Neither is my intention.
The second-boldest claim that I would make about my writing is that it only exists at all because I feel like a failed composer. I write it — and this is still true — because writing music has always gone so badly for me. It’s been ruined. Maybe that is why my speaking voice is so absent from the writing. These poems are things I have made, folded up, hammered out; they aren’t anecdotes, they aren’t little bits of philosophy or theory, with or without a gentle epiphany at the end. If they are queer, it’s because I am, and they cannot but reflect that they are made by a queer person; not because they are somehow a part of me, or my ostentatious lifestyle, and certainly not because they hit the mark scheme, mention ghosting and Grindr.
They are little scrunched-up entities of rhythm and pause, and — this is the core boldness in the claim — they use images and semantics and ‘meaning’ the way I’d want to use timbre and harmony, if I were able to write music. Colours and tinctures, not narratives or vignettes or opinions or ideas. This isn’t a confession that my poetry is meaningless, nor that I don’t love syntax and form, because I do, and certainly not that I believe music ‘has no meaning’ (!) — just that I think of ‘meaning’ when I wrangle words as an emotional quality which arrives timbrally, and flits about rhythmically and harmonically. Rather than, to be blunt, anything which is going to respond to any demand that it be comprehensible, let alone ‘relatable’. That won’t go very well.
Now. Today, I am one hundred days into recovery. People who’ve read this substack for a while will know what a big deal that is for me. Professional help was useless. It was a brick wall. Many brick walls. It caused me a breakdown that completely wasted two years of my life, and it took a gang of four friends to help me claw my way out — across 509 days — of the addiction that has ruled my life since I was 17. For twenty years I was effectively never sober, not til this last winter. For this reason, today — one hundred days!! — I forced myself, as a treat, to change “am a failed composer” to “feel like a failed composer”.
Here I am going to swerve direction, as I warned about. What follows — and I would be loath to allow it such power, but it’s too late for that — is why I am the way I am, partly. In 2005, as a teenager, I applied to Cambridge University, to study music. I did this because I wanted to be a composer. I always did and I always will. I was and am a working-class boy from West Somerset and I had at the time no sense whatsoever of the contemporary music eco-system in this country. All I knew was that one of my favourite living composers had gone to Cambridge, and that meant that my sights were set on it, too.
It’s become obvious to me, in the years since, that the ways in which my life before university had been different from his — I wasn’t born into a very wealthy London family, with so much music on my doorstep, and with the funds for consistent private tuition; likewise, I didn’t go to the Purcell School of Music, I went to a local comprehensive, where I was the one student who did A-Level music — all that will have had a great deal more of an effect on my attempt to be a composer than just ‘following him’ to Cambridge could ever have done. It would take some hubris to claim that I am just as fine a musician as he is, and that it’s all down to privilege: I am absolutely not saying that. But I am, however, a very good musician, and I already was one at the time. Among people who live their lives as musicians, I was a late starter, but I progressed lightning fast, and I was not without luck: I found, locally, the best piano teacher anyone could ever hope for. A life-changingly brilliant teacher, and also such a kind man. Kind. I’ll just linger on that word.
As a teenager my ambitions had been already musical, but I struggled. I really struggled. Perhaps I had warped notions of what you were supposed to be able to do, and with what help. Already a pianist, I’d got myself, for sixth form, a full scholarship to attend a private school, two counties away, which I didn’t want to go to, but had zeroed in on, on the sole grounds that they offered composing tuition. I arrived, and was immediately told that they were no longer offering composing lessons. I fucking hated that place. I barely lasted two months before returning to the local comprehensive. I’m sure that comprehensive had its problems — in 2014, in the second annual ‘State of the nation’ report from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, West Somerset scored 324th out of 324(!), in the entire UK — but I was happy enough at school. I think, broadly, that a lot of us were happy enough at school.
You understand why I looked at the Cambridge route — I knew no better, but a musical hero had gone there. Somehow, I did get in. Only, the pattern repeated itself. Cambridge was horrible. I hated it. I never finished a single academic year. I never finished a single term, that was how badly I got on there. It happened too that I got unlucky with the head of music at my college. The inspiring and exciting man who had interviewed me, and who presumably had let me in, immediately took a job elsewhere; and his replacement was so boring, so exhausting and dispiriting a teacher, and so utterly uninterested in his students, that I still can't quite believe he was real, or that he had been given the position he had. (There was one tutor I met there, just one, who was truly inspiring. But he was not posh; he went against the grain. Cambridge, to put it very, very mildly, was not kind to him. We kept in touch. He’s much better now, but that place almost destroyed him.)
When I got to Cambridge, inevitably, I immediately started questioning how to do what I wanted: how to get lessons, how to improve my composing, stretch my boundaries, explore new stuff. I asked around, immediately. There were composition elements to the degree, but they wouldn’t be til the second year; and besides, I think they were mainly pastiche. Not worthless, at all; I looked forward to them, as better than nothing — but I also wanted to meet people who were writing new music, I wanted to play their music, I wanted to collaborate. I was young, and full of energy and enthusiasm — even though (with hindsight) I was already catastrophically mired in my alcoholism. It’s hard to notice that, as a fresher surrounded by freshers.
Soon enough, I was told to arrange a meeting with someone. He wasn’t teaching, but maybe he could direct me to people who would be. Something like that. This I did, within a few weeks. He could advise me, if nothing else, that was the idea. I can’t remember our meeting in much detail, let alone adequately express what happened, and the effect it had. But I’ll try.
It was the most intense combination of fish-out-of-water and “door being slammed in my face” that I’ve ever felt. He had a quick, very quick scan of one of the scores I’d brought. I didn’t mention that I had recordings, because he didn’t show any interest whatsoever in hearing them. (I’ve heard from other student composers that he habitually refused to listen to student pieces; he’d only look at scores.) Like I say, details are dim. But basically, he was so dismissive of my work, so baffled and uninterested — he was almost mocking of it, almost indignant that I had shown it to him at all — that I didn’t try to compose again for nine years. Yeah, nine years. That’s a fucking long time when you are still a teenager.
There’s few people in my life who’ve managed to be so absolutely and completely crushing in so short a time. What was it, a few minutes? Not as many as five. And yet he somehow kept me talking for three quarters of an hour, his various opinions on other things. He’d belittled me so much and made me feel so nervous and humiliated that I accidentally said “willing” instead of “wilful”, on which he took pleasure in correcting me.
He didn’t crush my ambitions completely — and, by the way, he was wrong. Accolades aren’t everything, but when I finally did start writing again, the very first thing I did, in 2014, got shortlisted for a small contemporary music festival in London. It went well. Every musician involved was awesomely complimentary to me about it. But the process had been so exhausting and emotionally fraught that I was pretty much forced to leave composing alone again. Why keep doing something which only makes you feel awful about yourself?
I reckon I could have been a composer. Maybe. Maybe I still could. People who have played my music have always been so positive about it. But it’s like pulling teeth. Every time I try, it completely shatters me, it really fucks me up. So I’ve given up trying. Every few years, I try again, but I always think I’ll give up on that too. Every few years I try getting lessons from someone, but I’m accepting that what I really need if I am ever to progress here is therapy. Technique and skill can be learned, and practied, fine, and knowledge can be acquired: but not if the slightest approach to them tugs on your sadness and shame and regret and loneliness like a thick, deep vine.
Composing music is still the thing I most want to do, more than any other creative thing. (Writing is joint second with blacksmithing, for what that’s worth.) I’d be much happier if music wasn’t first, always first — I’d be a lot calmer if the desire to compose was crushed completely. But it just won’t be crushed. The fact that it’s always gone so badly for me means that I’ve pretty much left all music alone for good. I’m a very good pianist, and that was my living for a decade. But a good pianist isn’t the musician I want to be, is it. So I almost don’t play any more: I don’t care, it just makes me so miserable. Between this, and a boyfriend who respected my playing but bullied me for what I listened to, I barely even listen to music any more. It almost — almost — ruined being a musician for me. A string of bad luck, and at the dead centre of it, one sneering posh piece of shit setting off an emotional depth-charge in my musical life nineteen years ago. Many years a professional musician, very close to composing, always very close to it, but so rarely doing the thing I truly want to do. Like being tempted by impossible life, being stuck behind a pane of glass.
As much as I blame the alcohol, and my poor decision making, I blame that uppity wanker, and that few minutes in which he looked down his nose at the work of a young student who had the temerity to want to be creative. It was absolutely the worst time for it to happen to me: it felt like the final door being slammed. The last chance. The very idea that I should pursue this. I do remember him saying something like “Yes, okay, I see what this is about”, closing the first score he’d opened, and then just kind of dropping all of them at the side of the table, as if they were junk mail, before sitting back and looking at me, without a word. Finally the silence was broken, but I don’t remember how. Anyway. Why I’m posting this, as a treat, on my hundredth sober day, is to say, among strangers as well as among friends: fuck him. Fuck him. Fuck him and the effect he had on me, fuck his sneering, fuck his aloofness, fuck his rudeness. What it comes down to, treating students like that, is nothing more than elitism and cruelty. I can’t imagine how many other people he has done this to. Fuck him.
Maybe I’ll be able to write music. One day. A fortnight ago I wrote a short piece as a gift for my piano teacher — we’re back in touch, twenty years later. He was delighted with it. And guess what: even in a short paragraph thanking me for it, and saying what it made him think of, he managed to introduce me to several new things, in such a generous and happy way. It makes me happy, to tell you about him like this. It is such a joy to be reminded of what happens when you communicate with a kind teacher, rather than encounter a gatekeeper, especially such an arsehole of a gatekeeper.
Often, when I try to compose, I feel myself thinking: what will other musicians think of this? They’ll look down their noses at it, and drop it to one side like some undercooked fish-skin on the side of their plate, while looking at me as if I should have come prepared with something else to talk about. Of course, they won’t, and experience has told me that they don’t; but that’s what that piece of shit programmed me to feel at age 19. Helpfully, for me, I have since heard some of his own music and I think it is dog shit.
On the other hand, and because I wanted to end this saying something positive: one thing I do get to do, sometimes — though it’s been 5 years — is teach piano, and one of the reasons I’m good at that is because I had a wonderful, kind, thoughtful, generous teacher. Often, with students, I love to think to myself: What would Keith say, now?
That’s plenty, isn’t it. That felt mad to write, actually.
I’ve already told you about the prose book I have coming out in May. I haven’t mentioned, not on here, that I have a new poetry book out. It’s called SHAPESHIFTING and it’s out from RunAmok Press. Here is the entire first poem from it.
Usually, I don’t tell people this sort of thing, but this one poem — you should try this, it’s fun! — was written as a birthday present, to me. At the time, I needed to convince myself that I deserved better, that I deserved not to drink myself to death, and this was a pulse of that conviction. It doesn’t make any sense, but why should it? I wanted it to be a bolt of fortifying energy, of love for the world and all the good still in it, a “fuck you” to spiteful cruel elements, and a statement of intent to be back alive in the world again, one day — why should that be comprehensible, if it’s sincere? It was a poem for this feeling: it would be good, wouldn’t it, to feel alive… and I think we should try. One hundred days sober now, and progress is slow, but real; and one of these days — I’m determined to do this — I am going to write a piece of music which exists to say only this: at last, I feel alive, and it feels good.