Yes, I consider myself a Queer Artist. I'm a poet, at the literary, experimental end of the scale rather than the annoying 'spoken word' end of the scale, and I also write lyrical / experimental essays. I did a practice-based PhD in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent in which I was writing poems which circled around the concept of masculinity and the male body. Some of these ended up in my pamphlet 'Mr Universe' (Eyewear Books, 2017). As part of my research I began curating a resource of images of the male body, taken from fitness magazines, Renaissance art and pornography. This led quite naturally to an ongoing interest in manipulating images like these, at first in paper collage and then digitally, by editing and filtering. So although I'm primarily a poet and essayist, I prefer to think of myself more as a writer AND - potentially! - a multimedia artist. I'm now looking for a way to express myself visually, without being so dependent on these images. But my aim, as with my poems, is the same: to explore what it means to be a man, and specifically a man who identifies as 'queer' - so whatever I do, queerness is central to it. I'm interested in queer embodiment, queer spirituality, queer masculinity - ALL my work explores what these things might look like. Also, on a more personal level, ALL my work is a way of expiating the gay shame I was also taught to embody earlier on in my life.
That poem is the only poem I've written that's got noticed and talked about - a bit of it was even quoted in The Observer when it was reviewing the anthology The Poetry of Sex. It's an old poem now. I think I've changed a lot as a poet since then. I liked the idea of objectifying Daniel Craig as 007, in that famous scene when he comes out of the sea - objectifying him wryly and lasciviously in the same way that the makers of the film were objectifying him. At the time I think I got off on dragging some popular culture, and a wry queerness, into the form of the sonnet. Not that that was an original thing to do. But it was an important step for me to take.
I love Nottingham. It's a city which is in poor shape at the moment. Shops closed. Homeless sleeping in doorways. It's in a bad way. But this will change. And I think it's in periods of decline that artists get a bit feistier, because there seems less to lose. So we'll see. I haven't done any Creative Writing workshops for a few years because I realised that, as much as I enjoyed doing them, they take a lot of energy. I also handed over 'Word Jam', a multilingual forum for poets and musicians, which I'd founded. I made a conscious to withdraw from all that and concentrate on my own work. Despite my jab at Spoken Word, I do love performing - but I guess I don't want my poems to fit into any kind of London-y formula or London-y scene (and Spoken Word does seem to do this). I did a gig in Nottingham with a free-jazz saxophonist and free-jazz percussionist - that's more the kind of live work I'm interested in. Any kind of collaboration which brings poems to people's ears - or eyes - in fresh, unformulaic ways - then count me in!
Actually, I know nothing about text art so I'm not sure I can comment!! It seems like the obvious area for me to explore - I certainly want to work out ways of incorporating some of my words into something visual. (Maybe you can suggest something to me?!)
I don't have one particular 'hero', but Derek Jarman is always there, and John Cage. The 50's 'beat' movement was quite queer, what with Ginsburg and Burroughs etc - and I also like that period because some of them were very influenced by Zen (in their improvisatory, chance and 'stream-of-consciousness' experiments). I'm a practising Zen Buddhist, so any Queer Buddhists are likely to be placed in my lineage of influences.