Shadows Out of Color

The history of queer poetry in the UK remains, in many ways, untold. There are the fin-de-siècle and Modernist exceptions: Swinburne’s decadent erotics, whose metrical complexity torsioned transgressive sexuality via Sappho and sadomasochism; Oscar Wilde’s acidic wit; the work of the “war poets,” most notably Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon; and the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (for the sake of argument, let’s call Woolf a poet of prose).

Less well-known is a poet such as F.T. Prince, author of the classic “Soldiers Bathing” (1942). John Wieners, Lee Harwood, and John Ashbery admired Prince, a writer of formal intricacy and leisurely agitation. Of Prince’s “Words from Edmund Burke,” Harwood observed, “[Prince] wrote [a whole] poem about being buggered, and he has this great line in it—‘I am it would seem an acceptable tube.’ Well, it is just so genteel! I admired it very much.”

Contemporaneous to Wilde and Swinburne, late-19th-century lesbian poetics was likewise connected to the Sapphic revival. Writing as “Michael Field,” Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper—partners in art and life—collaborated on around 40 verse dramas and books of poetry, producing their own lyric version of Sappho in Long Ago... (“They plaited garlands in their time; / They knew the joy of youth’s sweet prime, / Quick breath and rapture”). Meanwhile, Renée Vivien lived in Paris, wrote in Baudelairean French, and had a tempestuous affair with American heiress, poet, and salon host Natalie Barney. She was also featured in Colette’s book of queer encounters, The Pure and the Impure (1932).

In the 1930s, decadence was replaced by left-wing politics. Sylvia Townsend Warner, the visionary writer of subversive novels such as Lolly Willowes (1926) lived with her lover Valentine Ackland in Dorset for nearly 40 years. Co-writing the openly queer poetry collection Whether a Dove or a Seagull in 1933, they joined the Communist Party of Great Britain the following year, espousing the anti-Fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War. During the same period, W.H. Auden was active in Marxist circles alongside Warner, Ackland, and left-wing queer artists such as Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and composers Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett. (This early Marxism has, however, often been overlooked or dismissed; the scholarship of Glyn Salton-Cox provides a valuable recent corrective.)

Auden immigrated to the United States in 1939, followed by Thom Gunn in 1954, but with the instantiation of the welfare state and the (very) gradual lifting of social restrictions in the postwar period, a new generation emerged: Harry Fainlight, author of the queer lyrics of Sussicran (Narcissus spelled backward); Dom Sylvester Houédard (“dsh”), a Benedictine monk, concrete poet, former army intelligence officer, and an editor of the Jerusalem Bible, who served as historical adviser for filmmaker Derek Jarman’s dizzying parade of toned male flesh, Sebastiane (1976); the suspected bisexual Lee Harwood, whose The Man With Blue Eyes (1966), a book that arose from an affair with Ashbery, contains one of the finest of all postwar lyric poems, “As Your Eyes Are Blue.”

Meanwhile, Maureen Duffy, who reworked the visionary medieval poem Piers Plowman in the context of contemporary factory work in her play Pearson/The Lay Off (1956), came out in the early 1960s. Her novel The Microcosm (1966) was set around the lesbian Gateways Club on the Kings Road (featured in the film The Killing of Sister George). A prize-winning poet since her teens, Duffy wrote "the first modern lesbian love poems, unabashed and unapologetic," as the scholar Alison Hennegan notes. Duffy also campaigned for the government to decriminalize homosexuality, which the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 effectively did 10 years after the recommendations of the landmark Wolfenden Report.

In the 1970s and 1980s, critics such as Gregory Woods and publishers such as the Gay Men’s Press did the important work of promotion and recovery. The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse came out in 1983, and in 1991, Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore established the master’s program in Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change at the University of Sussex. Historical memory has, however, been fractured, particularly in the aftermath of the censorship of Section 28, a series of Thatcherite laws that prohibited local officials from "promoting" homosexuality, and the brutal generational rift of AIDS.

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.)

However, though scholarly work is being done in equivalent scenes in the US—from the New York School to the Occult School of Boston to the poets of Gay Liberation—there is little in the way of a holistic literary history for such movements in the UK, even, perhaps, among writers themselves, who are more likely to invoke North American queer poets for inspiration. Most young British poets today have probably read Frank O’Hara or Audre Lorde, yet a poet such as Al Celestine, a gay African American who lived the majority of his life in the UK and wrote the astonishing collection Confessions of Nat Turner (1978), remains virtually unknown.

All the more welcome, then, is the posthumous appearance of two new books: So Much for Life (Nightboat Books, 2023), the selected poems of UK queer poet Mark Hyatt, and Love, Leda (Peninsula Press, 2023), Hyatt’s only novel. As editors Luke Roberts and Sam Ladkin put it, Hyatt “lived at the center and the fringes of the bohemian underground in 1960s Britain.” Since his death in 1972, much about Hyatt’s life and work remains obscure. Ladkin and Roberts perform the tasks of both biographers and editors, interviewing Hyatt’s surviving friends and family; going through official records; and sorting the multiple, disordered drafts of Hyatt’s sometimes chaotic papers. Thanks to their editorial sleuthing, the Hyatt myth gains biographical clarity in So Much for Life.

***

Hyatt was born in South London. His father was a hawker who sold groceries from a cart and worked in a scrapyard, often assisted by the young Hyatt. His mother was Roma and died in her late 20s, when Hyatt was five. Gay male sexuality was a kind of despised open secret within the traditional, upper-class institutions that undergirded the Empire, entangled, for instance, within the hierarchies of British public schools. Working-class queer sexuality—and the potential for cross-class encounters—was another matter. But Hyatt found a conducive environment in the world of Notting Hill bohemians, some of whom were wealthy and had influence as editors and publishers. As a teen, he gravitated toward the city’s queer quarters around Soho and Notting Hill—the latter a seasonal sight for Traveller communities in the 19th century and, by the 1950s, a neighborhood in the midst of the racist unrest that followed the arrival of the so-called Windrush Generation (the immigrants who arrived in the UK from the Caribbean). In 1960, Hyatt met Cressida Lindsay—former Communist Party member, poet, novelist, and single mother—at a gay club in Soho.

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,

from the poor freak streets comes a lad
that turns intellectual over a soft art
and meets all the big bohemians with cash [...]
time seemed to slow down nice and easy
and the more rich people he met by chance
in sweet thatch houses he slowly got more money

Increasingly invested in poetry, Hyatt appeared in underground magazines and anthologies throughout the 1960s, including Michael Horovitz’s countercultural document Children of Albion (1969). He was also in and out of psychiatric hospitals, suffering various forms of addiction, and died by suicide in 1972, at just 32. His work was never collected in his lifetime.

That the majority of Hyatt’s poetry survives at all is due to the diligence of J.H. Prynne, who photocopied Hyatt’s now-lost papers. Having been alerted to Hyatt’s suicidal ideation, Prynne and fellow poet Barry MacSweeney drove through the night from Cambridge to Manchester in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to save Hyatt’s life. So Much for Life includes the majority of the posthumous and long out-of-print pamphlets that followed the poet’s suicide—How Odd (1973), Eleven Poems (1974), and A Different Mercy (1976)—along with other uncollected and previously unpublished work, an introduction, and detailed editorial notes. In all, the book gathers nearly 150 poems, primarily short to medium-length lyrics, the longest a few pages, the shortest two lines. The edition makes Hyatt’s work biographically and textually intelligible, although it still retains its mysteries.

***

Hyatt lacked a conventional literary education, so his influences can be hard to trace. He was a fan of the Romantics—as he writes, somewhat archly, “I get milkman shits over Keats”—along with Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and the work of his sometime lover Harry Fainlight. Certainly, his work shares Genet’s (and Fainlight’s) openness about sexuality along with its rejection of legal norms. With titles such as “True Homosexual Love” or “fuck beyond existence,” his poems are declarative and bold, combining archaic elegance with fierce carnality. It’s hard, for example, to think of another poet who follows a line such as “touches of time of tea” with “we are into shit arse and soul.”

Hyatt came to poetry not just at the encouragement of his new bohemian friends but with their literal aid. Writing with dictionary at hand (“you have got to shock the fantastic dictionary,” as he put it), Hyatt often relied on friends and lovers—Cressida Lindsay, Lucy O’Shea, his later partner Atom (Donald Haworth)—to type his work. His relationship to written language formed outside an institutional context, nurtured by a community it could not have existed without.

Hyatt’s sometimes ambiguous position among various social contexts emerges clearly in Love, Leda, which was written in the early 1960s but is set earlier, when Hyatt was around 20. Leda—“elegant joke nickname”—is effectively Hyatt’s stand-in. He almost never stays still, roving between coffee houses and queer bars in Soho, taking a train to the countryside for some rural sex, picking up casual work washing dishes or cutting metal for washing machine parts, or taking a friend’s children to the seaside.

Like The Lonely Londoners (1956), Sam Selvon’s classic novel of West Indian migration, Hyatt’s novel is both a story of isolation and a social book. Selvon’s characters hustle, encounter racism, move from place to place, remaking and yet being constrained by the city’s geography and its encoded social mores. Hyatt’s characters can’t put down roots but must negotiate their way around in search of a meal, a bed, the spark of human connection.

Having stolen £10 from an unspecified mark, Leda goes with his hookup—“heavenly blue eyes cast down into his own hell”—to a Lyons Corner House. “People in Lyons are passing through the City or out of work,” he observes, “all of them murdering time. We too have time on our hands to murder.” A central element is Leda’s doomed fixation on a married neighbor, Daniel, modeled on Hyatt’s own unrequited love for his neighbor, John Lindsay (no relation to Cressida), who worked for the BBC music department. “Our Friendship Began on the Foundations of Digging a Basement,” a poem in So Much for Life, is dedicated to Lindsay: “Summer. / With all its hot days — / under a desire I work / [...] to kill a pain / which eats through my heart.”

But the novel has no plot as such. Instead, a flash of connection, sexual or otherwise—a glance, a quick word—leads from one place of transience, the street, to another—Lyons, a gay bar, a student party—setting up a chain of other such connections: a situation of alternating movement and stasis, of killing time or being killed by time in which nothing is certain.

Hyatt named his novelistic alter ego for a figure from Greek mythology who was assaulted by a god disguised as a swan. But Hyatt’s Leda is not so much a victim as someone with the capacity to constantly reinvent himself within the limited confines available—and perhaps, too, to find the love named in the title.

Though the novel cumulates in a suicide attempt prompted by Leda’s futile love for Daniel, the action is not presented as the inevitable consequence of queer life. “I wake up and for once in my life I am awake,” Leda comments from the hospital. “I stepped out of life and back, into the same mess. No laments. [...] Now I look at the world with optimism and a pure sense of self-ego, without the need to animate my face for the demands made upon me.” In this beguilingly inscrutable last sentence, Leda appears to draw a moral from the experience, but it’s not one of repentance. Optimistic, albeit with no expectations, Leda refuses to be what anyone else wants him to be.

Though this is not certain, the novel appears to offer a record of Hyatt’s life when he first entered London bohemia. His poems, meanwhile, reveal how haunted he was by society’s efforts to interpellate him. The counterculture often romanticized the archetype of the “gypsy,” but Hyatt, as a person of Roma descent, knew that Travellers and Roma people had been persecuted in almost every country in the world (and continue to face vicious, racialized legal discrimination within the UK). In “I am frozen with knowledge,” Hyatt alludes to the Porajmos, the Nazi slaughter of up to a half-million European Roma:

The gypsy in me is gassed to death
but still desires a golden frame
and the longhair on the universe
grows down to my shoulders.

The poet’s rebirth as a “longhair” bohemian or proto-hippie emerges from the specter of genocide, as if countercultural dreams might redeem a shattered history. Yet this redemption is, at most, tentative. In “Half Breed,” Hyatt writes:

I’m half gypsy and I burn with colour
like a fat cow dancing in the sun [...]
being only half of a race
understandingly I know the past [...]
half human half freak I think
of the future how sick with wine
i am in a tarty nightclub [...]
feeling hell inside my guts

Even when drinking in a nightclub, a background of historical violence bubbles just under the surface. The poem also suggests the tone of Hyatt’s work: its mix of vernacular—the “tarty” nightclub, the particularly British insult “fat cow”—down-in-the-dumps if not “kitchen sink” realism, and a metaphorical register that remains fundamentally mysterious. What does “burn with colour” mean?

Hyatt’s experience of labor shaped his identity as a “half gypsy” and a poet. “I am a natural labourer / and I can’t make one penny / into two pence,” he writes in “Hashish on Sunday,” a kind of poetic autobiography written two years before his death. The presence and absence of labor influences the world of these poems. Though he worked in factories, Hyatt’s background was not that of a proletarian doing the same job year after year but of seasonal or temp gigs. Unlike others in bohemia, Hyatt had no inheritance and relied on wealthier lovers for support, falling back into the rhythms of casual employment or hustling when money dried up.

In “Work and Wonder,” he writes:

I quietly work at my job
for a single poor wage
and I don’t get rich like others [...]
I am a prostitute to my city
among the daddies of this time,
on just a manly whore’s income
I barely feed my lips honestly,
stupid how means are financial [...]
God is control by some of the people,
a person like me is jammed.
Yes, I work under you, darling boss.

“Home Walk” attests to the bitter routine of walking home while “the gypsy sky dark and black holds rain”: “No poet should live at the top of a hill / and work 12 hours at the bottom, it’s awful.” As suggested in the “gypsy sky” metaphor, his racialized background shaped Hyatt’s experience of labor. In “Hashish on Sunday,” he writes:

By birth I am a diddikai, my interest
in rubbish comes from my father’s side,
and my flare of mad quick colour from
an unknown mother, unknown to me that is;
if need be I know how to lie, I was fed
with lies from babyhood to a teenager
but somewhere after leaving home, I
learned my own kind of truth.

Diddikai (also spelled didicoy) is a sometimes pejorative term for a person of partial Roma descent. Movement was a vexed issue in Hyatt’s life and work—going from house to house, bed to bed, away from the violence of the home and into the temporary chosen family. His relationship with his non-Roma father, who remarried soon after Hyatt’s mother died, appears to have been characterized by violence and aggression—episodes that Hyatt later dramatized in his work. In “From my father to me,” he imagines his own birth in unsparing terms:

my father looked down on me
and said:
I think he will be a coward
and I will hate him for knowing that
I am his father.
So clear were his words
so hard was his look.

“Love and Hate,” the final poem in So Much For Life, channels Oscar Wilde’s “each man kills the things he loves,” the famous line from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” that was later set to music in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Querelle and is quoted at the end of Love, Leda:

hate moves like love
it moves together
until it kills
the thing it most needs,
hate comes from way back
from childhood.

As a queer man, Hyatt sought to escape the patriarchal violence of his upbringing, imagining new ways to conceive relationships between men or ways of inhabiting one’s gender. But the issue continued to haunt both his gay and heterosexual affairs. In particular, his own role as a father filled him with ambivalence. Dylan was raised by Cressida Lindsay and Hyatt’s former lover, Anthony Blond, on a commune in Norfolk—the property paid for with Blond’s money. Dylan came north to the small village where Hyatt had moved with his partner, Atom, for semi-regular visits. In “It’s all in the past now,” Hyatt imagines how his son must think of him sitting upstairs writing poems:

“How queer my father is, staying up
all night, looking in a deep trance
at nothing but unseen torches that glare
from within his large strange eyes,
trying his hand at loud lousy poems
which he can’t sell to holy people."
[...]  Is my father upstairs
still in that funny odd mood again?
Is he still of common folk? My mother
says “Dad’s a gypsy; so don’t tell
anyone but your children[”]

In “Between You and Humanity,” Hyatt addresses Dylan directly, haunted by the hatred his own father felt for him:

My son, I am not a man that will give love,
in fact I feel you as being strange.
Some time in your life you must hate me.
All you can say is “I am from your sperm” [...]
Understand, son, I am a poor labouring man,
my belly thinks for me, do you see.

Hyatt seeks to explain himself to Dylan, a bohemian child, raised in bucolic surroundings, in terms of his own difficult background and the way it shaped his ability to relate to others. Yet he also wishes to emphasize that, as a laborer, he is connected to workers’ aspirations for a better world, in lines as close as his work comes to a Socialist rallying cry:

Oh yes! Labourers have their dreams
[...] dreams of sons of the soil really at peace,
revolutionary, unknown in human history,
the courage and strength of every living being

As he struggles to think of anything to say to his son, Hyatt turns melancholy once more. He anticipates his own death, and ends with a resolution that’s half-ironic, half-desired: “The prize of life is to be able / to eat, laugh heartily, then have a good shit / reading to yourself some soft poetry.” The swings of theme, tone, and mood are characteristic: they are also brave, sometimes self-deprecating attempts to reckon with his own difficult familial inheritance, the way that, as a queer man, Hyatt negotiated that inheritance and his inability to escape it.

Yet nowhere in Hyatt’s work is homosexuality identified with a conflicted cri de cœur, as it was in the contemporaneous—and, for its time, courageous—Dirk Bogarde film Victim (1961), in which the expression of queer desire is offset by anguish and guilt. Hyatt is a terrific poet of gay sex, writing of the physical mechanics of the act with frequent good humor and without a trace of sentimentality or cliché. “[A]nyway”, he writes in a poem simply titled “Yes!”,  

the amount
of dry spunk on your belly
is unimportant
the thing is did you enjoy yourself?

Yes!

In other poems, he adopts a kind of speculative, philosophical tone. From “True Homosexual Love”:

I stimulate solitude to satisfaction
and practice different masculine emotion
around an unfinished boy adolescence [...]
I lived for the feminized role one had
to behave in front of domestic partners.
Early life exercised makes orgasm almost
impossible to escape with genuine joy [...]
the lovely-man I let intercourse the body
feeds a marriage affair and successful freedom
which I consider serious legitimate love
until adult parting doom. But here’s the truth:
do I love love?

The poem promises to end with an assertion—a truth or truism, a maxim to sum everything up—but instead deflects into a question, the deft repetition prying open the relation between love as act and love as existential state.

In poems such as these, Hyatt suggests that sexuality of any kind is a longing for relation and a way of knowing the self. But so is writing, so is poetry, and so is any kind of social activity. For Hyatt, queer sexuality is a given, not, to adopt the language of the day, a “social problem.” And in the bohemian enclaves of early 1960s London, he found a context in which his queerness—which along with his race and class sometimes rendered him precarious—could be nurtured and protected.

***

In the latter half of his life, Hyatt dropped out of the big city. Lasting only a few months on the Norfolk commune where Lindsay and Dylan had moved, he went north with Atom around 1968, moving around the country before settling in the small village of Belthorn, Lancashire, a moorland village made up largely of old weavers’ cottages. Here, too, he found a network of poets operating outside London’s metropolitan axis, including his friends Dave Cunliffe and Tina Morris, antinuclear activists and editors of Poetmeat magazine, based in nearby Blackburn.

As Hyatt writes in Love, Leda: “I look out of the window again and we’re breaking into country scenery. In contrast to the city, it’s sheer beauty. I can always find a full line of fine words for it.” “The country is bird quiet,” Hyatt writes in “Country Poem”:

The sky moves blue to blue
 
Through this wide-awake daze [...]
 
The senses are happily light [...]
The best a poet could do is state
the softness

Here is a newfound space of listening and observing: “tree Autumn [...] not a mouse – / moving sound / only Atom.” “[M]y lover burns by me,” Hyatt writes in “I am frozen with knowledge”: “our kingdom is life / & governments dry out our thoughts [...] our feet kick shadows into colours / but we string the seasons together.” With Atom, it seems, Hyatt found—at least for a time—a kind of cheery domesticity quite different from the transient world of Love, Leda:

Two queers live on a hill
drinking home-made wine
and dancing around the cat
until both are quite ill.
 
We got hash and cash
and the wind is fucking cold
that blows down the country road

Yet, just as often, the countryside seems depressingly empty. “I can’t write / in the country,” Hyatt exclaims. “So badly I need a trip / to the large city / and smoke [...] I live out lonely dreams / and burn.” In “Now I live in the north country,” he looks forward to a trip to the city but has premonitions of being stalked or beaten up while cruising:

Now I live in the north country
but now and soon I have to go
to London for the trips you know
I smoke with friends and get smashed
only my mind is on the look-out
for someone who is a mad person
who walks the night streets
hoping to find me really alone.

Hyatt imagines his assailant:

he knows how he lives
by the punch-up culture he wants
when possible he is going to knife me
somewhere in the back of the city
I will tell you now
he can’t bear the queer touch.

“I wait upon the moment,” the poem ends, with a kind of ominous resolve.

Away from this real or imagined space of urban violence, Hyatt’s is a decidedly ambivalent pastoral. For one, he still had to earn money. In “Hashish on Sunday,” he describes his new “grossly boring” job working 11-hour shifts to put foam on cheap carpets in the local carpet mill. Hyatt knows that the countryside is not so much an idyll as a place of labor, the industrial and the pastoral always interlinked. In “Growing Peas,” he peeks into “pretty clean cottage windows / all sparkling with brass” whose chintzy decor belies the exhaustion of the inhabitants, wearied from a life of factory work:

And from all this show
daily polished glory
appears a face or two
of very old people;
factories have eaten lines
beneath their eyes.
I realize they’re here
to catch the youth of old age.

In “A Shiner,” the sun’s glint off a window “miles away from here” leads Hyatt to speculate on the lives of his neighbors once again:

Now I wonder
who lives there
so far away
from here
what do they do
for a living?
or how do they
pass their lives away?
Are they poor Irish
trying to keep
the family together?
poor jobless blacks?

The poem ends with understated quasi-epiphany, returning to the flash of light that prompted it:

My God! how that window
glows

In the work of another poet, this moment might gesture at a kind of vague transcendence, an insight into the nature of things, an escape from or refusal of the social world. But for Hyatt, it’s a social revelation, a curiosity about others and how they live their lives that forms the beginning of solidarity and, perhaps, the beginning of love.

***

In the early 1970s, Hyatt’s relation with Atom broke down under what he perceived as Atom’s desire for a heterosexual relationship. When Atom left him early in 1972, Hyatt wrote to Lindsay, “Without Donald, I can’t live; and being so-called free, I no longer want my ‘self.’” In the final weeks of his life, he moved to Manchester. Though other poets attempted to dissuade him, he insisted that his time had come. By all accounts, he was calm and even cheerful. He continued to live life to the end, but it wasn’t for him anymore.

“Mark Hyatt was too beautiful, too passionate to live in [the world] for long,” wrote Anthony Blond in his memoir, Jew Made in England (2004). “His death was a classic of homosexual life.” Yet Hyatt’s work resists a narrative of queer victimhood, challenging the expectations readers might bring to it, invariably catching them out.

In “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties” (1833), John Stuart Mill famously argues:

Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of feeling; but, if we may be excuse the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience. The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener.

Hyatt, though, is not simply talking to himself or ruminating out loud. An unnerving second-person address is key to the flavor of his work. He is addressing someone, yet this address constantly shifts, at once direct and evasive, in lines somewhere between frustrated outburst and ecstatic song. “How about fucking life silly / just for fuck sake,” Hyatt writes in “Love in the shadow of summer.” Elsewhere, he deploys tonally ambiguous understatement: “it’s not great to find no person / behind the eyes; // it’s harder to think otherwise [...] it isn’t really great" (“Is It Now”). Who is Hyatt talking to here? Himself? A future reader? A particular person? Musing and accusing, the poems won’t allow readers to sit still, just as the poet, it seems, sometimes has to struggle for everything he’s got.

Hyatt’s poems are not biographical illustrations of identity but of states of mind—or rather, not states of mind but states of language. “What is mind? — designed —/ this chewing dialogue body is battling over.” Poetry was a space in which Hyatt won his way, despite his class background, somewhere he could invent and reinvent himself, articulating himself beyond interpellation. In “The Waste,” he writes “I look, and I don’t think. / But I can hang God / On a line of words.”

In their introduction, Roberts and Ladkin note, “We know [Hyatt] went to prison in the spring of 1966, and that he claimed it was for ‘picking flowers,’ which sounds like a drugs charge, or what the Wolfenden Report … would call ‘importuning.’” Hyatt seems to allude to this in the poem “Radio-Me: The Big Send Up Of Everything Around Us,” when he writes “On picking flowers of nature, and not the state / it’s to show I care for humanity, not the laws of man.” Hyatt’s poems, one might say, were his way of winning himself into the world: both wooing and rebuffing it, being wooed and rebuffed by it. They also attest to his disjunction from the world.

“[T]he content of this body / Is a good portrait of the dead,” he writes in “The Waste,” a poem that alludes to the death of his mother. But his work equally celebrates the pleasures he found, as in “The End of This Day”:

tomorrow will be bright
and I will look with the same eyes
for new things
and the same happiness as yesterday.
Slowly
this world is fading out of existence
[...] soon all will be gone
the hard and flowery language of sound
will die in my darkness [...]
but I bless the one that awakes me tomorrow
for renewing my life

Coda: For Further Reading

The following resources list provides further context for Mark Hyatt’s work and its political, cultural, and social contexts, as well as sources for the various histories related in the essay.

For more on Hyatt’s life, see the editorial introduction to So Much for Life. For further biographical information, see Luke Roberts, “Try Living,” Times Literary Supplement, January 2023. Laura Del-Rivo’s novel Daffodil on the Pavement (1967) and Cressida Lindsay’s Fathers and Lovers (1969) contain fictionalized representations of Hyatt.

For more on British queer poetry before Hyatt, see Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton University Press, 1999); Emma Donoghue, We are Michael Field (Pan MacMillan, 2014); Michael Field, The Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials, edited by Marion Thain and Ann Parejo Vadillo (Broadview Press, 2009); Eleanor Keane, “Tea and Scandal: Renée Vivien and the Fin-de-Siècle Salon,” the Rimbaud and Verlaine Foundation, June 2020; Jérôme Kagan, “Natalie Barney: The Enchantress on Rue Jacob,” France-Amérique, October 2021; F.T. Prince, Collected Poems 1935–1992 (Carcanet, 1993); and Glyn Salton Cox, Queer Communism and The Ministry of Love: Sexual Revolution in British Writing of the 1930s (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

For more on British queer poetry and culture contemporaneous to Hyatt, see Harry Fainlight’s poems in Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, Vol.6, No.5 (April 1964) and Vol.9, No.5 (June 1965) (scans available online at Reality Studio Archives); Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter: The Life & Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard, edited by Nicola Simpson (Occasional Papers, 2013); Lee Harwood, New Collected Poems, edited by Kelvin Corcoran & Robert Sheppard (Shearsman, 2023); Alfred Celestine, Weightless Word: Selected Poems, edited by David Miller and Richard Leigh (Shearsman, 2016). For the Gateways Club, see Lucia Cheng, “Inside Gateways, One of the World’s Longest-Surviving Lesbian Nightclubs,” Smithsonian Magazine, June 8, 2022, and Rob Baker, “The Lesbian Gateways Club on the Kings’ Road and The Killing of Sister George,” Flashbak, January 2019. For an explanation of Section 28, see Harvey Day, “Section 28: What Was It and How Did it Affect LGBT+ People?”, BBC Three, November 2019.

For British queer scholarship of the 1980s, see Martin Humphries, Not Love Alone (Gay Men’s Press, 1985) and Gregory Woods, Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (Yale University Press, 1987). On Audre Lorde’s publication history in the UK with Sheba Press, see Sue O’Sullivan, “Proud to have published Audre Lorde in the UK,” The Guardian, October 2017.

For younger British queer poets see: Kae Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos, both a book and an album, released in 2016; Jay Bernard, Surge (Penguin, 2019); Verity Spott, Prayers, Manifestos, Bravery (Pilot Press, 2018); Nat Raha, of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018); Sophie Robinson, Rabbit (Boiler House, 2018); Tim Thornton, Penguin Modern Poets 2: Controlled Explosions (Penguin, 2016); Laurel Uziell, T (Materials, 2020); and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel (Nightboat, 2020).

For more on queer US poetry, see Bruce Boone, “Gay Language as Political Praxis” (1979), in Bruce Boone Dismembered, edited by Rob Halpern (Nightboat, 2020); David Grundy, Never By Itself Alone: Queer Poetry in Boston and San Francisco (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Michael Bronski, “Zines From a Revolution,” the Poetry Foundation, June 2019. For lesbian poetry, see the online Lesbian Poetry Archive, maintained by Julie Enszer, and Judy Grahn, A Simple Revolution (Aunt Lute, 2012).

For more on government persecution of Roma and Traveller peoples in the UK, see part 4 of the UK government’s recent Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, given Royal Assent in April 2022, which severely discriminates against Roma and Traveller peoples.

—Many thanks to Luke Roberts and Sam Ladkin for sharing their extensive unpublished research into Mark Hyatt.