The sex life of poets: Fucking Poets by John Gallas

Fucking Poets is a collection of 30 Close Encounters with English poets that was conceived on the banks of the Thames and born after labour in Coalville, Leicestershire. Following Hardy’s dictum that the sex life of a character is vital to an understanding of what makes them tick, the poems provide a fleshily possible encounter with writers from Eadbert (a ‘Beowulf’ poet) to Thom Gunn, with (a selection) Arnold, Brooke, Flecker, Duck, Housman, Owen, Noyes, Crashaw, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Gower, Layamon, Chatterton, Shelley, Skelton, Spenser and Haggard between. Each written by an Orlando-type partner, who traverses Time and Space (and Sex) from (undoubtedly) New Zealand to be There, the poems are a rhapsody of humour, researched detail, surrealism, language-concoction, merry obscenity and philosophical rudeness. A short introduction, written by the anonymous but certainly irresistible penperson is here attached.

All the encounters described here are real : though they seem incredible. I have recounted them in poems of my own maykynge not to gain Opinion, but to allow the Reader intimacy with Angels. 

In each case, I determined to do whatever the Poet asked of me : I would be, so to speak, the possible World he entered. And though this World begin in a cloud of unknowynge, I sought to hold gentle questions with Each to allow the Lights of Knowledge to disperse it. 

I fear that there will be questions upon my virtue. I assure the Reader that this was only a labour of love : and while I was a Determined Woman, and could be a Boy, I should have found it hard to be a Man.

My evidence is the collection of centuries. I seek only to add to the scholarship of poets and, concomitantly, the body of knowledge. It is a commonplace that artistic creation and the urge to love are in their preparation, achievement and denoument wholly alike.

Though I have not shirked from Detail, I am sure there are no particular descriptions of equipment here unless they are wholly justified by their relevance to the Work. La sirs, all the working parts of a Poet are interesting.

I commend this Book of Experience to the reader in the hope that I have laid bare ingredients of the creative process unachievable in the guesswork of strangers. I seek no character at all for myself. 

Read on, and enjoy this rare glimpse into the Private Poet, brought to 

you by the fearless but scholar-conscientious Cold Hub Press, of Governors Bay, Lyttelton.

John Gallas was born in 1950 in Wellington, New Zealand, and brought up in Richmond and St Arnaud. He went to England to study Old Icelandic in 1972, and stayed. He now lives in Coalville, Leicestershire. His poetry is published by Carcanet Press, the latest of 8 books being 40 Lies (2010). Fresh Air and The Story of Molecule are to be published in 2012. He returns to New Zealand each winter.

  

Fucking Poets. John Gallas. Cold Hub Press.  www.coldhubpress.co.nz/

Vol I     ISBN: 978-0-473-18983-9

Vol II    ISBN: 978-0-473-18984-6

Vol III   ISBN: 978-0-473-18985-3

Softcover chapbooks, 32pp each. Set of 3 $49.50.

Cold Hub Press

PO Box 156

Lyttelton 8841

New Zealand

+64 3 329 9389

web: http://www.coldhubpress.co.nz

email: coldhub@gmail.com