Five minutes with poet dr John McCullough
John’s collection of poems Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins, 2019) was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Literature. It was also shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. His most recent collection Panic Response was published in 2022 and was a Book of the Year in The Telegraph as well as featuring in The Times‘ list of Notable New Poetry Books for the year. Its long poem ‘Flower of Sulphur’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. He has been teaching creative writing and literature in higher education since 2002 and lives in Hove.
Tell us about your journey into writing and poetry in particular. I started writing poetry in the mid-nineties as a teenager, mostly because I loved reading it. My early work was fairly typical for an adolescent and revolved around death, blood and darkness. I was very much a little thunder cloud – the gay Sylvia Plath of Watford!
Your debut collection The Frost Fairs won the prestigious Polari Prize in 2012. How did this collection come about and how did you get a publishing deal with Salt? After about 15 years I’d amassed quite a number of poems and I’d had pieces published in various magazines and anthologies. I began to think about ways of gathering them into a longer work. That first book is more miscellaneous than my others, though there is a theme of queer history that I’ve come back to of late. I’d already done a pamphlet with Tall Lighthouse in 2008 for which Roddy Lumsden was my editor and he knew I’d been writing for a while. When he moved to the same role at Salt, he kindly asked if I’d be interested in doing a full collection and I said an enthusiastic yes.
Your third collection Reckless Paper Birds won The Hawthornden Prize in 2020 and was also shortlisted for the 2019 Costa Poetry Award. On the blurb it says it ‘..welcomes you into a psychedelic, parallel world of ‘vomit and blossom’! Can you tell us more about what this means and the inspiration behind these poems? I didn’t write that first phrase but what I think it’s describing is how I tend to use a lot of surreal imagery and reimagine the world. I can see how reading my work is like stepping into a parallel reality in that sense, one that’s lively and colourful. Reckless Paper Birds concentrates on vulnerability, particularly in terms of the queer body. It was the first time I’d set all the poems in twenty-first century Brighton where I live rather than hopping off to history or the future and almost everything was written in the same period of a year and a half. I think all that helped to make it more focussed and intense. Stylistically, there was a degree of detachment in my earlier work I wanted to move away from too. I had a strong drive to speak from places of passion, and from experiences of being prone, exposed, open. I wanted it to crackle with feeling.
Your fourth collection Panic Response has been described as ‘your darkest and most experimental collection to date’. It contains the long poem 'Flower of Sulphur', an experimental piece which engages with Renaissance friendship and Cicero and was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Can you tell us about the process of writing this poem? Despite its length and its unusual form of lettered fragments, ‘Flower of Sulphur’ actually came together very quickly. I hardly edited it at all. It was one of the first things I wrote for the book and emerged from some very bleak personal circumstances concerning a friend as well as the fact I’d written a PhD thesis on friendship in the Renaissance period many years before, a part of my life I’d come to regard as something of a dead end.
And you have a new collection coming out this spring, can you tell us about it? I can! Crowd Voltage is a bouncy book that engages with people’s desires for community and togetherness. It’s divided into two halves – ‘The Body of the Crowd’ and ‘The Crowd of the Body’. The first is concerned with social themes, often to do with class and queer history, and the second confronts isolation and internal division, entering more spiritual territory.
Which poets have inspired you? It’s a long list, and always changing. Most recently I’ve gone back to W.S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, Anne Carson, Les Murray, Rosemary Tonks and Norman MacCaig. I’m always casting my net, however, and looking for new influences. Nothing energizes me like an encounter with an exciting poem or collection by someone whose work was previously unknown to me.
You’ve taught poetry and creativity for a number of years at Arvon, University of Brighton, Open University and the Creative Writing Programme. How does this teaching impact your own creative process? I think the biggest impact comes from my updating of teaching materials. With the Creative Writing Programme, I teach primarily on poems I’ve never taught on before to keep things fresh. That search inevitably helps me as a writer, leading me to think about ways of beginning poems I’ve not tried before and presenting different tools to help me solve the sort of problems that crop up during editing.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given about writing? It’s come from various sources but the most helpful perspective I’ve fostered is to look at writing poetry as a slow process. I try to enjoy that rather than wishing for it to be over quickly. Most of my poems spring from experiences and language that I’ve sat with for a long time. I’m forever going back to phrases and images that have been bobbing around in my notebooks for years. I’m fond of a remark by Doris Lessing too: “Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
What’s your go-to book about the craft of poetry? For generating ideas, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. For editing, Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius.
You’re marooned on a desert island with the complete works of Shakespeare and a spiritual text of your choice. What fiction or poetry book do you want to have with you? And would you prefer a notebook and pen, or laptop to write with? I suppose it would have to be a poetry anthology of some kind. Emergency Kit, edited by Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney, is an old favourite.
What are you working on at the moment? I often have a fallow period after completing a collection. Over the last few months, I’ve been concentrating on reading instead and have in the last few weeks begun to write my first few poems after a lengthy gap. I always begin by moving away from whatever themes and forms were dominant in the last book. I have ideas for other projects I might investigate but for now it’s more individual poems – loose beasts…
Are you interested in our Advanced Poetry Workshops with John? He’s running a 10-week and 20-week course starting in September. They are now open for enrolment.