Today on the site I’m delighted to spotlight Joy//Us, an anthology of poetry edited by Cherry Potts and Jeremy Dixon and published by Arachne Press! Here’s a little more about the collection:
Arachne Press has long been a champion of LGBTQ+ writers, but we’ve never before published an anthology of LGBTQ+ poetry. These are joyful poems that celebrate all that is best about our community/ies and lives. This is not an ‘explain it to the straights’ book, this is for us. LGBTQ+ readers can open this book at random and find a moment of poetic queer joy for themselves, however big or small.
The poems in the book find joy in the simplest (or most complex) things. Love, sex, a quiet night in, dancing with friends, nurturing of and from our community, recognition from allies, a welcome from strangers, celebrating our cultural icons… the identity-affirming haircut, the right jeans, books, walking, food, flint-knapping… and political action.
Cherry Potts, Great Queen Street and Dance Free on Hope
My two poems in Joy//Us couldn’t be more different.
I wrote Great Queen Street in one of the workshops my co-editor, Jeremy Dixon ran during the submission period. It is almost true – I was on the march on the rain, I did have to dry off with a hand drier, it was in the Women’s Centre on Great Queen Street, and I still have the trilby. Everything else is nonsense, but one of my greatest joys, as mainly a writer of fiction, is exaggeration. The number of times my wife asks me ‘what did you really say?’, or ‘is that what actually happened?’ – she’s a lawyer, and a lover of precision.
Speaking of my wife, Dance Free on Hope was written a very long time ago, and was one of the readings at our civil partnership. It started life as a set of instructions to live by, and turned into a proposal.
So my two greatest joys, absurd exaggeration, and my wife. (Although we both sometimes claim to love the cat more.)
Elizabeth Chadwick Pywell, In A Meadow A Girl Holds Her Friend’s Hand
I wrote an early version of this poem not long after I got together with my partner; we live in beautiful North Yorkshire, and in the early days of our relationship spent a lot of time wandering around the countryside together. In many ways the women in my poem are much more confident in their queerness and their sense of self than I was at that time. They don’t care about who sees them, they’re just happily existing, aware of their surroundings but really focused on how in love they are and how much they want one another. Everything else feels unimportant compared to those feelings, and they’re able to have a sense of humour about other people’s reactions to them, and just be with each other. The poem became more fragmented and included more dialogue in later drafts; I wanted to convey a sense of movement, and the urgency they feel about being together, as well as the sheer joy of being in love in the summertime.
Rick Dove, Balcony Scene
Balcony Scene is a poem about finding joy in those fleeting moments that exist among the noise of living life to the fullest. As a bisexual man, many of my moments of queer joy have come unexpectedly like this, in heteronormative spaces, in an exploratory conversation, through coded flirtations, a glance, a knowing smile. I wanted to capture this, alongside allusions to Romeo & Juliet (possibly literature’s most famous lovers), and hints of Plato’s Cave and the notion of an assumed comfortable reality falling away. It is an aggregated autobiography, an account of about six such instances distilled into one but I think drawing on the commonalities of those “Meet Cutes” has helped to make something a little more universal.
When I read the call out for an anthology on the subject of queer joy, that was the thing I wanted to try and capture, something both personal but with specificity that would still be able to resonate widely. I am sure someone out there met their life partner this way (I had at least one near miss), and I cannot wait to have someone give me that feedback. Or maybe, it is a prophecy…
Maria Jastrzebska, Gorse Track and Women, Lava
When I first started publishing my poetry, a friend in Warsaw said, ‘well Maria this is all very interesting, very stream of consciousness, but could you write something about happiness?’ I tried but got snagged in the other stuff, oppression, loneliness, grief… Arachne’s recent challenge has been welcome and thought-provoking. I’m usually wary of single topic anthologies as to me poems defy categories, but queer joy is not something to be pinned down anyway. My two contributions, both from a longer sequence, feature my younger self. In Gorse Track she is sustained by friendship with another girl and the (relative) freedom of exploring the outdoor world and nature. In Women, Lava she does not yet know of the exciting possibilities which await her. Poems are a place where we can make things happen, create a world we want to live in even if it doesn’t exist just yet. Here a traditional (Christmas) trope is transformed. Nature helps once again. Imagination is our special power! We never know what’s round the corner – at our bleakest, most trapped, there’s always the hope of finding unexpected, unbelievable joy.
Sophia Blackwell, First Night, New Town
My poem, First Night, New Town takes place on the evening my wife and I realised we would get married to each other. Neither of us mentioned marriage during the evening, but when we spoke about it later, we agreed that this was the moment. I am used to writing about queer joy, but often in the domestic sphere, which somehow feels too acceptable a topic, particularly for women poets. To me, queer joy is spikier, darker and weirder, so in this poem I find queer joy in the quiet magic and vocal fighting that my ancestors were doing before I even came along, and I wanted to make it clear that they were with me in this moment. The poem has hints of darkness that acknowledge that my experience is not the same as that of LGBTQ+ people around the world, and uses the phrase ‘if we’re spared,’ as a caveat to cut through the sweetness, but I’m quite used to writing in a joyful register – either that, or angry, and who’s to say you can’t combine the two?
Joy Howard, Don’t
Don’t is a short poem about a longer relationship that I was beginning to see was heading for the rocks. It duly smashed into them head on. But it’s always good, looking back, to remember the nice bits. I always like to get as much meaning into a poem with as few words as possible, and maybe I’ve over-achieved with this one. But I hope at least it has resonance with readers. The only bit of imagery that’s crept in is the honeysuckle – it was real, but I find I have used it before as a metaphor for the sometimes short-lived sweetness of love.
JP Seabright, Short Back and Sides
During the summer of 2022 I was Poet in Residence at a gender neutral barbers in Hackney, East London. It was Barberette’s 10th anniversary year and I’d approached them with the idea. One of the first gender neutral barbers in the U.K. they had the simply radical idea of charging people based on the cut, and how much time it would take, rather than their gender.
It’s also queer run and a safe space for queers of all genders to be. No judgement, no constraints, no ego or pretence. Just a damn good haircut at a fair price. The residency didn’t quite work out as planned, but I did speak to staff and clients which generated several poems, some of which were displayed in the premises. My intention was to celebrate this space, what it offers, and its importance to the local queer community.
Short Back and Sides is one of these poems. An unashamedly simple poem, it was my first attempt at a praise poem: “a poem of tribute or gratitude”. This approach felt entirely right for the role of Barberette, as well as capturing that feeling of a really great haircut. And of “placing your life, your look, your history and identity into another’s careful hands.”
Khakan Qureshi BEM, How We Love
A monogamous, long-term relationship brings many feelings and emotions, highs and lows.
I wanted to encapsulate the feeling of being with the one you love and having that moment which propels you to re-create the time you first met, the heady days of early romance, the intensity of making love and the afterglow in all aspects of being in love, all day, every day.
I wanted to show that love, same sex attraction and otherwise, is no different to how other
(heterosexual) people love. This was my way to celebrate companionship, sharing affection and being of an age in which we can still find sexual and romantic attraction towards one another as we grow older, and find time to desire each other, demonstrating that love can overcome many things.
We are a relationship, friendship, and united in many universal ways.
We’ve learnt to love, live and accept all our yesterdays, todays and tomorrows.
The reader is treated to a glimpse of how we love.
Zo Copeland – Trees Like Us
The topic of queer joy was more difficult for me to access than I had expected. I couldn’t tap into where the two intersected. Eventually I realised it was dependent on context – the right environment for it to arise. This piece emerged when I was lying on a picnic blanket with my partner at a tranquil garden in Glastonbury. I was inspired by two trees – clearly different species – right next to each other, that were sharing their canopy space.
Whilst I was busy noticing this, my partner was talking to me. I realised how often this happens, me drifting off into my thoughtsphere, and them having to repeat themselves. Rather than arguing or judging me for it, they are patient and accept how my brain works. At this point I realised that a lot of the queer joy I experience is in the minutiae of moments where I am not just tolerated with sympathy, but accepted as who I am in my entirety. We’re not always on the same cerebral wavelength, but we are always there with each other. The trees stood tall and proud, showing off their true colours ‘this is who I am – look at me’. They shared the same space whilst both very different, able to bring these differences together to live in harmony in their own symbiosis. We were the trees.
Steph Morris, Legacy
Most of the poems I considered submitting for this anthology arrived at ‘queer joy’ after a journey through darker territory, typically homophobia or heartache. Luckily I read an Instagram post from editor Jeremy Dixon saying that he and publisher Cherry Potts were not looking for those kind of poems, so I put them aside. We shouldn’t have to show we had earned our queer joy; it should be there from the first line, not saved for the turn or the last line. At first this felt like quite a technical challenge. How could I structure a poem without shade to contrast with the light. ‘Along with the sunshine, there’s got to be a little rain sometimes’, I thought. This poem, however, wrote itself. Turns out, all I had to do was focus on the joy I’d seen and felt. The structure soon became clear; it would progress from queer joy via even more queer joy, to a whole load of queer joy. You so can have a ‘Rose Garden’, or in this case, marigolds.
Jeremy Dixon, Joy//Us
Co-editing the Joy//Us anthology with Cherry Potts was a joy in itself. It was a privilege and a great pleasure to read poems by so many queer poets and to run writing workshops both online and in person. My poem JOY//US was written after we’d made the final selection of poems for the book. It was inspired by the whole editorial process and all the poems I had read (whether included or not) and all the ideas and themes for poems generated by the workshops. To me the poem is a tiny blessing of thanks to everyone involved in the book and also to all the other poets and readers that I hope the book with resonate with. The poem is an invitation into this writing space for everyone who wants to be included. The first line of the poem was taken from our discussions as to what we were looking for in a cover. One of those ideas was not to use the colour pink, to not be limited by expectations of what a queer book looks like and to try and expand the range of queer visual language. Our queer creativity is all the permission that is required of us and I hope this collection will inspire many more queer poets to write about whatever brings them joy.
