Panel: True Homosexual Love: Mark Hyatt

A fascinating panel discussion exploring the work of bohemian 1960s poet, Mark Hyatt.

Bold, experimental, sexually explicit, Hyatt’s So Much For Life: Selected Poems and Love, Leda present a major lost voice of queer literature in Britain. Born in South London in 1940, Hyatt came from a Romani background. He received very little formal education and learned to read and write as an adult. Scarcely published in his lifetime, he died young in 1972 but his manuscripts survived thanks to the intervention of friends and contemporaries.

In this session, Hyatt’s editors Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts are joined by writers and activists Fran Lock and So Mayer to read from and talk about Hyatt’s work. They’ll discuss the challenges of queer and working-class biography, bohemian Soho, Hyatt’s Romani heritage and sexual identity, filling the gaps in the archives, and more.

Sam Ladkin is the author of Perfectly Disgraceful: Frank O’Hara’s New York School and Mid-Century Mannerism (forthcoming, Oxford University Press). With Luke Roberts he co-edited So Much For Life: Selected Poems by Mark Hyatt (Nightboat, 2023), the first comprehensive edition of poetry by this neglected writer. He is the co-editor of five collections of poetry and essays, most recently Against Value in the Arts & Education (Rowman & Littlefield), and has published articles on Tom Raworth, Walt Whitman, and Rob Halpern, amongst others. He lectures at the University of Sussex.

Luke Roberts is the author of Home Radio (87 Press, 2021) and other works of poetry. With Sam Ladkin he is the editor of So Much For Life: Selected Poems by Mark Hyatt (Nighboat, 2023), and he edited Hyatt’s novel Love, Leda (Peninsula, 2023). His book Living in History: Poetry in Britain, 1945-1979 is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. He is Senior Lecturer in Modern Poetry at King’s College London.

Fran Lock is the author of numerous chapbooks and twelve poetry collections, most recently ‘a disgusting lie’: further adventures through the neoliberal hell-mouth (Pamenar Press, 2023) and White/ Other (87 Press, 2022), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Fran is the out-going Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University (2022-23), researching feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval Bestiary. A collection of essays relating to dirty animality, queer failure, and trash-feminist practice, Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, will be published by Out-Spoken Press later this year. Fran’s other work includes the chapbook Forever Alive (Dare-Gale Press, 2022), and the work of “queer mourning” Hyena! Jackal! Dog! (Pamenar Press, 2021). Fran is an Associate Editor at Culture Matters, where she most recently edited the mammoth anthology The Cry of the Poor (2021). She is a member of the new Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, and she edits the Soul Food column for Communist Review. She is the co-host of the cross-cultural poetry podcast Social yet Distanced with Jack Varnell. She lives with Manny, beloved pit bull, Eternal Muse.

So Mayer (they/them) is a writer, bookseller, organiser and film curator. Their first collection of speculative fiction (& speculative fact) Truth and Dare is out now from Cipher Press. Their recent books include A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, a book-length essay on queer films, bodies and fascism for Peninsula Press, and their most recent collaborative projects are Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guin (Silver Press), The Film We Can’t See (BBC Sounds), and Unreal Sex (Cipher Press). So works with Burley Fisher Books and queer feminist film curation collective Club Des Femmes.