John McCullough

My online Advanced Poetry Workshops course returns in October. Each week I talk on the effects of techniques and we read contemporary pieces. We workshop students' poetry and there are exercises to help produce fresh, surprising poems. www.creativewritingprogramme.org.uk/advanced-poe...

Been working on my next collection Crowd Voltage since 2021, aiming to find fresh ways to write about working-class and queer experiences that would draw on my energetic approach to imagery and phrase-making. Here are some of the writers I’ve gone back to most often…

Thanks! ⚡️🙂⚡️

Thanks! ⚡️🙂⚡️

Thanks Sarah! xx

Hoorah! 🌈😁⚡

Thank you Rosanna! :)

Thank you lovely! xxx

I hope so! 🙂 I have performed at the South Bank Centre for Outspoken before and taught online with them. (This book is with Bloodaxe but I’m sure I will read with other queer poets published by them like Simon Maddrell who lives round the corner from me.)

Thanks Doug! It was a lot to ask Villain to produce something so homo it outgays the cover for Reckless Paper Birds but they got there. 🌈😁⚡️

Excited to say my fifth collection of poems, Crowd Voltage, will be published by @bloodaxebooks.bsky.social in March 2026. It's a high-energy book about class, crowds and community. This specially designed cover is by the brilliant queer artist, Villain.

Poem for the new month. From Wendy Xu's book, You Are Not Dead.

#poem #books #writing

Kim Addonizio. This is the opening of a poem in her fantastic recent collection, Exit Opera (Norton, 2024). I’ve been a fan for a long time and for me this book and the last see her at the top of her game. So wildly imaginative and thoughtful, intimate and funny all at once.

Twenty years since my 2005 author photo. 🙂 Part of my boy band phase. Album includes the hit singles ‘Dreaming Barman’, ‘Ding! Dong! My PhD is Dead!’, ‘Puberty Won’t Leave’ and ‘Nobody, Nobody [Wants My First Book Yet]’.

Always looking for new ways to stop students looking at smartphones while I'm talking. :)

OK I’m hiring you as my stylist! 🙂

Bright orange has always been my favourite colour. :) I wish I could wear it more. My Irish ancestors conferred on me the gift of pasty skin which outside summer tends toward vampiric blue. I still have a pair of bright orange Nike Air TNs though.

Gorgeous.

Love your photo and caption equally! :)

@mrjohnmccullough.bsky.social I've Carried a Door on my Back for Ten Years is the perfect foundation for tonight's class on redrafting #TheProcessofPoetry #Cantwaittoshare

Promotional material with a teal background, showing the book cover of “Her name is Alice” by Caroline Litman. The cover is a picture of Alice in a grey coat, beige trousers and brown shoes carrying a neon pink handbag. It shows a quote about the book by the poet John McCullough, “Shines an unyielding light on the devastating impact of transphobia”.

A copy of #HerNameisAlice is winging its way to several politicians and members of the House of Lords who have been offered, and have accepted a copy.

JOHN MCCULLOUGH SUNFISH Who wants to live for eons anyway, watch everyone you love dissolve while you keep shining, pissing out the latest drops of the ocean that’s passed through your body? I’d rather be a sunfish than the sun, rather hop over stepping stones in my cowboy hat than endure like the serious mountains. I can’t answer the sky’s questions or the sea’s. I light candles because I love starting fires that are small and temporary like beetles, like flowers, like most of us, common as days.

John McCullough (@mrjohnmccullough.bsky.social), from Opening Line (@brokensleepbooks.bsky.social)

A wooden framed box with plexiglass cover has the poem Flamingo by John McCullough printed with the image of two flamingos standing near an antique radio. The text of the poem is: “We prefer shallow water, gathering in hundreds at night clubs by the shore. The powder cakes we bring say EAT ME and we do, gobbling up beakfuls till our heads turn upside-down. We don't know how Sia and Audrey Helburn joined us, pirouetting across the floor. And who invited the clouds? We don't mind. Our origin is in fire. We are invincible, even if we're imaginary figures in some Red King's dream, even if we may be losing it, may in fact just be me standing on one perilous leg breside the speaker, waiting for the rain to stop.”

The latest poem in our little sidewalk poetry box is @mrjohnmccullough.bsky.social’s Flamingo from 📖 Reckless Paper Birds 🦩

Amazing - thank you! Hope all is good with you and your own poems. 🦩🦩🦩

Just seen this poem by John McCullough in Broken Sleep’s ‘Opening Line’. It has stopped my heart - it’s like it was written just for me!

Springtime sadness from Tomas Tranströmer, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton in Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2006).

Diane di Prima. From: Revolutionary Letters (City Lights, 1971).

Fingers crossed for you Rosie xx

Robert Bly. From: Collected Poems (Norton, 2018).

Hey hey it's Frank O'Hara's birthday! 'Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern.' - 'Mayakovsky'. Me too - any second now. :) (Image: Frank with his cat, Muffins, photographed by Richard O. Moore.)