Gregory Woods Poet Professor of Gay and Lesbian LGBT Studies Gay Queer Literature Culture

Welcome

NON-AWARD-WINNING POET AND CULTURAL HISTORIAN

Welcome to my website. I use it to post information about my poetry and literary criticism, and also about my career as an academic and teacher. When I retired in 2013 I was appointed Professor Emeritus in Gay and Lesbian Studies by Nottingham Trent University.

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"The poet with the sharpest technique for social verse in Britain today. He lets off fireworks through the official groves of English literature" - Peter Porter

"The poems of Gregory Woods have never failed to impress me ... For a start there are few poets around who can rival him technically" - Matt Simpson

"Perhaps the most sexily literate poet writing in England" - Neil Powell

"The foremost gay poet working in Britain today" - Alan Sinfield (Gay Times, 1995)

"When I think of the dross that is regularly published, noticed, praised, rewarded, and then consider that for the most part Woods goes without recognition, I'm not so much aghast as enraged at the (still largely London) cabal that decides poetic worth in England" - John Lucas

"I'm not sure I had ever written a fan letter before to a poet I had not met, but that's what I did when I read two poems by Gregory Woods ... I admired them especially for their technical virtuosity, in that it was technique completely used, never for the sake of cleverness but as a component of feeling ... What an enviable talent Gregory Woods has" - Thom Gunn

"I have read Gregory Woods' poems with real excitement" - Sir Stephen Spender

"Probably, the finest gay poet in the United Kingdom ... a poet of considerable technical ability and intellectual depth" - Sinéad Morrissey

From the introduction to Luca Baldoni, Le parole tra gli uomini: L’omosessualità e la poesia italiana moderna e contemporanea (2010):
"Anche nel mondo anglosassone è possibile tracciare una linea che parte con Whitman, e poi prosegue con Crane, Auden, Ginsberg, O’Hara, e più recentemente Gunn, Woods e Doty".
(In the Anglo-Saxon world, too, it is possible to trace a line that begins with Walt Whitman, continues with Hart Crane, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara and, more recently, Thom Gunn, Gregory Woods and Mark Doty.)

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If you want to buy any of my books, please go to the Poetry and Non-fiction pages. Details of my publishers can be found on the Links page.

INVOCATION

Come, hungry Muses, sink your fangs
into the rancid meat of things.
Give us another of those songs
that fizz the spittle on your tongues.

Descend on us in raucous gangs,
tattooed and sporting nipple rings.
Evacuate those tarry lungs
and goad us with your humour's prongs.

Conciliate your hunger pangs
with scraps of life, the random slings
and arrows felt by human throngs.

Foregather where the tyrant hangs
and harry anyone who brings
to human rights inhuman wrongs.

[from Gregory Woods, An Ordinary Dog (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011)]

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A cultural history of LGBT internationalism, from the late 19th century to the 1970s.

Latest Reviews Homintern: "This wide-ranging history of gay culture spans the so-called “Wilde century”: the era that began in 1895, with the trial of Oscar Wilde, when homosexuality emerged as “a major cultural influence.” Wandering from Sergei Diaghilev’s coterie around the Ballets Russes to Natalie Barney’s interwar Paris salon and Jane and Paul Bowles’s compound in Tangier, in the fifties, Woods shapes his book as a challenge to a defining myth of the period: the idea that homosexuals, newly emboldened, were secretly plotting a takeover of the social order. Marshalling an impressive array of conspiracy theories (as early as 1869, Engels was telling Marx that the “paederasts” would shortly begin organizing), Woods allows his eclectic portraits of gay groups and individuals to provide the exculpatory evidence." The New Yorker