Finally, someone who's happy to call herself a queer poet!
Okay, okay, I know lots of us are okay with such terms, but it is nice to see it in print once in a while. 
The Literateur interviews Brit Sophie Mayer and includes a sizeable chat about queer/gay poetry. Check out these moments below and then click to read the whole piece. Mayer's most recent book is The Private Parts of Girls, and she's the commissioning editor for the UK's Chroma queer arts journal.
Mayer: As for the straightness or queerness of poetry, it is equally fraught, but there is a conservative tradition in which epic and lyric are not only read as straight, but written to enforce compulsory heterosexuality. The blazon, in which the male poet strips and divides up the female muse, is a key example (and here is where feminism and queer theory cross wires and spark for me). The unitary white middle-class masculine pose of authority is ingrained in Western culture – and at the same time, it is challenged from the start of written poetry, whether in Sumeria or ancient Greece; challenged again even at the core of the tradition in Shakespeare's queer sonnets with their sinuous blur of second-person address and theatrical role play across genders.
But how many people are taught the queerness of the lyric tradition at school? For me, the label 'queer poetry' is useful as a stance against the suppression of such subversive histories and presents. It might allow a reader emerging from such absences in their education to discover much-needed allies, much as I made a beeline for Women's Press and Virago books as a teenager. It might give them a way of naming feelings for which they have been told to feel ashamed. At the same time, the label is provocative and political in claiming an allegiance to generations of writers whose work matters hugely to me, from Katharine Phillips to Chrystos. For all three of those reasons, I'm proud to be called/call myself a queer poet, and my poetry queer poetry (although I am always aware of the gap between the two, and of their unstable meaning).
'Queer' started out as a politics of interpretation celebrating such instability of meaning, as a way of handing power to the reader in engaging with the text – but it also offered a way for writers to claim a community, tradition and openness. It's associated, for me, with a lineage from Sappho to Gertrude Stein, who not only lived an openly lesbian life but refused the straightness of syntax. It's that formal and structural challenge, as much as the re-visioning of content and excavation of untold stories, that signals 'queer' for me.
