Andrew McMillan
(United Kingdom, 1988)   
 
 
 
Andrew McMillan

Andrew McMillan is one of a brilliant generation of young British poets in their twenties, and also one of a growing number of British LGBT poets. His work has been called “electrifyingly fresh and lyrical” (David Morley) and “a glorious, vivid exploration of the body” (Michael Symmons Roberts). His first collection, Physical, was Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2015, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, is also currently shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award, and won the 2015 Guardian First Book Award and the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize

McMillan was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire. After studying English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, he gained an MA in modernism from University College London. He has been an active presence in the UK poetry scene for years, both with his own poetry and as a founding editor (with Martha Sprackland) of  Cake Magazine.

His first pamphlet, every salt advance – published by Red Squirrel Press in 2009 – was followed in 2011 by the moon is a supporting player, also with Red Squirrel Press. In 2013, Red Squirrel published his third pamphlet, protest of the physical. This was formed of a single long poem, now the centrepiece of Physical.
 
The poem, ‘protest of the physical’ – whose stanzas float across the page in broken sentences, with McMillan’s characteristic lower case letters and lack of punctuation – is a series of fragmented meditations on about sex, love, being young, and being from the north of England – from, as the poem mimetically says, ‘Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarnslie’. It’s a raw, heartfelt poem that feels universal:
 

awake     after waking for what
seemed like hours     the light from the bay
window of the balcony was making rainbows
 
on the floor     there are days
when I don’t miss you     or even love you
that much   anymore
 
something of a naked man and fire
which is prehistoric    which is horrifying
to be undressed so quickly     someone else looking on
 
empty gallery of silence
lines we cannot cross
the naked flame     the burning boy
graffiti     Oaks Lane Pithead
 
 
pits close
          we still sink
                          into them
 
 
The poem is also a tribute to the poet Thom Gunn, whom McMillan counts as his first poetry love, and a major influence (along with Sharon Olds, Diane Wakoski, and Kenneth Patchen, among others). Its youthful sense of fantasy and destiny is captured in the lines:
 
sleep with Thom night after night
open at the spine     face pushed deep
 
These lines also get at something of the flavour of McMillan’s take on the ‘physical’: it’s about the body – what Michael Symmons Roberts has called ‘the loved and broken ground on which we meet and are transformed’ – and the longing psyche, which is where the transformation occurs. They exemplify a sleight of hand that seems a signature of the poet’s style: a punning fluidity that enables a poem to convey multiple layers of meaning with a minimum of words.
 
McMillan’s physical sensibility is sited specifically in gay culture, as he notes in  an article he wrote for The Independent. He felt that Gunn’s poetry ‘gave him permission’, writing: ‘Here was a poet who I felt was speaking directly to me, not of things I'd experienced but of things I wanted to experience’. This was, he says, meaningful for ‘a young lad trying desperately to lose weight and fit into a gay world driven by pursuit of physical perfection’.
 
But his poem recognises that the youthful drive for sex, love and an attractive body is universal. There is human recognition from across the gender divide. In ‘protest of the physical’,
 
town that sunk from its centre
like a man winded by a punch
town that bent double    carried
 
young men     and women     and younger men and women
as long as it could but     spinebroken
had to let them go
 
McMillan’s work interrogates men, masculinity, maleness, how this is expressed through the body. The opening poem in Physical, ‘Jacob and the Angel’, describes a chance encounter that could be sexual, but is presented as a fight with an angel.  This rapturousness, or a readiness for heightened feeling, is ever-present throughout his work, whether wrestling the angel, or lying in bed, or standing at a urinal. The boundary between the self and the other, the nature of intimacy, seems to be McMillan’s real subject, and he finds it in the quotidian places of the everyday.
 
In a  review written for The London Grip, the poet Peter Daniels has written: 

Gym culture is a major junction for gay and straight masculinities; while exploring male attitudes in male-male sexual relationships, McMillan pays attention to maleness in general, which connects also to Northernness, the Northern man’s way with feelings. The version of Egill Skallagrímsson’s Norse suggests how far back male self-destructiveness goes:
 
I am deadheavydrunk
sharpen penblade     moonglint
now think of Hemingway swallowing a shotgun
 
This sense of passing on a heritage is apparent in poems like ‘Strongman’, a description – in deceptively light couplets – of picking up his young nephew and holding him above his head –
 
. . . because
what is masculinity if not taking the weight
 
of a boy and straining it from oneself?
 
But it’s not just self-destructiveness, just as it isn’t just sex. McMillan’s work is about how one kind of physicality bleeds into another, how vulnerability bleeds into strength, and how the body bleeds, always, into the heart:
 
and knowing that this is love    the prone flesh
what we expel from the body and what we let inside
– from ‘Urination’
 
McMillan is an active poetry-workshop facilitator, working with community, groups, schools, and others. He has been Poet in Residence and appeared at various literary festivals and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. He is currently senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University. More of his poetry can be found in anthologies, including The Salt Book of Younger Poets, Best British Poetry 2013 and Best British Poetry 2015.

© Katy Evans-Bush

Bibliography
 
Poetry
Physical, Jonathan Cape, London, 2015
 
Chapbooks
every salt advance, Red Squirrel Press, Northumberland, 2009
the moon is a supporting player, Red Squirrel Press, Northumberland, 2011
protest of the physical, Red Squirrel Press, Northumberland, 2013

In anthologies
The Salt Book of Younger Poets, Salt, Cromer, 2011
The Best British Poetry 2013, Salt, Cromer, 2015
The Best British Poetry 2015 Salt, Cromer, 2015
 
Links
McMillan’s own  website
Physical at the Jonathan Cape website
Interview for the Forwards Arts Foundation
McMillan on ‘Starting a Magazine’ for the Young Poets Network
Profile at Liverpool John Moores University
Review of Physical in The Guardian
McMillan explains ‘How I Did It: “protest of the physical”’ for  Campus at The Poetry School
McMillan’s Ted Hughes Award judge profile at The Poetry Society
Video of McMillan reading ‘Finally’ as part of 21 Poets for Sheffield

 



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