‘Mike, Bob, Bill, Jim, Thom’: queer communal life and poetic form in Thom Gunn’s ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’.

This article establishes a relationship between Thom Gunn’s experience of queer domestic space and his use of poetic form through a close analysis of ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’. Drawing on queer historical scholarship, I outline the context of queer communal dwelling in the United States that led to Gunn’s Cole Street residence. Through a close reading of his letters, I set out the ways in which Gunn was invested in remodelling the heteronormative household model. Drawing on literary spatial theorists such as Bachelard, I argue that the form of ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’ is answerable to the domestic space in which it was written. I conclude that the poem formally absorbs and refracts the queerness of the mode of dwelling that engendered it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]