Introduction to Chaucer Cameron and Jeffery Sugarman

Safeguarding note: all the poems Chaucer Cameron reads deal with ‘adult themes’.  One poem has a trigger warning in place so viewers can mute the sound or turn off the captions if these are being used.   In addition to this, she discusses the shifts in power between client and prostitute.  More details about Chaucer Cameron’s and Jeffery Sugarman’s work can be found in my introduction to their workshop-performance below:

Hello,  I’m alice hiller, introducing Chaucer Cameron’s and Jeffery Sugarman’s Voicing Our Silences workshop.  Before I handover to these two brilliant poets, I’ll share a few words about their work. Published by Against the Grain, Chaucer’s debut, In an Ideal World I’d Not Be Murdered is powerful and timely in the here and now of March 2021. Following the murders of Sarah Everard and others, the topic of violence against vulnerable and undefended peoples round the world is uppermost in many of our minds. 

An uncompromising poet and poetry filmmaker, in addition to her page publications, Chaucer created the international poetry film project, Wild Whispers.  She also curates and presents poetry film everywhere from Houston and Athens to Berlin and Bath Spa University.  Her biog, like Jeff’s, is on the link.  

Calling to mind the project of Jay Barnard’s Surge, the poems  of In an Ideal World I’d Not Be Murdered  perform the voices of a group of women working as prostitutes in London in the early 1980s – when the gentrification of the rundown areas around Kings Cross seemed unimaginable.  Speaking to each other, reflecting on clients, remembering their poignant, defiant individual histories, these women take us to a place where:  

Many of the poems are anchored by the names of their speakers – “Caprice”, “Eve”, “Morgan”, “Grace” – in acts of apparent witness. In ‘Cartoons’, “Peyton” reveals how she took her mind back to The Flintstones during a violent assault by a “dodgy punter” leading to “hell/ a broken nose.” 

Central to Chaucer’s sequence is “Crystal”.  Her wise-cracking, self-defining story is a steady reclamation of possibility – all the way to the final full stop. While the poems do not look away from selling sex, and the personal costs of this rough trade, they also encompass the harms, and the predators, which can set people up for working in this field.  Notwithstanding their grounding in real, difficult materials, Chaucer’s poems are always ‘made’ works.  Their sound patternings,  imageries, and formal structures allow their listeners and readers to become active participants through the plays of art. 

All the poems Chaucer will read in this workshop deal with ‘adult’ themes.  Hina Needs Swabbing also bears witness to specific injuries.  Chaucer will cue this poem with a warning so that people can turn off their sound and adjust the captions if they need to, and raise her hand to signal the reading is finished.

While Chaucer’s work grows out of the UK, her workshop partner Jeffery Sugarman is an American-born poet living in London.  Memories of the wildernesses of his native Florida followed him into a career in architecture and urban design in New York City.  He moved to London in 2009 with his English husband.  Jeff’s debut, Dear Friend(s), was published by the Emma Press in 2019 and explores the webs of connections that help form our identities, while elegising lost times and places that we carry within us. 

Like Chaucer’s compelling poems, Jeff’s urgent, tender work also resists silence, and silencing.  He interrogates the wordless-ness that can arise from long-form grieving, whether for growing up in a family whose centre was peopled by absences, or living with the memories of those lives ended prematurely through the HIV/AIDS epidemic. 

Beginning in a Florida of “whispers behind doors; valanced// curtains [...] his mother// in hospital unmoving” and travelling towards “bodies chafing on the blades// of St Augustine grass” as in the poem ‘Second Harvest’, Jeff questions the conventions of hetero-normativity, to ask what love means, and how it may be found. Through a Whitman-like embedding in the physical, the poems also contrast the repressions and denials of previous generations of queer lives with the gradual openings that have followed. They refer to sexual themes as part of their reclamatory voicing of long imposed silences.

It’s now my great honour to hand you over to Chaucer Cameron and Jeffery Sugarman. 

About Chaucer Cameron

Chaucer Cameron is a poet and poetry filmmaker. Her poems have been published in various journals, magazines & online, including Under the Radar, Poetry Salzburg, The North, Blue Nib, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Shed, Ink Sweat & Tears. Chaucer’s poetry-films have been screen-published in some of the growing number of journals and sites that are now accepting mixed media, such as Atticus Review.  

Chaucer is the creator of Wild Whispers an international poetry film project, and regularly curates and presents poetry film at events and festivals including: REELpoetry/HoustonTX, Garsdale Retreat in Yorkshire, Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, Athens Poetry Festival, MIX Conference Bath Spa University, Sheaf Poetry Festival in Sheffield.

She has performed at Ledbury Poetry Festival as part of a live performance combining British Sign Language poetry and video poetry (2017), Bath Fringe Festival Still Points Moving World performance writing exhibition,  and her poetry and monologues have been performed at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham.

• https://chaucercameron.com/

• www.elephantsfootprint.com 

• Poetry Film Live 

• bigpoetryweekend.

About Jeffery Sugarman

Jeffery Sugarman is an American-born poet living in London. He grew up in 1960s Florida when the state was still relatively untrammelled, a bit exotic – swampy, bursting with coconut palms, peacocks and mermaids; shaded by live oaks, draped with grey moss. He has written in various forms all his life: first, architecture and design criticism; then in planning and urban design over a 20-plus years career in New York City, where he lived, and began writing poetry, from the mid-1990s. He moved to London in 2009 with his English husband, and lives on Islington’s ‘west-side’.

Animated by many different types of kinship, the poems in Dear Friend(s) explore webs of experience that wind between parents, extended families and friends. They will take readers back to powerful, often early influences, which result from relations of likeness and empathy as well as blood. The long title poem is an elegy – to a specific Dear Friend, dead from AIDS in its earliest years. It’s also an elegy for the loss of innocence and freedom of sexual expression that flowed generously in the 1970s and 80s, in the UK and in the US.