RJ ARKHIPOV.
RJ Arkhipov on his book, Visceral: The Poetry of Blood, which explores the intimacies and stigma of the contemporary gay experience.
Welsh poet RJ Arkhipov has just released his first book, Visceral: The Poetry of Blood, a stunning collection of LGBTQ poems and powerful imagery, conceived by RJ and French photographer Maud Maillard.
The queer artist has become notable for creating photographs with his blood, and chose this method as a protest against the discrimination of blood donation for gay men. He tells us: “If my blood is unworthy of saving lives, I thought to myself, I shall pour it into my poetry and rouse a resistance against the stigma of gay blood.”
In celebration of Visceral’s release, we caught up with RJ and discussed his incredible anthology and why it’s taking so long for the UK to see everyone as equal.
Where did your inspiration for creating work with your blood come from?
My book, Visceral: The Poetry of Blood, began as a handful of poems back in 2015. I was inspired by a line attributed most often to Ernest Hemingway: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Dwelling on those words, I recognised that blood was a substance of potent metaphor. Blood courses in constant flux throughout our bodies, from before we are born up until the moment we die, transforming effortlessly from liquid into solid when it escapes us. It is universally understood and lends itself well to the embodiment of family, sacrifice, violence, and stigma. With this in mind, I set myself to writing a few poems using my own blood as ink. As I was having my blood taken, I thought of blood donation and how the blood of gay men is unfairly discriminated against throughout the world, including in the UK. From that moment onwards, writing the “blood poems” became an act of protest more than anything else. If my blood is unworthy of saving lives, I thought to myself, I shall pour it into my poetry and rouse a resistance against the stigma of gay blood.
What are people’s reactions when you explain how you create your work?
An eclectic mix of disbelief, disgust, confusion, and curiosity. Those who were curious took the time to understand the meaning behind the medium, particularly the underlying political aims. What surprised me most of all was the sheer number of people who were unaware of the abstinence required of gay men to donate blood. The scandalous nature of my “blood poetry” offered a shock to consciousness that ink alone would not have achieved. I am by no means the first to have written with my own blood as ink though. Among the works written in blood, you can count the Marquis de Sade’s manuscript for The 120 Days of Sodom and a number of sacred texts including several Buddhist scrolls now in the possession of the British Library, and Saddam Hussein’s Quran. Each one of their authors had differing reasons for writing with blood. When you engage with that choice more abstractly, you begin to see another dimension to the written work, where the medium itself adds to the meaning.
The laws against gay men giving blood is improving, but still has a way to go. Why do you think it’s taking so long for the UK to see everyone as equal?
I am confounded by the government’s lethargy on this issue. Our current blood donor policy does not reflect a concern for public safety or a commitment to equality. If it did, we would have implemented a truly individual risk-based assessment whereby each person is assessed according to their own personal risk. The banning of men in Britain who have had a sexual encounter with another man in the past three months remains very much rooted in assumption and prejudice. Under the current policy, a seronegative gay man in a monogamous relationship is unable to donate his blood if he has made love to his partner once within the past three months. Even if that single encounter was protected or exclusively oral sex. A heterosexual man or woman, however, with numerous unprotected penetrative sexual encounters faces no such limitation. Not only is the proscription irrational, it further burdens our community with stigma and deprives the NHS of much needed blood donations.
How did you choose the name “Visceral” for your book?
As a child, I would often read the dictionary. From beginning to end, I would go through each of the letters as though they were chapters. I acquired an appreciation for words which captured vastly distinct definitions in a single combination of letters and sounds. The word “visceral” is one such word. Deriving from the latin “viscus” referring to the internal parts of the body, notably the heart, stomach, lungs, and intestines (which were believed to be the seat of emotion), the word “visceral” nowadays refers either to the internal organs or to something based on deep feelings and emotional reactions, rather than reason or thought. As blood and sentiment were the very essence of my poetry, the word “visceral” was undoubtedly the mot juste for the title of my book.
Why did you choose French photographer Maud Maillard to illustrate your work?
I left Wales and moved to Paris when I was eighteen years old. In the six years I lived in the French capital, I met some of the most exquisite minds and a great many talented artists. Among them was French photographer Maud Maillard. Not long after I met Maud, a magazine offered to publish a series of her photographs. She asked if I would pen a few words of poetry to accompany her images and I was honoured to oblige. Those words would become my first published poem. My poetry and her photography have a history together. There is an intimate melancholy in both our works. In this way, my visual language and her poetic photography complement one another. On top of that, working with your own blood as an artistic medium throws up all sorts of complications when you’re working alongside other artists, but Maud was not squeamish in the slightest. A true artist herself, she understood that using my own blood — rather than the artificial kind — was important to me and didn’t hesitate to get her hands bloody.