#TheWhiskeyShot: Poet Spotlight (Wave 2) – Barney Ashton Bullock

Barney Ashton-Bullock doesn’t just write poems, he assembles them, sculpts them, listens for the friction and fizz between words like a sound designer tuning for emotional pitch. “I’ve always had a joy of the connectivity of one word to the next,” he says. “Each word is a raw material… a sculptural pastime.” For Ashton-Bullock, poetry isn’t about decoration, it’s about extraction. Distillation. Wrangling meaning from language in all its mess and music. “Poetry thrives in this simmering to essence,” he adds, “a lifelong puzzle with many thoroughfares of mysterious diversion to explore.” And he’s taken most of them, headlong, eyes wide open.

His creative life has never been ruled by trend or competition. “The only challenge I face is from poets who are wildly competitive,” he says, blunt as ever. Ashton-Bullock doesn’t chase approval. He chases truth, his own. “If the work doesn’t organically seep from oneself… then I guess one could feel a sense of competition.” But that capitalist impulse to package creativity? “I always think: screw that. It is art. It is outlet. It is expression.” His poems emerge not from performance, but from quietude, an inner tuning. “That is a significant challenge in an age of overstimulation,” he reflects, “to find those trickles of unsullied truth within the floods of onslaught.”

And yet, the inspiration is everywhere. Music, especially, cracks things open. “Different passages of music can skew me into different moods.” So does photography, images of other times, other lives, half-lost. “Wondering whether the people in the scenes became the people they intended to be,” he muses. That tension between ideal and real, between self and society, is where his poems hum with meaning. Whether drawing from his own life or imagined lives, Ashton-Bullock writes with one eye on the hurt and one hand on the mic, turning personal damage into cultural noise.

Isolation is a gift, not a burden. “Isolation is my best pal for attuning myself to plucking the inner vibes of inspo,” he says. Coastal Norway is his spiritual basecamp, where the melancholy work emerges, pure but private. “The work I generate there is of a particular oeuvre of melancholy… beautiful goodbyes and brutal honesty. It’s not for sharing.” But it’s foundational. It fuels the clarity in his published voice. “It has enabled me to greatly understand myself and the creative impulse that propels my published work.”

That published work is bold, unapologetic, and consistently inventive. Beau, Beau, Sadisto! (Back Room Poetry, 2023) and Cul-de-Sacrilege! (Polari Press, 2022) lead a body of work that spans from the satirical to the sacred, often both at once. Titles like F**kpig Zeitgeist! and Schema/Stasis aren’t flippant, they’re fierce acts of reframing identity, desire, politics, and pain. He’s also behind the sharp-edged Torsten Verse Diaries, exploring queerness, shame, love, and culture through his long-time musical/theatrical collaboration with Andy Bell (Erasure).

Of all his work, Cul-de-Sacrilege! stands out as a turning point. “It was the first time that I was on a real journey excavating and refracting from my own experience of being the archetypal ‘Smalltown Boy,’” he says. The book plunges into queer adolescence, heartbreak, dislocation, and longing. “The thwarting suppression of young desire… the unconsolable nature of the loss of first love… the awful lovers one dallied a while with,” he recalls. Every page was a form of reckoning. “Writing Cul-de-Sacrilege! very much helped me be easier on my memories of my younger self… helped me come to terms and release that existential pain.”

Ashton-Bullock’s work exists where theatre, memory, and revolution overlap. From the Royal Court’s Young Writers’ Programme to indie presses and international collaborations, his career has never played it safe. He refracts the personal until it hits everyone. He refuses stasis, even when his poems whisper about it. He believes in art as resistance, reflection, reinvention, and it shows.

No one else writes quite like him. No one else needs to.