Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn, born Thomson William Gunn, was an Anglo-American poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement and his later poetry in America, even after moving toward a looser, free-verse style. After relocating from England to San Francisco, Gunn wrote about gay-related topics—particularly in his most famous work, The Man With Night Sweats in 1992—as well as drug use, sex and his bohemian lifestyle. He won major literary awards...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth29 August 1929
With my creative writing students, I've taught literature more than I've taught writing courses'I just hope to make them better.
Edmund White said he thought coming out in public was good for any writer's work. It was for mine, because the subject matter is so much greater.
When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.
When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.
While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.
Being in the closet, I saw being homosexual as a deliberate choice. It's got nothing to do with choice or the will, but I was being defiant about it.
The painter saw what was, an alternate Candor and secrecy inside the skin.
I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.
I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.
I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about.
I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other.
Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.