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
As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.
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 don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.
I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.
Much that is natural, to the will must yield. Men manufacture both machine and soul, And use what they imperfectly control To dare a future from the taken routes.
Thus for each blunt-faced ignorant one The great grey rigid uniform combined Safety with virtue of the sun. Thus concepts linked like chainmail in the mind.
Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly.
We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
My thoughts are crowded with death and it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused to be attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation.
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.
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.