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.
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.
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.
I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.
When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew.
One is always nearer by not keeping still,
I'm not sure I had ever written a fan letter before to a poet I had not met, but that's what I did when I read two poems by Gregory Woods ... I admired them especially for their technical virtuosity, in that it was technique completely used, never for the sake of cleverness but as a component of feeling ... What an enviable talent Gregory Woods has
How sociable the garden was. We ate and talked in given light. The children put their toys to grass All the warm wakeful August night.
As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.
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.
My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.