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
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.
We control the content of our dreams.
Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
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.
We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.
I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop.
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.
One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.
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.