Selected Poems of Thom Gunn

by Thom Gunn

  (D. H. Lawrence, ‘Introduction to New Poems’, Selected

  Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal, London: Heinemann,

  1956, pp. 84–89)

  The incompleteness Lawrence talks about had always been part of Gunn’s subject matter, inseparable from his preoccupation with energy. As he says in ‘On the Move’, ‘One is always nearer by not keeping still’, and ‘One moves … always toward, toward’. The excitement of Gunn’s earlier poetry had lain in the tension between form and content, yet it is not surprising that he should also have come to admire a poetry which possessed the very qualities that moved him in real life.

  In the 1980s and 1990s, Gunn was to talk about his poetry in terms of ‘openness’ and ‘closure’, terms derived largely from post-modern theory but associated in his thinking with the ideas and practice of the fiercely experimental poet Robert Duncan, who became a friend of Gunn’s in the 1970s. Gunn was very much inspired, not always to good effect, by Duncan’s notion of the poem as a process, as a construct that was essentially incomplete. But as his elegy for Duncan, written in strictly metrical form, suggests, there remained in his mind occasions to which a poetry of closure, Lawrence’s poetry of the past, was more appropriate than a poetry of openness such as Duncan’s. (See ‘Duncan’, pp. 181–82, and the note for it on pp. 268–69.) In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many of Gunn’s contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic abandoned metre in favour of free verse. Gunn by contrast continued to regard free verse and orthodox metre as viable alternatives. Free verse became a new string to his bow, but metre continued to make some things possible that were not possible without it. It is noteworthy that at two key periods of his subsequent life – in the late 1960s, when he was experimenting with psychedelic drugs, and in the late 1980s, when numbers of his friends began dying of AIDS – he produced bodies of work in iambic metre that stand among his finest achievements.

  The alternation between old and new manners, however, was not always productive. He was never happy with Touch, which he thought dull, over-moralistic and uncertain in direction. Much of it was, paradoxically, the outcome of a very productive year, 1964–65, spent in London. The carnival atmosphere of ‘swinging London’ and the sound of joyful rebellion made by the Beatles appealed to Gunn’s temperament. He had written a book of verse captions for photographs by his brother, Ander (Positives, 1965; see p. 223), and completed a long sequence, ‘Misanthropos’ (pp. 58–79), about the lone survivor of a nuclear war. It was in Positives that he first achieved the transition from syllabics to free verse, and it was there, too, that he began to work out a more humanistic attitude to life. The early work had been largely heroic in tone. In the first half of My Sad Captains, very much under the influence of Albert Camus, who had replaced Sartre in his enthusiasms, Gunn began wondering what heroic action would be in ‘a valueless world’ (to quote from ‘On the Move’). As in Camus’s novel The Plague (1947), moral action is an arbitrary choice; it brings no advantage with it, except the affirmation of our humanity. Two poems about Nazi Germany exemplified this outlook: ‘Innocence’ (pp. 33–34) evokes the career of a young SS officer whose amoral upbringing has resulted in moral numbness, while Claus von Stauffenberg, in the poem of that name, motivated by love of honour ‘In a cold time where honour cannot grow’, refuses to accept that ‘An unsanctioned present must be primitive’ (p. 38). In a quieter and more circumstantial way, the Positives captions look affectionately at what it is to be human. They do so in a manner that Gunn had learned in part from the poems of Williams, on whom at the time he was writing a groundbreaking essay (OP, pp. 21–35). ‘Misanthropos’, which he included in Touch, brings these different elements together. It even includes a poem, ‘Epitaph for Anton Schmidt’, which deliberately calls to mind the German poems from My Sad Captains. But there are also syllabic poems, which show Gunn as a poet able to respond imaginatively to fortuitous circumstance. ‘Misanthropos’ is not an unqualified success. The first two-thirds of the poem is as good as anything Gunn wrote and seems to anticipate a work of real authority, but the last section, in which the persona rediscovers his humanity, suffers from crude didacticism and plods rather heavily along.

  The moral of ‘Misanthropos’ is that we rediscover our humanity through touch: not through willing ourselves to virtue but by opening up to others. This is the theme of the title poem, ‘Touch’, which is probably the finest of Gunn’s love poems. Getting into bed with his sleeping lover, the speaker rediscovers the warmth of their shared lives. ‘You are already / asleep’, he begins, and then ends with an echo of that beginning:

  What I, now loosened,

  sink into is an old

  big place, it is

  there already, for

  you are already

  there …

  … the place is

  not found but seeps

  from our touch in

  continuous creation, dark

  enclosing cocoon round

  ourselves alone, dark

  wide realm where we

  walk with everyone.

  With its short lines and stark enjambments it is very much a poem of process; it calls to mind the style of Robert Creeley, though the content is reminiscent of John Donne. What the process seems to reveal is the recovery of a warmth the speaker and his partner had been losing. This reflects something of Gunn’s life in the late 1960s. Growing away from armoured solitude seems to have involved becoming more openly promiscuous, a development that was eventually to loosen his relationship with Mike Kitay. In 1972 Gunn bought a house on Cole Street in Haight-Ashbury, the ‘hippie’ district of San Francisco. He and Kitay expanded their relationship to include other men, their own relationship ceasing to be sexual, and the house became, in effect, a gay commune – or as Gunn, ever one to épater les bourgeois, liked to say: ‘a queer household’ (PR, p. 150). The changes in social mores associated with the 1960s were spreading across the world and San Francisco was in the vanguard. Young people were ‘dropping out’ and ‘turning on’, and Gunn, Kitay and their friends identified with them. They attended the free rock concerts in Golden Gate Park and experimented with the mind-expanding drug LSD. These experiences and a personal quest to rediscover human innocence resulted in the achievement of which Gunn was most proud: Moly (1971) can be read as a single work on the themes of metamorphosis, evolving identity, and the physical world as paradise. The title refers to a magical herb that features in Homer’s Odyssey. In Gunn’s book, it stands for the consciousness-changing drugs, such as LSD, with which he was experimenting.

  The Moly poems represent (to borrow from a title of William Empson’s) a version of pastoral. They recall that element in the Elizabethan poetry Gunn so loved. They also revive the early vision of America as the new paradise, uninfected by the sins of the Old World. In one of the poems not included here (‘To Natty Bumppo’), Gunn says of a field:

  Open on all sides, it is held in common,

  The first field of a glistening continent

  Each found by trusting Eden in the human

  But though he insists on the utopian element implicit in the words ‘open’, ‘trusting’ and ‘in common’, he is also aware of the conflicts and complexes that occupy the human interior. The dope-peddler who, in ‘Street Song’ (pp. 94–95), brings the possibility of visionary experience, proposes his inward journey in these terms:

  Call it heaven, call it hell,

  Join me and see the world I sell.

  Join me, and I will take you there,

  Your head will cut out from your hair

  Into whichever self you choose.

  This is surely alarming. It is not only that we might not care to risk hell, but that the choice of selves is not, to most of us, an obvious benefit either. Gunn’s exploration of his own identity, moreover, is hardly confined to the terms of love and peace. The opening poem of the collection, ‘Rites of Passage’ (p. 85), evokes an Ovidian metamorphosis that is plainly to be understood in terms of the Oedipu
s complex: a fierce conflict between the hated father and the desired mother, the latter long dead and buried but still insistently present to the poet as his Muse. In his notebooks and conversation Gunn would insist on the femininity of the Muse, even in the imagination of a gay man. This is the subject of a fine earlier poem, ‘The Goddess’ (p. 55), and is firmly stated here: ‘I stamp upon the earth / A message to my mother.’

  The utopian pastoral of the Moly poems found its antithesis in the much less successful volume that succeeded it, Jack Straw’s Castle (1976). The poems that open the collection, all in traditional metre, to some extent continue and develop the world of Moly; but the title poem and a group of free verse poems related to it disclose the darker consequences of the drug culture. The castle of the title is partly the human body and partly the usual setting for ‘Gothick’ nightmare. It is presided over by the notorious ‘hippie’ psychopath Charles Manson, who had driven the members of the so-called ‘Manson family’ to commit nine murders at their commune in the Californian desert. The book concludes on a gentler note, however, with a number of autobiographical poems, mostly about Gunn’s former life in England. Jack Straw’s Castle is an uneven collection, but it marks a significant change in Gunn’s work: it was in the title poem, for instance, that Gunn ‘came out’ as a gay poet, having masked his orientation in earlier books. From now on, Gunn had at his disposal a substantial range of new subject matter.

  For most of the 1960s, Gunn had been an Associate Professor at Berkeley. He was by all accounts an effective and charismatic teacher of English literature and creative writing, as poets such as Jim Powell, Belle Randall and Joshua Weiner, all taught by him, have testified. Temperamentally, teaching suited him. He liked the daytime discipline: he read and wrote on the bus journeys across the Bay Bridge to work. Teaching, moreover, kept him in touch with the young, as with the need for poetry to communicate. In the early 1970s, however, he decided to go part-time in order to give himself more freedom to write. He was eventually to return to a more regular programme, perhaps conscious that empty days do not necessarily fill up with creative achievement.

  Jack Straw’s Castle was followed in 1982 by The Passages of Joy, a book poised between the open and closed aspects of his poetry. The subjects of The Passages of Joy are friendship, pleasure and the passing of time. Gunn was now fifty-three and this was very much the book of a middle-aged man, looking back on past delights and re-evaluating friendships – most, though not all, of the friends being representative of the life of gay men in this new, more open era. The year 1982 also saw the publication of The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography, which included the essay on William Carlos Williams, introductions to Fulke Greville and Ben Jonson, and some pungently condensed essays in autobiography. Eleven years later, a further collection of criticism, Shelf Life, contained the finest of his essays, ‘What the Slowworm Said’, on Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Basil Bunting, as well as articles on Robert Duncan and memoirs of Yvor Winters and Christopher Isherwood. Gunn’s criticism is impressive, though modestly framed; it is always accurate and sharply exemplified, but not at all academic. The prose is direct and limpid; he does not theorise but leads the reader through the process of reading poems.

  In 1983 the world began to be conscious of a new epidemic. It was called acquired immune deficiency syndrome but quickly came to be known by the acronym AIDS. In the Western world, its most visible victims were sexually active gay men, and San Francisco became the epicentre of what quickly came to be perceived as a real plague. As the plague spread, so did alarm. In 1986 Gunn agreed to care for a close friend dying of the disease. His two-week bedside vigil resulted in the longest continuous poem that he wrote, the 116 lines of ‘Lament’ (pp. 167–71), a major addition to the great English tradition of pastoral elegy that includes poems by Milton, Shelley and Tennyson. Soon afterwards other friends fell ill and died. One month in 1987 saw the deaths of no fewer than four of Gunn’s friends, two of them on the same day. Among them was Charlie Hinkle, a talented young poet in his late twenties with whom Gunn was emotionally and sexually involved. In ‘The J Car’ (pp. 175–76), he evokes his late meetings with Hinkle as the latter’s short life reached its last stage:

  I’d leave him to the feverish sleep ahead,

  Myself to ride through darkened yards instead

  Back to my health. Of course I simplify.

  Of course. It tears me still that he should die

  As only an apprentice to his trade,

  The ultimate engagements not yet made.

  His gifts had been withdrawing one by one

  Even before their usefulness was done:

  This optic nerve would never be relit;

  The other flickered, soon to be with it.

  Unready, disappointed, unachieved,

  He knew he would not write the much-conceived

  Much-hoped-for work now, nor yet help create

  A love he might in full reciprocate.

  If Gunn ever rose to an occasion, it was in these poems expressing these dreadful losses. The poems recall the tone of Ben Jonson, master of brief laments and the poetry of friendship. Gunn disliked the Confessional poetry of the 1960s and 1970s, with its emphasis on self-display and self-exposure. The stoical reticence practised by Jonson now gave him the means of writing about his loss without betraying the depths of private feeling or falling into hysteria. As more and more friends died, a string of elegies followed, each of them deeply poignant, the poignancy an effect of the reticence. The achievement is as much moral as literary. The collection containing these poems, The Man with Night Sweats (1992), brought about a revival in Gunn’s reputation.

  Remarkably, Gunn did not himself contract AIDS, though the title poem of The Man with Night Sweats evokes his apprehensions in that regard. He began to think of himself as a survivor and death became a major new subject for him. There were not only the AIDS elegies, but the poems he wrote about literary friends – Christopher Isherwood (p. 161) and, later, in his last book, Boss Cupid (2000), Robert Duncan (pp. 181–82). Then, in 1991, he finally dealt with the death that had haunted him since the age of fourteen: his mother’s. ‘The Gas-poker’ begins with reflections on the length of time that had passed: ‘Forty-eight years ago / – Can it be forty-eight / Since then? – they forced the door …’ The key word there is ‘they’. He at last succeeded in getting the memory down only when it had occurred to him – taking a hint from Thomas Hardy – that it was possible to write in the third person. A slight crankiness to the rhyme scheme and metre also recalls Hardy – in disyllabic rhymes such as ‘barricaded’/‘they did’, for instance. It is by ‘closures’ of this kind that Gunn succeeds in distancing the experience and, as in the AIDS elegies, it is precisely the note of reticence needed for speech to occur at all that moves the reader, who is forced to imagine for him- or herself the pain that occasioned the poem.

  Like the AIDS elegies – and in remoter ways, like ‘Misanthropos’ and Moly – ‘The Gas-poker’ is a pastoral. The setting is a garden. The ‘sort of backwards flute’ that fed gas into Charlotte Gunn’s mouth is a perversion of the reed or ‘oaten stop’ of pastoral song. ‘Ago’ at the end of the first line rhymes with the first lines of each of the four subsequent stanzas, the sequence culminating with ‘flow’, which evokes the uninterrupted flow of a musical line. The brothers ‘Repeating their lament’ are not only in the everyday sense a burden to each other, but to quote the line correctly ‘A burden, to each other’ – that is (in musical terms), ‘a chorus or refrain, or the drone of an instrument’. The dead woman is, at the end of the poem, filled up by the poker’s ‘music’ and so ‘mute’. Mute, yet alive in her son’s songs, whose Muse, giver of music, she had always been.

  Reading this poem with its distancing, wit and artistry, it is not difficult to see why Gunn was wary of Confessional poetry. ‘I don’t like dramatizing myself,’ he said in an interview. ‘I don’t want to be Sylvia Plath’ (JC, p. 15). As it happens, he didn�
�t read the last poems of Sylvia Plath until 1965 – two years after her death – when I lent him my copies. When he returned them to me, he wrote this:

  I am still not quite sure what they add up to. Each poem is a series of exclamations and images loosely connected by the themes stated in the title, but the connection is often very loose. Only about two of the poems … have any construction worth talking about. The result is that they together make a kind of rambling hysterical monologue, which is fine for people who believe in art as Organic but less satisfactory for those who demand more. Nevertheless there are some incredibly beautiful passages, where an image suddenly emerges from the crowd of other images and takes over for a few lines … The trouble is with the emotion, itself, really: it is largely one of hysteria, and it is amazing that her hysteria has produced poetry as good as this. I think there’s a tremendous danger in the fact that we know she committed suicide. If they were anonymous poems I wonder how we’d take them.

  (CW, 25 February 1965)

  What he did not say is that, if he had wanted to be Plath, he had the perfect subject matter ready and waiting. But he didn’t believe that dying was an art and his subject hurt too much to permit direct expression.

  It is beginning to be clear that Gunn’s last two books were carefully planned as the formal conclusion to his life’s work. He may not have been consistent in this plan, but despite the appearance of bohemian spontaneity, he was an orderly man – almost obsessively so – and he had very clear ideas of what he wanted his work to be. Any poem that dissatisfied him he excluded from the books, and each is meticulously shaped. Not long after publishing The Passages of Joy in 1982, Gunn told his friends and publishers that he would not be publishing another book for ten years, about twice as long as his usual gap between books. He had always found that, once a new book was out, he would suffer from writer’s block for a year or two, so he decided that this time he would not think about a new collection until he was sure he had more than enough poems to select from. In the event, the AIDS elegies, which he could not have anticipated, determined the shape of The Man with Night Sweats and there were a few poems left over that found their way into his last book. The opening poem of Boss Cupid, ‘Duncan’, was begun as early as 1988, when he was still involved with writing about AIDS, and it continues the preoccupation with elegy, as does ‘The Gas-poker’, written a year before the publication of The Man with Night Sweats. Everything else one can say about Boss Cupid suggests that he knew it would be his last production.