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(The full range of Gunn's poetic powers is manifest in "Th...)
The full range of Gunn's poetic powers is manifest in "The Wound," "On the Move," "The Unsettled Motorcyclist's Vision of His Death," and other poems selected by Gunn from all of his full-length books
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(In his Collected Poems Thom Gunn has assembled all the wo...)
In his Collected Poems Thom Gunn has assembled all the work he considers worthy from throughout his remarkable career. Gunn's first book, Fighting Terms (1954), was quickly identified in The Cambridge Review as "one of the few volumes of post-war verse that all serious readers of poetry need to possess and study", and in the four decades since, he has come to be recognized as one of the finest poets writing in English. Collected Poems establishes the breadth and formal catholicity of his work, from the classically inspired early poems to the stylistically exuberant poems of the 1960s to the elegiac rhymed verse of The Man with Night Sweats (1992), in which, as John Updike wrote in The New Yorker, "the tension of Gunn's famous earlier poems...has become muted and commemorative". Born in 1929 and raised in Britain, Gunn has lived in northern California since 1954, and he describes himself as an Anglo-American poet. His poetry is likewise a mixture of apparently discordant elements, and he has made a specialty of playing style against subject, dealing with the out-of-control through tightly controlled meters and with the systematized through open forms. Some of the contents of Collected Poems has been out of print for many years. This gathering together of the full range of Thom Gunn's work reveals the enormous extent of his creative achievement.
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(Thom Gunn has been described as 'one of the most singular...)
Thom Gunn has been described as 'one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century' (TLS). This Selected Poems, compiled by his friend Clive Wilmer and accompanied by insightful notes, is the first edition to represent the full arc of Gunn's inimitable career. 'The poetry of Thom Gunn was much admired in his lifetime, and at the same time often misunderstood and underestimated. The scale of his achievement, and its uniqueness - a masterful Elizabethan lyric poet writing in the second half of the twentieth century - is just now becoming properly appreciated. Anonymous in voice, even in the service of the most intimate subject matter, acute in observation, particularly the urban experience, with San Francisco the principal site, Gunn is not merely the poet of the druggy '60s in California or the plague of the AIDS epidemic, but of the deeper-running themes, shared by Shakespeare, Baudelaire, William Carlos Williams and all his greatest exemplars, of the artist's moral and imaginative engagement with the world as it actually is, in the broadest possible sense, not as contemporary fashion might have it be. Which strikes me, who knew and loved the man and poet, as a kind of heroism.' August Kleinzahler'Thom Gunn smuggled the lyric tradition out of post-war Britain, and gave it cool, gracious renaissance in California. His poetry evokes the wild life of the body with madrigal-like elegance.' Fiona Sampson'Gunn's work illustrates with unusual clarity some of the debates poetry in English has pursued in the twentieth century - form versus improvisation, diction versus talk, the American way versus the English tradition, even, at times, authenticity versus art. To contain these contradictory impulses and . . . to have generated a body of work which anybody wanting to understand the period and identify some of its best poems will find essential reading - this is quite an achievement.' Sean O'Brien
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Gunn was born on the 29th of August 1929 in Gravesend, England, the son of Bert Gunn. Both of his parents were journalists. His father, Herbert Smith, and his mother, Ann Charlotte Thompson Gunn, were both journalists; they divorced when Gunn was nine.
After serving in the army, Gunn lived in Paris for a year, beginning to write there, then moved to Trinity College at Cambridge, where he focused seriously on writing poetry.
California Liberated Style Gunn published his first collection of poems, Fighting Terms, in 1954, the same year he began graduate study at Stanford University with poet Yvor Winters, who was known as a stern poetic rationalist.
Gunn studied at Stanford from 1954 to 1955 and again from 1956 to 1958, publishing his second collection, The Sense of Movement, in 1957.
Gunn traveled with his father, moving from town to town, and served in the British Army for two years, from 1948 to 1950. After serving in the army, Gunn lived in Paris for a year, beginning to write there, then moved to Trinity College at Cambridge, where he focused seriously on writing poetry.
His new home became an essential part of his work; the discipline and structure that characterized his early work began to combine with "Californian 'with it' subject matter, " according to New York Review of Books critic Stephen Bender.
In a San Francisco Chronicle interview, Gunn said coming to America "changed everything for me. "
The link between Gunn and the Movement, however, Gunn himself referred to as "categorizing foolishness. " In an interview with Contemporary Authors, Gunn proclaimed that he was "not a member of the Movement, and I don't think the Movement was a movement; I think it was simply a period style that extended way beyond the people who were supposed to be involved with it. " Throughout his career, Gunn has clearly defied any kind of easy categorization.
Counter Culture Influenced Poetry Settled in San Francisco, Gunn continued to write, and began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley in 1958 after graduate studies at Stanford.
Aside from occasional trips to England and a year teaching in San Antonio, Texas, Gunn has taught at Berkeley and lived in San Francisco ever since. "
In the 1966 and '76, Gunn was part of the pleasure-seeking culture of the hippies and gay liberation, " wrote San Francisco Chronicle reporter Jesse Hamlin. This culture included experimentation with LSD, which Gunn believes "increased the subject matter" of his poetry, giving him "more of an accepting attitude towards the world. " Writing About AIDS When AIDS struck San Francisco, Gunn lost many friends to the disease.
He voiced his opinion and vision of the epidemic in the clear and unsentimental manner characteristic of his work, particularly in poems like "The Man With Night Sweats" and "In Time of Plague. " Poetry's David Spurr wrote that Gunn "follows erotic impulse as well as disease-the pleasures and pains of the body-as a kind of corporeal index to the news of life and death. " But the poet did not actually plan to write "The Man With Night Sweats. "
But Gunn resists being identified with any particular group. According to William Logan of the New York Times Book Review, Gunn writes "of America without being of America. "
Interestingly, after more than 40 years of living in America, Gunn has chosen to remain a resident alien, perhaps attesting to his firm desire to remain an outsider.
However, he does show preference for the writing of his adopted home: "I find most English poetry terribly timid, " he told Contemporary Authors. "American poetry is much more interesting. " Collected Poems is Acclaimed With the release of 1994's Collected Poems, Gunn seems to have "made a peace with art, its beauty and inherent artifice, " according to Publishers Weekly. The collection reads as a personal retrospective of San Francisco.
Halfway through the book, though, Gunn began experimentation with free verse that was indicative of the chaotic, wild atmosphere of San Francisco in the 1976.
When Gunn began to write about AIDS in the 19806, his work became more compassionate, yet still unsentimental, and clear-headed. Tillinghast observed that "the poet is human enough to feel consoled, while at the same time having enough wry self-knowledge to undercut that consolation. " And Publishers Weekly opined that Gunn "avoids both naive realism and modernist self-referentiality. "
He was an award-winning poet Thom Gunn (born 1929) has concentrated on traditional form and, in contrast, on modern themes like LSD, panhandlers, and homosexuality.
He won Publishing Triangle's inaugural Triangle Award for Gay Poetry in 2001 for Boss Cupid; following his death, the award was renamed the Thom Gunn Award in his memory.
In 2003 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature together with Beryl Bainbridge.
He also received the Levinson Prize, an Arts Council of Great Britain Award, a Rockefeller Award, the W. H. Smith Award, the PEN (Los Angeles) Prize for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, the Forward Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.
In 2003 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature together with Beryl Bainbridge. He also received the Levinson Prize, an Arts Council of Great Britain Award, a Rockefeller Award, the W. H. Smith Award, the PEN (Los Angeles) Prize for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, the Forward Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.
He won Publishing Triangle's inaugural Triangle Award for Gay Poetry in 2001 for Boss Cupid; following his death, the award was renamed the Thom Gunn Award in his memory.
(The full range of Gunn's poetic powers is manifest in "Th...)
(Thom Gunn has been described as 'one of the most singular...)
(In his Collected Poems Thom Gunn has assembled all the wo...)
Quotations:
He began reading free verse-Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams-and embraced American culture. "I saw there were other things you could do. I started out with heroic stuff; full of Shakespearean-like heroes. Gradually, by the time I was living in San Francisco, I could write a poem called 'Taylor Street' about an old man sitting in a doorway. "
But Gunn's focus on form remained: "Whether describing the countryside of his native England or an acid trip in his adopted California, Gunn's poems have a singular purity of measure and tone, " reported Publishers Weekly. The Movement My Sad Captains, published in 1961, marked a turning point in Gunn's work from metrical to more lyrical language, and a turn towards the subject of nature.
My Sad Captains is frequently regarded as his best-known early collection. Originally, Gunn was associated with Philip Larkin and other poets of the Movement, who began to publish during the fifties and who rejected the Romantic excesses as well as the modernist revolution led by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. The Movement, according to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, "sought greater concreteness and a less high-flown diction for poetry. "
As he confessed to Hamlin, "I was writing about friends as they were dying, but I didn't realize the poems would have the impact they all did coming together. I was so impressed by the way people face death. So few people feel sorry for themselves, or whimper. I hope I can have such bravery, whatever kind of death I eventually have. "
Gunn said, "Being English is very important to me since I spent my first twenty-five years in England.
On the other hand . .. living in America is very important to me too, since I have spent more than half my life in this country. "
Especially at the beginning of the collection, Gunn "brings to demotic experience his finely-honed meter and incisive rhymes, " wrote Tillinghast. "The balanced caesuras, the Augustan assurance of verse, are worthy of Alexander Pope, the subject matter is Big Brother and the Holding Company territory. "
He was a member of the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.
Quotes from others about the person
Most remarkable about this collection of poetry is the "care, both in the making of the poem and in the concern for people. "
He addresses both the city of San Francisco and its citizens with "an intelligence and a warmth superior to those of virtually any other gay poet, " observed Booklist. The people who inhabit Gunn's poems, however, are a part of the world he seeks to subvert. In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, poet Donald Hall wrote that he did "not find [Gunn] pledging allegiance to anything except his own alert, unforgiving, skeptical independence. "
In 1954, Gunn emigrated to the United States to teach writing at Stanford University and to remain close to his partner, Mike Kitay, whom he had met while at college. Gunn and Kitay continued to reside together until Gunn's death.
