GLR November-December 2022

ESSAY

Thom Gunn, a Poet on the Move A LFRED C ORN

T HE FIRST GLIMPSE I had of Thom Gunn was his picture in a poetry anthology titled The Modern Poets , edited by John Malcolm Brin nin and William Read. It was assigned as a textbook in an English literature class I was taking at Emory University in 1963, with con sequences for me that the teacher could not have anticipated. That anthology was the first to include pictures of the poets alongside their selection, a bonus that always makes the reader curious about

They ride, direction where the tires press. They scare a flight of birds across the field: 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.

Thom was determined to “dare a future” from roads not usually taken by poets, in an act of will needed for “soul making.” He had determined that a soul would be most authentically made if he lived as an outlier, an unapologetic queer renegade, indifferent to mid dle-class values and literary co teries. In the recently published collection of his letters ( The Letters of Thom Gunn, selected and edited by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler, and Clive Wilmer), he mentions Brando ad miringly several times, an admiration that began with The Wild One . It prompted Thom to get a “hog” himself and ride around in it for a while, until his authentic self-understanding prompted him to let it go. His time was better spent at the writ ing desk. § F AST FORWARD TO N EW Y ORK , autumn, 1966. I had just begun living with Ann Jones, both of us graduate students at Columbia, both of us very much in love, notwithstanding that my first sexual experiences had been gay, as she knew and perfectly accepted. She’d been an undergrad at Berkeley, involved in the pivotal Free Speech Movement there, and had bedded down before with at least one other gay fellow student. We were unconventional anti-establishment bohemians, and proud of it. Soon I was introduced to her friend Pam, whom she’d known at Berkeley. Rem iniscing about her undergraduate coursework, Pam mentioned that she’d been in an English class taught by Thom Gunn. I pricked up my ears. She said she liked him a lot, especially when he complimented her pet, a German shepherd she usually brought with her to class. That was worth pondering, and I wanted to hear more, but she couldn’t think of any other unusual details. Later I learned that Thom taught for one quarter each year, passing up tenure,

how the writer’s appearance bears on the work itself. Most of the poets (all but one of them white) looked like solid, middle-class citizens, the men often in jacket and tie, the women in suit dresses. That included Elizabeth Bishop, a serene presence with hair in a neat short cut. (A decade later she would dedicate her poem “The End of March” to Brinnin and Read. By then I would know that the editors were in fact a couple.) The anthology was my first expo

sure to Bishop and also to James Mer rill, photographed in a shirt with the top button unbuttoned and seated in front of his piano. Eventually, I got to the photo of a lean, tough-looking customer with deeply creased cheeks, wearing tight jeans and a leather jacket, outdoors in open air and sun light, a cigarette jabbed in his mouth. He was identified as Thom Gunn, a name as striking as his appearance, which fit (as did his tight jeans) the longish poem next to it. That was titled “On the Move,” and its subject was unorthodox: bikers, re sembling those in the Marlon Brando film The Wild One . After a description of their leather, their goggles, and their bikes, Gunn says: Exact conclusion of their hardiness Has no shape yet, but from known whereabouts

Alfred Corn’s selected poems, titled The Returns, appeared last April. In 2021, he published a new version of Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

The G & LR

16