GLR November-December 2022

better. The detail, the honesty, the unflinching gaze developed in it set it apart from other well-meaning treatments. Thom himself, by some miracle, never contracted the virus. But the death toll among his friends and acquaintances was cata strophic, and I believe living through that era changed him profoundly. A year later, I wrote about Tom’s entire œuvre in an essay commissioned by Encyclopædia Brittanica ’s annual series, The Great Ideas Today . Thom was one of the five contemporary poets I settled on to represent contemporary English-language poetry—the others being Anthony Hecht, Derek Walcott, Adri enne Rich, and Seamus Heaney. He probably saw the Poetry re view and definitely read the Britannica essay, because I sent it to him. He never mentioned them, though, maybe because he thought commenting on any critical assessment of his work was improper. Or he may have felt that it was presumptuous of someone so young in the art to rate his achievement, even if praising it. I received a few more postcards from him and faithfully read whatever he published, even the blurbs he gave younger poets, some of which provoked a puzzled “What?” from me. Thom was a soft touch where his friends or even acquaintances were concerned. He also gave me a comment for my book Autobi ographies , one no doubt just as puzzling to my fellow blurbees as theirs were to me. Its brevity only increased the impact: “Al fred Corn remains one of the living poets who mean the most to me.” I was stunned. Our next meeting had not been arranged in advance. In the

early 1990s, I gave a reading at Harvard’s Warren House, and when I looked out at those attending, there was Thom, who hap pened to be in Cambridge. We spoke afterward, but only briefly. I could tell that other audience members were impressed that he’d shown up, and, truth to tell, so was I. We had lunch during one of his visits to New York in the mid-1990s. I remember it was at a midtown Indian restaurant, though not much of what was said. That’s the last time I saw him. He didn’t alert me to later visits, but word got out, and I wrote to ask him why he hadn’t called. No explanation was forthcoming. He stopped answering my letters. I still wonder why, but there’s little chance of finding out. I continued reading him, a little saddened that the friendship had dried up, but such events are common among artists. Finally, it doesn’t matter. I hold close the part of him that was inspiriting, which includes his exemplary courage to live according to his convictions. Above all, there is his body of work—honest, well-made and often redemptively outrageous. In 2009 Joshua Weinberg brought out At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn , a collection of essays, one of them by me in which I discussed the influence that French culture and Existentialist philosophy had on him. A few months later, I par ticipated in a celebratory event for the book organized by the Poetry Society of America. Looking out to the audience, obvi ously I didn’t see him, but felt, irrationally, that he was some how there. Somehow there and still “daring a future from the taken routes,” doing so not just for Brando and the “wild ones,” but for all of us.

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November–December 2022

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