GLR September-October 2024

Cool in Both Senses

P ROLIFIC, acclaimed, and contro versial, poet Thom Gunn pub lished over thirty books of poems and two collections of essays, and he edited four collections of poetry. He was the recipient of numerous awards and prizes for his achievements in literature. Mid-career, he became a queer icon eulo gizing friends lost to AIDS and celebrating gay sexuality with his Leatherman persona. He died of “acute polysubstance abuse” in 2004.*

Snyder, Robert Duncan, Ezra Pound, Eliz abeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, and other poets he admired. Michael Nott’s Thom Gunn: A Cool QueerLife provides illustrative backstories and perceptive insights into Gunn’s life and work. Nott was a coeditor of The Let ters of Thom Gunn (2022 ) and draws upon that research, along with interviews as well as the artist’s notebooks and diaries, to pro

J OHN R. K ILLACKY

THOMGUNN A Cool Queer Life by Michael No tt Farrar, Straus and Giroux 720 pages, $40.

duce the new biography. Despite considerable success, Gunn struggled with writer’s block after each book was published. “I don’t usually feel fully alive unless I am in the middle of writing,” he told a friend. Nott describes how, during these dry periods, Gunn would lose him self in sexual cruising and escalating drug use. This pattern be came increasingly complicated as he aged and started to worry that he was less desirable. In 1992, he published an elegiac collection, The Man With

Gunn was born in England in 1929; both parents were jour nalists. At the age of 15, he and his younger brother Ander found their mother dead from suicide. It took him over fifty years to address this profound loss. In one of his last poems, “My Mother’s Pride,” he wrote: “I am made by her, and undone.” He was educated at Cambridge University and wrote his first col lection of poems while still an undergraduate. Gunn’s early po etry was erudite, witty, and elegantly wrought, but it was seen

Night Sweats , which grappled with the AIDS pandemic. In one poem, he laments: “Now as I watch the progress of the plague,/ The friends surrounding me fall sick, grow thin,/ And drop away.” It became his most acclaimed work, emblematic of the power of art to speak to unbearable loss. The following year he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant. His final book of poems, Boss Cupid , was published in 2000, the year after he retired from teaching. His recreational use of crystal meth had spiraled into ad diction as he increasingly tweaked with “homeless speed freaks” that he picked up to have sex with, accord ing to housemates. In 2004, they found him dead at the age of 74. Nott’s scholarship is impressive, with 144 pages of footnotes refer encing interviews, letters, note books, and diary entries. The book takes us into the artist’s composi tional process, as drafts and unfin ished works are highlighted. Often reticent about feelings, Gunn told critics: “I don’t like dramatizing myself.” This important new biog raphy illuminates the private life of Thom Gunn and, by uncovering some of his sources of inspiration, makes his beautiful words ever more resonant.

as coolly detached, framed in meter and rhyme. As he progressed, he experimented with syllabic and free verse, juggling tradition and inno vation along with high and low themes. At Cambridge, he met his life partner Mike Kitay, an American theater artist. In 1953, they moved to California and settled into the Bay Area. A Guggenheim Founda tion fellowship allowed him to put a down payment on their Victorian house in San Francisco’s Upper Haight neighborhood. Gunn taught at UC Berkeley from 1958 to 1999, but only one term each year so he could focus on writing. California themes infused his poetry. Drug taking, gay sexuality, and hyper masculine bikers in leather were lyrically portrayed. He also pub lished analytical essays about William Carlos Williams, Gary ______________________ * For additional material on Thom Gunn, visit the G&LR archives, no tably: Felix Hawlins’s review of The Letters of Thom Gunn (March-April 2022); and remembrances by Chuck Forester (Sept.-Oct. 2005) and Al fred Corn (Nov.-Dec. 2022). John R. Killacky is the author of Be cause Art: Commentary, Critique, & Conversation. September–October 2024

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