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Home
Authors
Thom Gunn
British
Poet
About the author
When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Will
#Sense
#Fact
#Shakespeare
When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Being
#First
#Editors
#Poems
When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Teaching
#First
#Teachers
#Gay
We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Reading
#Poems
As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Art
#Treasure
We control the content of our dreams.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Dreams
#Control
#Content
My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Old
#Poetry
Many of my poems are not sexual.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Poems
I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Passion
#Sex
I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Home
#Self
I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Want
#Formula
We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#University
It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Time
#Being
#English
#Fame
#Gay
I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Reading
#Poetry
#Poems
I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#State
#Reading
#Students
#Poets
I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Being
#Men
I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Years
I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it's too easy to write about my last trick or something. It's not very interesting to the reader.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Students
#Gay
I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Friends
#Old
#Age
#Dying
I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Work
I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Self
#Sex
While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Work
#Poets
#Curiosity
There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#War
#Popular
#Poetry
#Vietnam
Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Feeling
#Language
#Help
#Deep
#Poetry
Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Poems
I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#Being
#Result
#Writing
#Students
#Class
#Improvement
I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about.
Thom Gunn,
British
Poet
#People