Quotes by Thom Gunn
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There were real fears of being too open in the '50s, and I can think of very few writers who braved them. One was Robert Duncan, and another was Allen Ginsberg.
We are very similar to heterosexuals. Not all queer people think this way, but I do.
There is a kind of inevitable consistency in a group of poems that you write over five to 10 years that end up in a book.
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.
Being in the closet, I saw being homosexual as a deliberate choice. It's got nothing to do with choice or the will, but I was being defiant about it.
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.
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!
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.
We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.
We were a charmed generation. Unlike our parents, we grew up with antibiotics, we hadn't had to suffer the deaths of our schoolmates from things like scarlet fever. Then AIDS hit us.
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.
I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.
So many people from Sappho onward were open about being queer and wrote good poetry.
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.
Many of my poems are not sexual.
I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
I came out in person to my friends'in my early 20s'long before I did in my writing; I think being in love helps to do that.
You can never write about anything after having censored yourself widely enough'during the '50s and '60s, in my case.
O wily painter, limiting the scene From a cacophony of dusty forms To the one convulsion,
Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly:
He moves in a wood of desire,...
My thoughts are crowded with death and it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused to be attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation.
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