Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn, born Thomson William Gunn, was an Anglo-American poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement and his later poetry in America, even after moving toward a looser, free-verse style. After relocating from England to San Francisco, Gunn wrote about gay-related topics—particularly in his most famous work, The Man With Night Sweats in 1992—as well as drug use, sex and his bohemian lifestyle. He won major literary awards...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth29 August 1929
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.
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.
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.
With my creative writing students, I've taught literature more than I've taught writing courses'I just hope to make them better.
Edmund White said he thought coming out in public was good for any writer's work. It was for mine, because the subject matter is so much greater.
You know I know you know I know you know.
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.
The painter saw what was, an alternate Candor and secrecy inside the skin.
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 work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
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.
I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.
I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.
I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.