Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life by Michael Nott

 

Deeply immersed. Very important poet to me, my first extended deep dive, met him at Northwestern, been reading him and thinking about his work ever since then.

The 1980s section devastating, where Gunn loses dozens of loved ones in the space of a year or so. Unimaginable until now when I read of how he took it full on, trying to survive it and gain some meaning from the carnage. 

And his "old age" as it were, is tragic as presented, although he is never really self-pitying. In his late 60s, he vigorously renewed his passion for drugs and picking up young men as sexual tricks, often homeless and troubled, although he cared for them as he could toward his purpose. He certainly died as he lived, with a fierceness and a care for the person he was with, and did not put on much of the dress of one ageing slowly and gracefully. He did not want that.

Yvor Winters definition of a poem: a statement in words about the human experience (p. 130)

The Sense of Movement was about a "specifically contemporary" kind of "malaise," the attempt "to understand one's deliberate aimlessness, having the courage of one's convictions, reaching a purpose only by making the right rejections." (147)

Gunn's love of Camus, particularly THE PLAGUE. (162)

Gunn on Lowell, and his aims for a personal autobiographical essay (209)

Gunn on Robert Creeley (218)

from TG piece about TOUCH: There remains open the possibility that one can deliberately and consciously attempt to create in oneself a field which will be spontaneously fertile for the tests of sympathy[.]... I do not mean that one can simply love everybody because one wants to, but that one can try to avoid all the situations in which love is impossible. (229)

Gertrude Stein: "She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting."

"Only Tony White, among my close friends, became an exception. He dropped out, coolly and deliberately, from the life of applause, having coming to see how the need for it complicates one's existence quite unnecessarily." 

... loss is loss, and time often only helps to show how deep and wide it is. (296)

Mike Kitay: "Tony Tanner was a good example of a smart friend Thom had, but he didn't like Tony's problems." (303)

"'The proverb is: A cat in gloves catches no mice. [...] I mentioned my proverb to a San Francisco poet, and he capped it with one of his own: And mice in high heels have a terrible time getting away from cats.'" (335)

TG on Duncan's definition of the Romantic movement: "the intellectual adventure of not knowing." (409)

"a poem is a record of activity" (422)

Thom saw these poems [in limited edition Unsought Intimacies] as "distinct from confessional poetry, which is a form of indirect boasting about pain, not so indirect maybe. When there is pain in these poems, it is a cause for deep regret." (431)