http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b041y11p
I was glad to find this recent discussion on Thom Gunn recently. I don't know how long it will remain available.
Paul Farley, Fiona Sampson and Clive Wilmer discuss the life and work in the last third of the programme. It's a strange feeling to hear two of these luminaries saying they came to Gunn much later than I did but that, of course, is because they are younger than me. Clive Wilmer is a major authority on Gunn and was in from the beginning.
It's a shame that they choose Street Song to enthuse about because surely it is not one of his finest poems but it does rather obviously illustrate how Gunn was both a contemporary poet and one who saw himself in a long tradition of English poetry, as the John Donne or George Herbert of the C20th.
The other choices of poems, from The Man with Night Sweats as well as Tamer and Hawk and The Gas Poker, are much more apposite. Some of the observations are useful, too, in how the 1992 volume saw a return to critical acceptance after a period when he had been somehow unfashionable.
Gunn's impersonality, taken more specifically from Elizabethan models and with precious little reference to Eliot, is also worthy of note, particularly in the way that although he does write about his life he is not interested in writing about it per se but as raw material for his poems, which is exactly what Confessions of the Life Artist said.
Fiona recommends new readers begin at Moly, which accords with what August Kleinzahler says in his introductory essay. It is also suggested that the poems are not best read chronologically.
I wouldn't say that. I think there is a story that unfolds and that is one of the most significant features of the oeuvre. However, it is a discussion worth hearing and I'm glad of it, and that Gunn might not be 'the subject of many academic conferences' (as if that were a mark of artistic achievement) but he warrants at least this much air time still.
Clive Wilmer is working on an annotated Collected edition but there is no sign of it on Amazon yet.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
