At the Barriers - On the Poetry of Thom Gunn

ed. Joshua Weiner, At the Barriers, On the Poetry of Thom Gunn (The University of Chicago Press)

It's always useful to find out that one's been missing the point for the last thirty-odd years. Neil Powell explains in his essay Coming Out Fighting that Thom Gunn's famous lines, 'I praised the overdogs from Alexander / To those who would not play with Stephen Spender' 'is not to attack Spender but to sympathize with him...who wanted to play with the rough boys every bit as much as Gunn did'. I'm still not quite convinced, though, since Gunn himself is quoted much later in the book as saying 'I was against a certain namby-pambiness' and in any case Gunn eventually disowned the poem so it's all over now.
This new collection of essays on Gunn, a few of which we have seen already, offers a number of new and valuable insights, as well as others that we could have managed without. They follow a chronological sequence through Gunn's ever-developing career but with a number of authors each contributing their own view of similar material, using the same reference points, there is a slightly repetitive echo effect going on within it.
Gunn's early career was all about a series of poses, and throughout his career he adopted a variety of attitudes like poetry's answer to David Bowie, superficially looking different but still the same underneath. But the poses were gradually shed as he developed and, if it means anything at all to say so, he was perhaps a Romantic poet working in a classical tradition.
He is a cerebral poet, particularly in his earlier work, and critics are regularly lured into over-intellectualizing. Just how Gunn's Anglo-American position is manifested or how Misanthropos
verbalizes a non-verbal experience are questions that we may never have needed to address but Weiner's essay does it anyway. Misanthropos is a seminal Gunn poem thematically as a man who thought he was the last on earth makes contact with some others, but it isn't a very good one and labouring its significance isn't helpful.
August Kleinzahler is better, highlighting striking comparisons with Baudelaire in Gunn's poems. Paul Muldoon astutely spots a lexical correspondance between Gunn's Blackie, the Electric Rembrandt about a tattoo artist and Ted Hughes' The Thought Fox about a poem being printed. David Gewanter follows a theme through from The Wound to Lament on 'the body's adventure', including a parallel between the openness to experience and the way 'the [AIDS] virus renders the body open and defenceless'. Tom Sleigh veers a little too far from the subject area by discussing how Gunn reconciled the hedonistic lifestyle with domestic stability and makes it a civic issue. But Brain Teare occupies sixty pages of our reading lives with a discussion of 'gay poetry' despite the fact that Gunn had said he didn't regard himself as such but as a 'poet of everything', which any poet worthy of the name ought to be. Gunn at least is far too good to be limited by such a label and it is only much poorer writers that need such epithets to give their work the appearance of some significance. In the same way that there isn't, or didn't ought to be, a need for such a thing as women's poetry, 'gay poetry' is a non-starter, too, but since Teare has won an award for it, he is unlikely to agree. Unfortunately critics and commentators often use their subject as a way of writing about themselves and that is what Teare, to the deteriment of this volume, has done here.
Poetry, above all, is concerned with the words, the words in the poems. The sub-title of this book, On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, suggests that it is going to discuss the poetry but far too much time is spent by academics developing their own avenues of thought away from the poems and such work is of limited use or interest. If it does nothing else, it makes one return gratefully to the poems themselves.