Certainly, I'll be hoping for more of a turnout than the Johnstone's Paint Trophy first leg match between Accrington Thursday and Bridlington Sputnik.
There will be a selection of artefacts from my Gunn collection to look at.
But, if you can't make it, here is my introductory piece-
Thom Gunn (1929-2004)
Two of the English poets who
first made their reputations in the 1950’s could hardly seem more different in
personality although their work might have had more in common than is generally
thought.
Thom Gunn wrote of Philip
Larkin that he was ‘a poet of minute ambitions but carried them out
exquisitely’, which is a compliment of sorts, whereas Larkin said of Gunn,
although only in a letter, ‘what a genius that man has for making an ass of
himself’, which isn’t. It might not be over-simplifying the difference between
them too much to say that Gunn was ‘cool’, adventurous and ‘open-minded’ (to
say the least) while Larkin was a self-styled curmudgeonly old fogey.
Gunn moved to America Hull
Several of the English poets that emerged in the 50’s
were labelled together as ‘The Movement’, a grouping that recognized a common
sense, empirical attitude that brought poetry back to earth after the war and
the previous fashions of Dylan Thomas’ fine-sounding but blustery rhetoric, the
political engagement of the Auden group of the 30’s and the high church
intellectualism of Pound, Eliot and ‘Modernism’. But, honestly, there was no
‘Movement’. Those poets hardly knew each other at the time and didn’t have very
much in common beyond the avoidance of those perceived bad habits.
What I like about Thom Gunn’s
poems is the way that so many of the usual battlegrounds that poetry arguments
are fought over are transcended. His early poems are written in strict metre
and usually rhymed but he moved towards a free verse via the ‘syllabic’ forms
used by William Carlos Williams and did all three brilliantly at his best, and
so he isn’t categorized as either a ‘formal’ or free verse poet and returned to
rhymed, metrical poems later, too.
And while he wrote poems
related to contemporary pop culture, about Elvis Presley, motorbikers or the
60’s drug culture, he was more than that a poet that was a part of the much
longer tradition of English poetry that goes back to the Elizabethans, John
Donne and Ben Jonson. He identified with Shakespeare as a hero just as much as
he embraced Beat Poets like Robert Duncan or Gary Snyder.
From his first book, Fighting Terms, published in 1952, to
his last, Boss Cupid, 2000, his work
developed from a strictly disciplined, somewhat intellectual (some might say),
cold outsiderism, through the discovery of Touch,
in 1967, to a very inclusive involvement with others and the world. Some of
that, it has to be said, was achieved through the use of drugs like LSD. But,
tragically, having come to a realization of the ‘pulsing’ community of
humanity, it was then ripped apart by the AIDS virus and perhaps his most
highly-acclaimed book, The Man with Night
Sweats, published in 1993,
recorded the epidemic from San Francisco, in what is mainly a series of laments
and in memoriams for lost friends.
In the 1960’s there was a joint Selected Poems with Ted Hughes which only served to encourage the
misconception that those two poets were concerned with violence. Again, they
really didn’t have much in common. Hughes’ animal poems certainly seemed to
celebrate nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ but Gunn’s pre-occupation at that time
with leather gear, machismo and posing was really a part of the then
fashionable existentialist philosophy of Sartre and an expression of the
futility of trying to impose meaning on a meaningless world. Hughes himself
recognized that Gunn was in fact a ‘poet of gentleness’ and Gunn’s poetry did
eventually find ‘meaning’ and that meaning was in others.
