Thom Gunn Quotes
Thom Gunn offers sly, poetic musings on nature and purpose, turning everyday observations into quiet rebellion.
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These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough. No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof.
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Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly.
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Thus for each blunt-faced ignorant one The great grey rigid uniform combined Safety with virtue of the sun. Thus concepts linked like chainmail in the mind.
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One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.
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Distorting hackneyed words in hackneyed songs He turns revolt into a style, prolongs The impulse to a habit of the time.
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My thoughts are crowded with death and it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused confused to be attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation.
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How sociable the garden was. We ate and talked in given light. The children put their toys to grass All the warm wakeful August night.
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It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
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We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
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We control the content of our dreams.
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Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
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My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
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I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other.
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As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.
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I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop.
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There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
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I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.
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I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.