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Wednesday, April 28, 2004
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Thom Gunn's Blues
The British - though long resident in America - poet Thom Gunn has died. I discovered the poetry of Thom Gunn when I taught a course, a few years ago, called Writing in the Age of AIDS. Of all the poets we considered who wrote seriously and at length about AIDS, Gunn was the best. His technique was rhymed, traditional; he understood that the constraints of form deepen beauty, emotion, and meaning. The worst poet we read was Paul Monette. He was a great essayist, but his poetry makes the mistake of assuming that intense emotion demands a flight from form. In Gunn the ceremonial lament for the dead has the well-wrought, redemptive cadence for which, as Mark Doty and others have eloquently pointed out, we go to art in the first place. Since the season is spring, I'll content myself with quoting these lines from Gunn's poem "Lament." He has just described his very sick friend's admission to an emergency room: That frown, that frown: I'd never seen such rage in you before As when they wheeled you through the swinging door. For you knew, rightly, they conveyed you from Those normal pleasures of the sun's kingdom The hedonistic body basks within And takes for granted - summer on the skin, Sleep without break, the moderate taste of tea In a dry mouth. |