My reading’s always been circumscribed by time (ain’t enough days in the hours) and money (not enough for me or libraries I frequent to seize all the possible books I could possibly read). And there ain’t enough exposure to poets writing today – who’s the Emily Dickinson of the early 21st century?— to make sure all earnest, die-hard, curmudgeonly readers of poetry cross paths with poets they desire/need to read. I’m always behind while I’m trying to keep a/head. I know I’m missing much too much too much too much.
One poet I’ve missed in the past was Thom Gunn. Sure I stumbled across his work again and again and again in the 1980s-90s Bay Area, reading it in journals. Allergic to rhyme, though, I didn’t give his poems my (time, I’m tempted to say, but I say:) attention. His work dominated one publication at least, Threepenny Review, when so many other poets went unheard. His work was the establishment. Thom Gunn I thought was the rear-guard, the academic, the Enshrined Convention. Man, was I wrong.
Last summer, finding a remaindered $22 hard-cover copy of one of Gunn’s last books, Boss Cupid, in Boise, in one of those sterile outlet malls littering America (offering all we don’t need at exorbitantly low prices we don’t need to pay), I was willing to give it a chance at $2. The first poem, “Duncan,” a paean to Robert Duncan’s power, in its prime and then on the wane, held me for months – I re-read it dozens of times before I was ready to go on to the remaining poems, and I didn’t even notice the rhyme. Here’s the last stanza:
“He was now a posthumous poet, I have said
(For since his illness he had not composed),
In sight of a conclusion, whose great dread
Was closure,
his life soon to be enclosed
Like the sparrow’s flight above the feasting friends,
Briefly revealed where its breast caught their light,
Beneath the long roof, between open ends,
Themselves the margins of unchanging night.”
I loved the book, a mess/mass of contradictions – high-brow language with low-brow subject (“Troubadour,” songs for Jeffrey Dahmer), low-brow language with high-brow subjects (poems about David and Bathsheba), intensely personal poems -- about his partner of forty plus years (“In Trust”), about street people, young men strung out, nights in bars, anonymous sexual encounters in Central Park, his own aging – a mastery of form (mastery = form’s unobtrusive, fluid yet staunch as bone) with a frankness, a rawness, that rarely goes hand-in-hand with conventional verse. Gunn may not have shucked the conventions of meter and rhyme, but the content of his poems, shifting, sliding, nudging, balanced their often oppressive weight.
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