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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.

Thom Gunn

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Thom Gunn
Age: 74 †
Born: 1929
Born: August 29
Died: 2004
Died: April 24
Poet
Writer
Gravesend
Kent
Thomson William Gunn
William Guinneach Gunn
War
Popular
Felt
Decades
Two
Deeply
Subjects
Poetry
Almost
Hiv
Lasts
Vietnam
Last
Aids

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My thoughts are crowded with death and it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused to be attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation.
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The painter saw what was, an alternate Candor and secrecy inside the skin.
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I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
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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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I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.
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I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.
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Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
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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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We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
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Many of my poems are not sexual.
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I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.
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My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
Thom Gunn
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Much that is natural, to the will must yield. Men manufacture both machine and soul, And use what they imperfectly control To dare a future from the taken routes.
Thom Gunn
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I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.
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I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
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One is always nearer by not keeping still.
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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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I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.
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When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew.
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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.
Thom Gunn