British - Poet | August 29, 1929 - April 25, 2004
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.
Thom Gunn
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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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I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
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I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
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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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Many of my poems are not sexual.
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My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
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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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We control the content of our dreams.
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We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.
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We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
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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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