'Everything Put to Use'

In March 2000 I interviewed Wendy Lesser, founding editor of The Threepenny Review, at her office in Berkeley, Calif. I was working on a freelance newspaper story about the Bay Area as a literary hub, starting with Twain, Harte and Bierce, moving on to Hammett, the Beats, City Lights Books, Wendell Kees and the rest. I asked Lesser if, in her judgment, any “world-class” writers were still at work in greater San Francisco, not really expecting an answer. (Edgar Bowers had died the previous month.) Her reply was immediate: “Thom Gunn.” Somehow, I had forgotten we had a first-rate poet in our midst. 

It's important to remember Gunn is not merely a “gay poet,” as he seems to have been myopically pigeonholed. His best poems transcend mere demographics. It’s also important to know that, despite his reputation for being a reckless wild man, he remained a grateful former student of Yvor Winters at Stanford. In the Autumn 1981 issue of The Southern Review, Gunn wrote of Winters:   

 

“The complete disinterestedness, the modesty, the lack of anything self-serving, only made his character more seductive and his personality more inadvertently charming. It is difficult to explain his diffident sweet-naturedness to those who know his personality rather through the prickly and often eccentric footnotes of Forms of Discovery. His manner could be, in Marianne Moore’s word for it, `bearish’; it could be brusque, intolerant, even brutal; it could also be generous, good-humored, and relaxed. His wit was quiet and disarming. But he had to feel at ease with you first.”

 

No doubt that will surprise Winters-haters. I’ve been reading again Gunn’s 1982 collection, The Passages of Joy. Gunn takes his title from Dr. Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes”: “Time hovers o’er, impatient to destroy, / And shuts up all the Passages of Joy.” We can hear a sexual echo in the final phrase but Gunn is more concerned with human passages through life. Some poems amount to miniature short stories, portraits of San Francisco’s hustlers and street people, as in “Sweet Things.” Some of the poems are rhymed and metered, others are free. Here is a sonnet about a sonneteer, “Keats at Highgate”:

 

“A cheerful youth joined Coleridge on his walk

(‘Loose,’ noted Coleridge, ‘slack, and not well-dressed’)

Listening respectfully to the talk talk talk

Of First and Second Consciousness, then pressed

The famous hand with warmth and sauntered back

Homeward in his own state of less dispersed

More passive consciousness–passive, not slack,

Whether of Secondary type or First.

 

“He made his way toward Hampstead so alert

He hardly passed the small grey ponds below

Or watched a sparrow pecking in the dirt

Without some insight swelling the mind’s flow

That banks made swift. Everything put to use.

Perhaps not well-dressed but oh no not loose.”

I’ve written about the serendipitous Keats/Coleridge encounter here. That year, 1818, Keats would go on to write his six great odes, surpassing anything Coleridge ever wrote: “Everything put to use. / Perhaps not well-dressed but oh no not loose.” In 1956, Gunn, born in England and still new to the U.S., taught briefly in San Antonio. He planned to tour the country and eventually return to Palo Alto. In a July 21 letter, Winters writes to Gunn:

 

“Beware of rattlesnakes, copperheads, cottonmouths, alligators, Mississippi dogfish, bad liquor, and characters out of Faulkner. Beware also of tellers of tall tales. Do not allow your speech to be corrupted, no matter what strange predicament you may encounter. And above all, keep a diary, so that you may read it to me next fall.”

 

[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by R.L. Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.]