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by brian bouldrey
Remembering Thom Gunn

THE LAST TIME I saw Thom Gunn (who died at age 74 on April 25), he and I were being driven to a fundraiser for the San Francisco Public Library. Thom was in the backseat, and since this was a dress-up affair, he was wearing his good leather jacket, the one that wasn't so rancid with Crisco. We talked about literature and sex, and Gilbert and Sullivan too.

The first time I saw Thom was when I was an undergraduate and he was a visiting poet. He sat on the seminar table – on! – and told us about syllabics and drug experimentation, all in the same sentence. I met him again in San Francisco after the reading of an insufferable Irish poet visiting Berkeley, who, between poems, mentioned how he loved to hear the seals fucking in the morning on his private beach. Thom was sitting behind us, and he leaned forward at that point and began to approximate the sound of copulating seals. For the record, it was my friend who laughed so loudly that we were asked by the poet to leave the reading. I only left out of solidarity and relief. But Thom came out to compliment us: "Distinguished colleagues," he said, clapping us on the back, "I once saw Robert Frost admonish audience members, but never have I seen a person bounced from a poetry reading."

Over the years we met at other high-class literary events. He could always talk about three things at once, and the friction among those things made everything, well, sexier. He'd describe the way Elizabeth Bishop's poems build and build like great tiered wedding cakes and how, speaking of baked goods, she made a mean pot brownie, especially for wild-man poet Robert Duncan, who couldn't inhale. He'd always have something exciting, naughty, kind, and very human to say about everybody, famous and in-, and I hope I was worth a little character assassination myself.

After a visit to his rather amazing room (he was ordering Orpheus! He was wordless Philomel! He was, yes, boys, hot as hell!) filled with boots that lined a wall, he gave me a pair to honor the publication of my first novel. "These, Brian, are novelist boots." I am wearing them as I write this, so imagine, if you will, that I am wearing them as you read this, whenever you read this.

I am always imagining Thom telling stories, a little jumped up from stimulants of whatever sort, when I read his poems, from the jittery breathless gossip in Boss Cupid to the too-painful lines of The Man with Night Sweats that are more often than not metrical, rhymed, full of an ordered prosody we all hoped might stave off the mad chaos that was that terrible plague time, back through the looser, stressed lines from The Passages of Joy, when he could conjure a sob, as he does in "Elegy" (a poem about an acquaintance committing suicide), from the freer line endings:

... They keep leaving me

and they don't

tell me they don't

warn me that this is

the last time I'll be seeing them

as they drop away

like Danny or slowly estrange themselves ...

When I read those lines now, a new kind of weeping enters the poem. Why didn't he drop me a postcard, to let me know that we wouldn't be gossiping away again, that I wouldn't be getting the new volume of verse in the mail signed by him, that we couldn't ask him to be our writer in residence next February? I've a little sob in my throat again – don't fret, it's just line endings – when reading the end of "Elegy":

There will be no turn of the river

Where we are all reunited

In a wonderful party

The picnic spread

All the lost found

As in hide and seek

An odd comfort

That the way we are always

Most in agreement

Is in playing the same game

Where everyone always gets lost

Longtime Bay Guardian contributor Brian Bouldrey is interim director of the creative writing program at Northwestern University.