Gunn’s life: Thom Gunn was born & grew up in wartime England, son of two journalists. After his parents divorced, his mother committed suicide; her body was discovered by Thom & his younger brother. He did two years of national service, spent six months living in Paris, studied at Trinity College Cambridge, and came to California on a Stanford University fellowship in 1954. Gunn settled in San Francisco with his life partner Mike Kitay & spent the last 52 years of his life writing & teaching there.
Gunn’s poems: Gunn published his first book to great acclaim when he was just out of university. In the 1950s he was recognized as a rising poetic star in Britain (alongside Ted Hughes & Philip Larkin) for his technically assured poems of fierce philosophy. After his move to the US, he became increasingly involved in the counterculture, discovered free verse & his poetry experimented in both form & subject matter -- he wrote about rebellion & violence, bikers & AIDS victims, drugs & gay life, love & decline.
Gunn & the AIDS epidemic: Thom Gunn was HIV-negative, but lived for 50 years at the center of American gay culture, in San Francisco. Even naysayers who decried the uneven quality of his anti-traditional, “anti-poetic” work after moving to California were moved by the power & respected the poetic achievement of his collection of laments & elegies from ground zero of the AIDS epidemic, The Man with Night Sweats, published in 1992.
Books by Thom Gunn:
- The Man with Night Sweats: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux or Noonday Press reprints, 1993)
- Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux or Noonday Press reprint, 1994)
- Boss Cupid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000)
- The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography (University of Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry series, 1999)
- Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview (University of Michigan Press, 1994)
- Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell (Between the Lines, 2002)
