The Letters of Thom Gunn (5.31.22)

"I can hardly imagine a life more to my taste than mine."

Thom Gunn wrote this in a letter to a friend.  It's collected in The Letters of Thom Gunn, reviewed this weekend in The New York Times.  Of course, the life to which he refers is one of sex, drugs and rock & roll, lived for 30+ years in San Francisco's Haight district . . . so you can imagine what killed him finally in 2004.

Why his collected (selected, actually) letters are coming out only now, I can't say and neither does the reviewer.  Maybe it had something to do with his second tier status among the Great Poets, or maybe he left instructions to keep it under wraps until most of his correspondents had passed away, too.

Anyway.

I never had much feeling for his poetry, so never paid much attention to it.  I recall a book the reviewer mentions, a combo of his and Ted Hughes' poems.  And I do have a series of Penguin Paperback collections of 60s era British poetry in my library (way down there on the bottom shelf where I almost never go anymore), in which Gunn is one of the featured writers.  Maybe that series is why I never read much of his work.  It's all Brits trying on American styles and voices and subjects.  Or so I think I thought at the time.  And not miming them too well for all that.

Anyway.

Seems like of all those writers, Gunn was the one who worked hardest to become American, and American poet.  He moved to San Francisco, after all, and stayed.