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A surprising number of Thom Gunn’s best poems (or, at least, the poems of his that matter most to me) take the same stance: addressed to an apparently real person — sometimes living, often newly dead — they pretend to tell that person who the person is and what the person has done and felt and thought. The gesture entails both intimacy and artifice: a person brought close by an artistic convention^[1] that seems to preclude their agency, making them a function of someone else’s language. And the poems work, in part, because they so consistently, so alertly, so movingly make those contradictory elements into a single thing.

The contradiction is especially pronounced in “Words for Some Ash” from The Man With Night Sweats, Gunn’s second-to-last collection. Gunn wrote the book as AIDS ravaged and killed his friends and lovers. According to a note at the end of his Collected Poems, “Words for Some Ash” addresses a man named Jim Lay, though the poem provides no information about who he was or what he was like. Instead, as the title suggests, it speaks to the material evidence of his absence, some ash — a phrase that goes out of its way to suggest impersonality: not your or a friend’s or a lover’s or even someone’s. Some. The poem begins as if it might be speaking to a still-living person:

Poor parched man, we had to squeeze

Dental sponge against your teeth,

So that moisture by degrees

Dribbled to the mouth beneath.

Christmas Day your pupils crossed,

Staring at your nose’s tip.

Seeking there the air you lost

Yet still gaped for, dry of lip.

Gunn writes in the past tense, but the opening address — “Poor parched man” — seems to pull the suffering man into the present moment of that address. He is still, in the moment of address, a man.

Almost independent of that, though, the rhythm is establishing a bright, insistent music — something that could conceivably accommodate light verse. Each line has seven syllables. Four beats, but the lines end and begin with stresses, as they will throughout the poem, so that you have to pause a little more in moving from line to line, even when the lines are enjambed, and so that the rhymes — which are, almost without exception, perfect or nearly so — become even more pronounced.^[2]

At the end of the second stanza, the rhyme seems to pull the poem even further into formality, torqueing the syntax so that Gunn ends up with “dry of lip,” which sounds like a parody of courtliness. The same goes for the phrase the rhyme connects it to, “your nose’s tip,” which would conventionally be “tip of your nose.” The rhyme seems to be driving the poem, and driving it away from something more grounded, even as the details insist on terrible, specific, physical agony.

And then, with the opening lines of the third stanza, the poem gets even stranger:

Now you are a bag of ash

Scattered on a coastal ridge,

Where you watched the distant crash,

Ocean on a broken edge.

Entering the present tense, the poem heightens the contradiction to the point of absurdity — telling you that you are not a person but rather a bag of ash. And that bag of ash turns out, as the sentence continues into the second line, to not even be that anymore. Scattered. Dispersed. No one thing anyone could address, except that the continuance of memory, care, and grief maintain an identity that is, if not answerable to, at least recognizable in that “you.”

In that way, the intimacy of the address intensifies. The connection it requires and enacts grows even more pronounced, the paradox of grief stripped down to its core: for a time, loss intensifies our love. The first line is brutal: so plain (compare the simplicity of it to “dry of lip,” or even the opening address) and so abrupt that its vulnerability merges into cruelty — which is a consistent element in Gunn’s elegies, though it often entails more wit that this version does.

There’s another contradiction here, too, though it isn’t entirely apparent yet. That brutal fact is also the beginning of an imagined peace for Lay, who is briefly recalled, in the third line of the stanza, as the person he had been before AIDS reduced his senses to suffering — someone who had gone to a specific place and found meaning there. But it’s a fleeting appearance. The fourth stanza begins, “Death has wiped away each sense.” With the exception of that moment in the third stanza, all we see of the living person is in the first two stanzas, when his senses are a portal for extraordinary pain. The dissolution of Lay is also the end of his suffering — the only possible way for the suffering to end. As readers, I don’t think we’re supposed to feel comfortable with that trajectory, any more than we’re meant to feel comfortable with Ben Jonson’s canonized attempt^[3] to enact a proper Christian understanding of the death of his son. But neither are we allowed to imagine the poem’s trajectory from pain to non-being as unkind.

Soon enough, the poem turns into a petition — though a petition that doesn’t seem to steer Gunn away from the fundamentally descriptive nature of the poem. It seems less to hope for an intervention in Lay’s fate than it does seek an opening of the poem to the future tense, so that it may continue the description to a point of rest. The final stanza imagines the ashes arriving at land’s end, still yoked together by “you” but devoid of the agency that was, in fact, already gone by the time of the opening hospital scenes:

May you lastly reach the shore,

Joining tide without intent,

Only worried any more

By the current’s argument.

It’s worth noting that the word “By” is the weakest stress of any opening syllable in the poem. It has the effect of easing the enjambment, but even more so of making that last line feel one stress short. That, plus the landing of the final rhyme on a syllable that only gets a secondary stress, makes the wished-for outcome audibly insufficient. The first word of the stanza picks up an earlier line, “Next may rain leach discontents / From your dust….” Now, if there is a discontent, it has audibly leached into the poem, there for the reader (and the writer) who retains the consciousness that had, for Lay, become unbearable. But it’s a minor discontent. The poem still gives beauty, and consolation, and an unlikely image of kindness, all of which we retain the ability to receive.

Having said so much about the poem’s complexity, I want to get back to its tangible simplicity — and its overriding formality. If this poem shows, in its design, its own limitations; if, at times, it goes out of its way to remind whoever reads it that it cannot reach the friend to whom it wants to speak; if its elegance occasionally tilts toward a deliberately exposed absurdity, it is always, to my ear, utterly sincere. The audible, elegant artifice and the mostly plain language that runs gracefully through it both communicate care — and even generosity. Even as the poem lets Lay go, it also lifts him up into a traditional grace that not only abets consolation (though only, the poem claims, to the extent that consolation can live with the truth) but returns some lasting dignity to the man it barely describes, making of his loss something at once constant and fluid, not unlike the tide and current to which Gunn at last cedes Lay in the poem’s last lines.

*

Gunn used that address for the living, too. “To a Friend in Time of Trouble,” also from The Man with Night Sweats, begins with the word “You,” and it moves with assurance over the details of the friend’s experience. The first of its four stanzas reads:

You wake tired, in the cabin light has filled,

Then walk out to the deck you helped to build,

And pause, your senses reaching out anxiously,

Tentatively, toward scrub and giant tree:

A giving of the self instructed by

The dog who settles near you with a sigh

And seeks you in your movements, following each.

Though yours are different senses, they too reach

Until you know that they engage the air

— The clean and penetrable medium where

You encounter as if they were a sort of home

Fountains of fern that jet from the coarse loam.

On one axis, the direct address is even stranger here — as it proposes to tell the friend things that Gunn presumably only knows because the friend first told him. In this regard, as well as the poem’s measured, almost stately couplets, “To a Friend …” seems out of step with its time and ours. It is, in some ways, comparable to a portrait, but the metaphor only goes so far, as the poem doesn’t just look at the friend; it also looks from the friend’s perspective, telling the friend what he sees, thinks, and feels.

But the poem feels like a gift — a present for the friend that I am allowed, by extension, to receive. And it reminds me of the kind of poem a courtly poet might have written centuries before. Those poets were important to Gunn, and he wrote about them with insight and imagination. His essay on Ben Jonson, published in 1974, is especially good and unmistakably loving, and at times it seems almost to be laying out a case for the kind of poem he was still learning how to write.

Gunn made his name in England at a young age with two books — 1954’s Fighting Terms and 1957’s The Sense of Movement — whose appeal, with the exception of a few poems, is hard for me to fathom from this distance. Gunn’s adolescent hope was to become a novelist, but as a young poet he instead aspired to philosophical authority, writing poems drawn from existentialism and laboring in grim celebration of the will. The characters are stiffened by the allegorical impulse and the poems sag under the weight of so much intention. (It might be tempting to connect this to Gunn’s resistance to his sexuality, but he wasn’t resisting it — just hiding it. He had already begun his romantic relationship with his lifelong partner, Mike Kittay.)

But for a poet initially so invested in images and exercises of the will, Gunn would prove unusually open to different styles and influences, and his poems changed significantly over time. Most notably, Gunn started experimenting first with syllabics and then with free verse. Those poems, which he wrote while still also creating poems in fixed meters with regular rhyme schemes, often make room for contingency in a way his early formal writing apparently could not. Then and later, his unmetered, unrhymed poems include brief sketches, small details, and incidental encounters. They can seem too much the opposite of those first two books, insufficiently transformed, even trivial at times. But Gunn was always interested in opposition, and those efforts would help him develop a lighter touch and an ability to bring into his best art those parts of life that seemed, even within the poem, to insist on their unassimilable independence.

The new developments were unwelcome. The critics who had celebrated him in England now lamented an American decadence creeping into his work. His American mentor, Yvor Winters, suggested Gunn give up writing poems and instead try prose. But if any of that especially bothered Gunn, he left behind no traces of anger or despair. According to subsequent interviews and essays, including a lovely tribute to Winters^[4], Gunn had already started to move away from his mentor, recognizing that the strict and narrow power of Winters’ vision (by then growing even narrower) would limit his own artistic freedom and growth. (He may have also been put off by Winters’ homophobia, but he never mentions it.) His response to the suggestion that he give up poetry is remarkably unruffled: “The letter came as no unexpected blow. I had been anticipating something about it for years, and I wasn’t going to fight him about it. If he had a streak of brutality in him, I had a streak of sentimentality.”

I’m inclined to believe that this goes deeper than just the external composure of a man who grew up in England in the 30s and 40s and held to a kind of decorum throughout his life — even as he immersed himself in sexual freedom and extensive drug use in his adopted San Francisco. (Again, he was at home in contradictions.) Looking over the span of Gunn’s writing, I get the sense of someone grounded in his own being, a self he inhabits with great confidence and apparent ease in large part because he is not especially concerned with himself. If he had another mentor after Winters, it was Robert Duncan, a poet who stood opposite Winters on so many axes. But he never gave up what he learned from Winters and never started writing like Duncan. He simply took delight in Duncan’s very different poems and learned from them — and him — what he could.

Whether or not this is true of Gunn off the page, within his psyche, I cannot say. Even those who knew him^[5] write of the man as a warm, witty, generous person who didn’t reveal a lot of himself, and I do not feel that I have much of a sense of his inner life. He certainly knew suffering — his mother killed herself when he was a teenager, and growing up gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal must have left deep marks in him. He would live through the worst of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, and it’s possible that he deliberately killed himself by a drug overdose, after years of not writing. But as an artist and a thinker, he seems to have achieved a rare kind of health, one that, as long as he could still write, allowed him to learn, experience, and give with a mix of freedom and stability that also manifests in the manner of many of his best late poems.

This untitled poem from Boss Cupid, his final collection, is hardly among those best poems. It’s ultimately too small and too slight, and the final two lines wrap the poem up too neatly in too cute a package. But it nonetheless registers, in its easy, unapologetic charm, and its ability to render the scene without moralizing or embarrassment, the spirit that seems to me to have been essential to his growth and power as an artist — a spirit that often thrives in tension with other impulses and occasions.

First saw him

on the street in front, in the

bar’s garbage, identifying

unfinished beers and swigging

off what was left of them,

shameless and exuberant,

remarking in friendly fashion

“It’s a doggy dog world.”

Charming error. He

had little idea of his looks

caught on a brief sill

between youthful lean times

and blowziness to come,

and too unfocused to try

hustling more than beer

and a night out of the rain.

Later, circling vaguely

the bar’s deep inside,

“Hitched up from New Orleans,”

he said. “Here, wanna feel it?”

It was already out

pushed soft into my hand. It was

a lovely gift to offer an old

stranger

                         without condition

a present from New Orleans

in a doggy dog world.

*

In the spirit of contradictions, I’m inclined to say that there’s something courtly about that poem. Many of Gunn’s touchstones were poets who had served in the English court, and he sometimes referred to himself, half-jokingly at most, as a Renaissance poet. Here, too, it’s possible that some amount of opposition is at work. In his essay on Jonson, Gunn observed of two poems:

“They have moreover the smoothness, control and urbanity that we associate with ‘classical’ writing. It is interesting that most of those who have succeeded best in writing so, i.e. within restraints both technical and passional, have been people most tempted toward personal anarchy. For them, there is some purpose in the close limits, and there is something to restrain.”

One of the two poems Gunn refers to here is “To Penshurst,” a work of art and artifice^[6] that surely seems exceedingly strange to anyone reading it today, though in its time it was popular enough to inspire imitations. A poem of praise addressed to the estate of the Earl of Leicester, it functions both as a moral statement and a public act of seeking favor from a powerful figure — though those two elements aren’t really distinguishable. Here are its opening lines:

Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show,

Of touch or marble; nor canst boast a row

Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold;

Thou hast no lantern, whereof tales are told,

Or stair, or courts; but stand’st an ancient pile,

And, these grudged at, art reverenced the while.

Thou joy’st in better marks, of soil, of air,

Of wood, of water; therein thou art fair.

Thou hast thy walks for health, as well as sport;

Thy mount, to which the dryads do resort,

Where Pan and Bacchus their high feasts have made,

Beneath the broad beech and the chestnut shade;

That taller tree, which of a nut was set

At his great birth where all the Muses met.

I can’t read “To a Friend in Time of Trouble” without thinking of “To Penshurst.” I wouldn’t be surprised if Gunn had it in mind. Though he showed little investment in the hierarchies that would have defined life at court, Gunn unquestionably cared about the kinds of elevations art (and drugs) could achieve.

Those opening lines from Jonson achieve a substantial portion of their energy by negation, as well as his graceful movement in and, occasionally, across the rhyming couplets that could so easily turn a poem into stone. Gunn moves with similar grace through his own couplets, but he also does something Jonson could not: He enlivens the poem (and magnifies the gift to his troubled friend) by carrying Jonson’s forward in time and offering the friend a place in a tradition made supple enough to lend its stately air to someone with no apparent claim to the power and reverence of the state.

I don’t want to get too bogged down in Gunn’s debt to Jonson. It matters more that an echo exists than it does that the echo entails this or that particular. Gunn is carrying this friend’s experience, as he did in “Words for Some Ash,” partway out of its own time, as far as it can go, perhaps, without being enervated, or falsified, or wholly generalized. And in fact the poem moves as adeptly as it does across its adamant rhyme scheme in part because Gunn is so deft in allowing detail and contingency to redirect the currents of the scene, so that rhyme seems to pull on the syntax and the story seems to pull on the rhyme. And so that the poem itself seems to be pulled by its apparent fidelity to the experience of the friend.

One phrase from the first stanza, “a giving of the self,” repeats almost exactly a phrase that Gunn used in a personal essay from the late 70s, entitled “Cambridge in the Fifties.” He is describing here his lifelong friend Tony White:

“He was a man of courtesy, and I mean courtesy not merely in the social sense. It was a giving of himself, in all his strength and sweetness, to others, whom he admired more than he could ever admire himself.”

Our current conventional wisdom would likely resist imagining a poem like “To a Friend …” as a giving of oneself. Gunn is taking someone else’s story, after all, and using it to create a poem of his own, one in which his light touch suggests an easy command. But that conventional wisdom — the implication of art as exploitative, of the experience of others as a commodity — feels too pinched to account for this poem and others like it. Reading the poem, I encounter an act of attention, a generous regard — Gunn putting aside his own concerns to accommodate and elevate the life of another. The poem lodges something of the friend’s story in a form that lends it ongoing vitality, that keeps it fresh, as well as proving its significance. It’s the kind of thing that might make a friend feel, to borrow from our contemporary idiom, seen.

Like the untitled poem above, “To a Friend in Time of Trouble” ends with a kind of summation:

And all day as you climb, the released mind

Unclenches till — the moment of release

Clean overlooked in the access of its own peace —

It finds that it has lost itself upon

The smooth red body of a young madrone,

From which it turns toward other varying shades

On the brown hillside where light grows and fades,

And feels the healing start, and still returns,

Riding its own repose, and learns, and learns.

I don’t mean to suggest that Gunn gets nothing from this giving of himself. These closing lines could also be a description of Gunn’s pleasure in writing the poem, as could these from “‘All Do Not All Things Well.’” Gunn is celebrating the men who used to work on cars out in the street before an “officious / Realtor” who “Wanted the neighbourhood neat / To sell it” forced them out, and the last line here bears a striking similarity to “A giving of the self”:

Their work one thing they knew

They could for certain do

With a disinterest

And passionate expertise

To which they gave their best

Desires and energies.

Such oily-handed zest

By-passed the self like love.

Once Gunn had relinquished his investment in the individual will, the loss of self was a frequent ideal for him, so much so that at times the counter-ideal seemed at risk of doing the same work as that which it replaced. His fascination with a radical, Edenic innocence never dominated the poems to the same degree as his insistence on will, maybe in part because he seemed to understand it as an ideal only fleetingly achievable, but it still had the ability to override his attention in a way that, at least to my ear, the graceful closing couplet of “To a Friend” does not. Rather, the summary seems to have emerged out of the particulars that shape the alert motion of that long, responsive sentence. They read as something discovered in the experience, recorded in the verse, and returned to the still individual, if unnamed, friend.

*

Returning one more time to Gunn’s essay on Jonson, I want to quote at length from his attempt to shake Jonson’s poems free from the sources of their 20th (and 19th) century oblivion:

“… surely one reason for the neglect in the last century and a half is that so much of it can be damned as ‘occasional.’ That is, much of it is elicited by external events, or is intended to compliment some noble, or is written to commend another person’s book. And nowadays we tend to use the phrase ‘occasional poetry’ to indicate trivial or insincere writing.

“Yet in fact all poetry is occasional: whether the occasion is an external event like a birthday or a declaration of war, whether it is an occasion of the imagination, or whether it is in some sort of combination of the two. (After all, the external may lead to the internal occasions.) The occasion in all cases — literal or imaginary — is the starting point, only, of a poem, but it should be a starting point to which the poet must in some sense stay true. The truer he is to it, the closer he sticks to what for him is its authenticity, the more he will be able to draw from it in the adventures that it produces, adventures that consist of the experience of writing.”

I’m not convinced that this principle of adherence is true in any consistent way, but I suspect that it was fundamental for Gunn, and that one part of his evolution (or, if you prefer, alteration) into the poet who wrote his last three books, the ones that seem to me to have been his fullest flourishing, comes from his working out of its implications.

The idea was at least important enough to inform the title of his first collection of essays — The Occasions of Poetry — which also includes an intriguing short essay called “Writing a Poem.” Published in 1974, the essay describes Gunn’s creation of “Three,” a poem of gentle humor and straightforward celebration that describes an encounter with the Edenic splendor Gunn sought. Like the untitled poem from the doggy-dog world, “Three” ends too neatly, this time by virtue of Gunn’s philosophical imposition in a final line, but until that moment, it is wonderfully alert. Here are its first three stanzas:

All three are bare.

The father towels himself by two grey boulders

Long body, then long hair,

Mottled like rainy bracken to his shoulders.

The pull and risk

Of the Pacific’s touch is yet with him:

He kicked and felt it brisk,

Its cold live sinews tugging at each limb.

It haunts him still:

Drying his loins, he grins to notice how,

Struck helpless with the chill,

His cock hangs tiny and withdrawn there now.

According to “Writing a Poem,” Gunn had been struggling to write a poem about “certain related concepts.” “They were a familiar enough association of ideas,” he writes:

“… trust, openness, acceptance, innocence — but I felt them all the more vividly and personally the more signally I failed to get them into poems. Well, I knew by now that the thing to do was not to strain. I’d just have to go on living with the values, watering them, hardening them, getting them bushy with the detail of experience, until their flowering presented itself to me as given fact.”

It was in this time of not straining that Gunn wandered into the scene he describes in “Three,” but it was only, he says, after he finished the poem that he realized it was an embodiment of those themes. Nonetheless, he suspects that the interest in that “haunting cluster of concepts” was part of what made the scene so resonant for him in the first place. And it was his fidelity to that resonance, and the scene that first struck the chord, that guided him in the writing of the poem.

My belief, unprovable but firmly held, is that Gunn only gradually (and never entirely) stopped working to be a philosophical poet — and that in making that transition he brought himself closer to something that was already true of him in his life outside of writing:  a spirit of openness to experience combined with a generous, and somewhat formal, attentiveness to others. This is part of what I am trying to label courtliness, and it is, I think, an essential element in his best and most moving poems.

I am, I admit, playing a little loose with the term, taking elements both from its more literal meaning — dealing with the manners and traditions of courtiers — and its contemporary suggestion of politeness and refinement — with a touch of Gunn’s “giving of oneself” thrown in to fill it out.

My excuse for doing so is partly that I think Gunn did the same. As a poet, he took from those long ago poets and their seemingly antiquated norms while also immersing himself in the particulars and mores of a world they would have found inconceivable and, in some cases, abhorrent. He made a space in himself and in the poetic traditions he loved for the people he loved, as well as those who fascinated him. It was only, I believe, by ceasing to treat his governing ideals and ideas as the poems’ truest occasions that he was able to do so — to really make room for them, and to let the counter-currents of the people he learned to accommodate make room, in turn, for him, allowing him to move with more agility than he had before. And he was only able to learn that, I think, by his work in newer traditions that he also came to love.

*

The movement, at first, was hard to realize. In his third book, he began making statements in praise of the particular, rendered abstractly: praise for “things” with “their fine / lack of even potential meanings,” for example, or an assertion that “That limiting candour, // that accuracy of the beaches, / is part of the ultimate richness.” For a time, the resistance to an overriding philosophical vision became an overriding philosophical vision itself.

Acid seems to have helped. He began to invest more in ideals of change and motion, and he seemed to start seeing, more often and in more detail, the examples of which the ideal was made. The poem “Grasses,” from his fourth book, Moly (the same one that “Three” appears in), seems to describe the experience of tripping with some friends and includes compelling, detailed descriptions such as the following:

Each dulling-green, keen, streaky blade of grass

 Leans to one body when the breezes start:

A one-time pathway flickers as they pass,

Where paler toward the root the quick ranks part.

But ultimately, I think, it was the particulars of other people that brought out the best in him — not, to be clear, because particulars are inherently more poetic than abstractions, or because observations have more life in them than ideas, but because Gunn’s best and freest self, at least on the page, was the one that followed his interests and appetites beyond himself.

Gunn received enough complaints about the absence of a recognizable personality in his poems — of a particular, recognizable “voice” — to bring it up in multiple interviews. Characteristically, he always accepts the criticism without protestation — it is who he is. But you get the sense that it needled him a little. He could praise poets who existed as charismatic presences in their poems, but it didn’t seem essential to him, and his deep knowledge of the poets of the English Renaissance provided him with sheafs of examples of thrilling poems without any recognizable persona at work in their lines.

The person who is most present in Gunn’s best poems is not so much a speaker as an observer and, at least as much, a dancer. It is in the motion that he appears. To return to Jonson again, consider the opening stanza/sentence of his “My Picture Left in Scotland”:

I now think love is rather deaf, than blind,

            For else it could not be,

                        That she,

Whom I adore so much, should so slight me,

   And cast my love behind:

I’m sure my language was as sweet,

                        And every close did meet

                        In sentence of as subtle feet

                                    As hath the youngest he,

            That sits in shadow of Apollo’s tree.

We often talk about poems embodying something. Here, I think it’s more accurate to talk about the poem as a kind of body unto itself, a counter-body to “My hundred of gray hairs” and “My mountain belly and my rock face.” In this body, Jonson moves with exceptional grace, seeming to leap from rhyme to rhyme. Part of the poem’s conceit is that it doesn’t matter — that love is deaf to the music of his verse — but since I am the audience of the poem, not “she,” I am unpersuaded by that. The dance, for the time of the poem, is all.

*

“My Picture Left in Scotland” is, along with and inseparable from its dancing, a poem of extraordinary wit — of quick connections and tumbling reversals worn proudly, for show, in the faith that those who read or hear the poem will find pleasure (and cause for admiration) in the vibrant displays.

I have two working assumptions about poetry — at least in English. The first is that definitions of poetry are necessarily grotesque. Some are so broad that they take in countless art forms that we do not recognize as poems, and whose makers would probably cringe at the commercial implications of being associated with something that so rarely succeeds at market in this time and place — novels, say, or even movies. Others are so narrow that they merely describe a fashion, or a personal preference, or a mystical ideal, and regardless of their particulars cut out countless poems written in both the present and the past. Most do both.

My other assumption, which risks running counter to the first, is that wit is so fundamental to the origins of poetry in modern English that the various traditions that spill out from it, outside it, and even against it all depend in part on wit for their effect — that even those poems which nowhere deploy wit, which are austere and even ascetic in their motions, gain part of their power and apparent seriousness or humility or severity because anyone who has read a few poems will be aware at some level of what isn’t there. Someone set on creating a taxonomy of poetic movements and styles could do much worse than organizing them according to their relationship to wit in its various embodiments and imagined purposes; wit necessarily implies an audience, and poetry has expanded over time not only through the new ways in which writers imagine poetry, but also through the audiences they imagine, and what they hope to do to and for the audiences they find.

In his essay on Winters, Gunn describes himself as someone with “a streak of sentimentality.” If so, he mostly withheld it from his poems. (Only his Edenic ideal could occasionally lure it onto the page). Instead, he more often deployed what he described in a late poem about his mother as her “ruthless wit.” In some of his most elegant poems, he pins down what he lifts up by leaps of imagination that can feel a little like a tiger’s pounce. “Still Life,” another of the elegies from The Man With Night Sweats, ends:

I shall not soon forget

The angle of his head,

Arrested and reared back

On the crisp field of bed,

Back from what he could neither

Accept, as one opposed,

Nor, as a life-long breather,

Consentingly let go,

The tube his mouth enclosed

In an astonished O.

And “The Gas Poker,” which described Gunn and his brother finding their mother’s body after she killed herself, concludes:

One image from the flow

Sticks in the stubborn mind:

A sort of backwards flute.

The poker that she held up

Breathed from the holes aligned

Into her mouth til, filled up

By its music, she was mute.

And then there is “Lament,” the astonishing account of a friend’s death. It’s much too long to quote in full, but almost any section manages, almost at once, to dazzle, sadden, delight, honor, and pierce. Here’s a sample:

Meanwhile,

Your lungs collapsed, and the machine, unstrained,

Did all your breathing now. Nothing remained

But death by drowning on an inland sea

Of your own fluids, which it seemed could be

Kindly forestalled by drugs. Both could and would:

Nothing was said, everything understood,

At least by us. Your own concerns were not

Long term, precisely, when they gave the shot

— You made local arrangements to the bed

And pulled a pillow round beside your head.

And so you slept, and died, your skin gone grey,

Achieving your completeness, in a way.

Wit, in Gunn’s poems, seems to move in two directions simultaneously. It knocks down, insisting that his readers see the worst of things. With more exceptions than you’d need to prove the rule, he tends to deploy wit when presenting things that are lowly, awful, terrifying, cruel, and his wit — as in that shocking inversion of the musical instrument that silences his mother — sharpens the news. But it also allows him to move with apparent freedom and grace; it creates marvels of intellect and athleticism. It lives and engages the living — his readers — in the dance. This is another aspect of the courtliness, something borrowed from a world in which the line between song lyric and lyric poem was still faint, when dancing–literal dancing–and poetry kept company. And in all cases, I want to note, such dancing is enabled by Gunn’s careful (in both meanings of the word) attention to the specifics of the scenes, none of which resemble a courtly ideal.

*

Gunn loved misfits — people like the street mechanics eventually forced out of his neighborhood or the hitchhiker who dug nearly empty beer bottles out of the trash. For better and for worse, he saw them as individuals, suggestive of no social or political failures and in need of no great intervention. It allowed him to encounter them without sentimentality, with tenderness, candor, clarity, and wit, sometimes ruthless wit — though as in the final lines of “The Gas Poker,” the ruthlessness somehow reminds you, without any hand-waving or self-regard, that he cared for them enough to be pained, too, by what he renders in such piercing terms.

Take, for example, “Falstaff,” the first poem in “Transients and Residents,” which Gunn subtitled “a sequence interrupted.” (It’s a wonderful sequence; I wish he hadn’t interrupted it.) The poem begins by addressing his Falstaff, another “you” his language can’t reach: “I always hope to find you circling here …” Gunn notes, before laying down a term he’ll pull on for partly-comic effect again at multiple points in the poem, “Vast in your foul burnoose, you’d be the same.” That is, the same complicated, charismatic man who gathered younger men to him, controlling but also caring, throwing parties, cooking huge meals for anyone who showed up — though Gunn will soon make clear that the man is not, and would not be, the same. The poem ends with two sentences, the first one piling up so many dependent clauses that the independent clause almost disappears, the second one … well, you’ll see:

And though as years have passed your bullying love

Became more desperate (sometimes indeed

Stripped by a ruthlessness you weren’t above

It showed itself more nakedly as need);

And though the parties that you gave took place

In other people’s houses now, until

They kicked you out for taking all the space;

And though the drugs themselves got questionable —

Too many evenings in the bar have passed

Full of mere chatter and the pumping sound

Of disco on the jukebox since you last

 Roared down it for the next player or next round.

If you are sick — that’s what they say in here

Almost as if by way of an excuse —

The cancer must have rendered you, my dear,

Damnably thin beneath the foul burnoose.

Although it doesn’t bear too much attention, it seems worth mentioning that Gunn’s Falstaff, like Shakespeare’s, is a failed courtier of sorts. More significantly, unlike the subject of “To a Friend in Time of Trouble,” I can’t imagine that this 20th century Falstaff would care for this portrait, no matter how convinced I am of Gunn’s sincere affection. This Falstaff depends on illusion to make himself viable; to be seen and shown this clearly would surely seem like a threat.

The “Interruption” is an unusual element in Gunn’s poetry — a poem of dissatisfaction with the other poems in the sequence, and one focused on himself. I would expect Gunn, if he were unhappy with a poem or a sequence, to leave it unpublished, but it seems to have been important enough to him to follow through, turning the too-accurate camera back on himself, and then turning the whole thing into part of a book:

My mind shifts inward from such images.

What am I after — and what makes me think

The group of poems I have entered is

Interconnected by a closer link

Than any snapshot album’s?

 I can try

At least to get my snapshots accurate.

(The thought that I take others’ pictures, I,

Far too conceited to find adequate

Pictures they take of me!) Starting outside,

You save yourself some time by working in:

Thus by the seen the unseen is implied.

I like loud music, bars, and boisterous men.

You may from this conclude I like the things

To help me if not lose then leave behind,

What else, the self.

I trust the seedling wings,

Yet taking off on them I leave to find.

What else, indeed. It’s hardly Gunn at his best, which inclines me to take it seriously. He chose to cut off the sequence, rejecting it, and added this somewhat flat poem focused on himself, and then published the whole thing. It must have mattered to him. The criticism here focuses on a lack of unity, but it also seems to present accuracy as an inadequate defense. The use of these people, he suggests, adds up to too little to justify their use–or to relieve him of having to see himself. Which is a long way of saying that courtliness, for Gunn, was not a simple thing. Instead, I suspect, it was the best he could make — making it one poem at a time — of himself.

*

Courtliness, like a fixed meter, establishes a code, and those who thrive in it find a kind of freedom in the restriction, moving more deftly because they know where to put their feet — and in this way it works a little like the occasions Gunn insisted on honoring. Of course, Gunn’s version of courtliness is his own, patched together from models of decorum and poetry — often intuitively, I suspect, though it may be that he simply stitched them together with such care and necessity, over time, as to make the seams invisible. Still, it became a kind of second self in which he could move toward selflessness. I’m inclined to believe, too, that it was one of the reasons he was able to move through his literary life with such apparent confidence.

“In the Post Office” braids four portraits into one narrative. Least articulated is the former maybe-lover, maybe-not, now dead, to whom Gunn is speaking. The poem begins by telling “you” about a young man — Gunn calls him a kid — whose careless beauty aroused in Gunn both a desire not “roused … / In several years” and, by association, a memory of “you.” From there, it swerves into the story of Gunn’s trip to the house where “you” had lived–and where “your” former lover (or maybe not: “your–friend, roommate, or wooer? / I seek a neutral term where I’m unsure. / He lay there now”) is now dying. The narrative and psychological complexity are too much for a brief summary and better encountered in the poem itself. But I mentioned four portraits and have only acknowledged three. The last is Gunn himself, rendered in response to the others, and in particular to the “kid.” Gunn writes that he “gazed and gazed / At his good back,” continuing:

feeling again, amazed,

That almost envious sexual tension which

Rubbing at made the greater, like an itch,

An itch to steal or otherwise possess

The brilliant restive charm, the boyishness

That half-aware — and not aware enough —

Of what it did, eluded to hold off

The very push of interest it begot,

As if you’d been a tease, though you were not.

I hadn’t felt it roused, to tell the truth,

In several years, that old man’s greed for youth,

[…]

Not since I’d had the sense to cover up

My own particular seething can of worms,

And settled for a friendship on your terms.

It goes on, magnificently, from there, but it should be enough for my purposes to settle here for a moment. Though the portrayals here convince me that these are real people and that this scene — or something close to it — really happened, they don’t really particularize either character. Both Gunn and the “kid” feel a little like types, even as they go on feeling real. Their vibrancy is in part a function of Gunn’s alert movement across the pentameter couplets, but that movement is enabled, I think, by Gunn’s acceptance of the detail that resists utility or purpose. There is a feeling, here as in all of the poems from Gunn that I value the most, of Gunn changing course as details and complexities intrude, obstacles that he then incorporates into the dance. You can hear it throughout the entire first sentence, but it’s especially audible to me in

The brilliant restive charm, the boyishness

That half-aware — and not aware enough —

Of what it did, eluded to hold off

The very push of interest it begot,

As if you’d been a tease, though you were not.

Pulled down the page by the expectation of the pronounced rhymes, pulled back by the need to account for some further complication, the lines open and close as easily as a jellyfish. In this mode, Gunn frequently piles up metaphors: “That almost envious sexual tension which…,” “The brilliant restive charm,” “My own particular seething can of worms.” As with his wit, they serve at once as grace note and ballast, filling out the form and knocking it nearly off course. They are an emblem of the space that Gunn is making for others (including, in this case, the other that is himself) and an enabler of his formal movement almost independent of the scene.

Meanwhile, the presence of “you,” in this poem less subject than auditor and unifying principle, lingers, someone who once again cannot hear and whose importance is manifest in Gunn’s insistence on speaking to him nonetheless. He becomes, in his importance, one of the poem’s occasions, allowing Gunn to embark on the “adventures,” as he referred to them, of writing.

Something similar plays out in “A Blank,” the final poem in The Man With Night Sweats. The poem begins as if introducing another death — “The year of griefs being through, they had to merge / In one last grief, with one last property” — but the gesture is a feint. The former friend  he encounters is still very much alive; he’s simply left the erotic culture in which Gunn apparently knew him for a life as a father. In the poem, looking out the window from a passing bus, Gunn sees him standing at the corner with “A four-year-old blond child tugging his hand” and observes, first thinking back:

What I admired about his self-permission

Was that he turned from nothing he had done,

Or was, or had been, even while he transposed

The expectations he took out at dark

— Of Eros playing, features undisclosed —

Into another pitch, where he might work

With the same melody, and opted so

To educate, permit, guide, feed, keep warm,

And love a child to be adopted, though

The child was still a blank then on a form.

The blank was flesh now, running on its nerve,

This fair-topped organism dense with charm,

Its braided muscle grabbing what would serve,

His countering pull, his own devoted arm.

“This fair-topped organism dense with charm” reminds me a little of “your nose’s tip” and “dry of lip.” I suspect Gunn is playing a little — presenting his own remove from the world of parenting, and by extension his distance now from the former friend, through the bright and clustered absurdity of the line. But it doesn’t knock the poem off course, and the blank — not only the one on the form, but the four years (at least) in which he’d had no contact with his friend — becomes capacious in being filled. The final stanza isn’t a perfect metaphor for Gunn’s poetry at its best — like all of his best writing, the stanza is too alive to be carried so thoroughly over to anything else, even as it seems to lift circumstance up into something a little lighter, freer, welcoming. But if you were trying to describe his best poems — in a long, meandering essay, say — you could do much worse than ending with “Its braided muscle grabbing what would serve, / His countering pull, his own devoted arm.”

*

You could, but there’s one more poem I want to describe, or at least present — not as a metaphor for Gunn’s writing, but because it’s a poem I adore.

“The Hug” is the first poem in The Man With Night Sweats. A love poem for a love that has “Become familial,” it moves with some of the same agility as Jonson’s “My Picture Left in Scotland.” But if Jonson’s poem serves as an alternate body for the aged (forty-seven!), ugly poet, Gunn’s seems instead to prove the altered but still-viable beauty of the ongoing, altered love. A sadness settles into the poem near the end, a counter-weight that proves (and is proved by) the lift of the extraordinary final line.

The poem starts with a quick sketch — addressed to the beloved — of a scene on the beloved’s birthday when, drunk, Gunn collapsed into the bed provided by a friend with whom they were celebrating. His sleep, he says, “broke on a hug,  / Suddenly, from behind,  / In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed.” It ends with three sentences:

It was not sex, but I could feel

The whole strength of your body set,

Or braced, to mine,

And locking me to you

As if we were still twenty-two

When our grand passion had not yet

Become familial.

My quick sleep had deleted all

Of intervening time and place.

I only knew

The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

It seems safe to assume that the “you” here is Mike Kittay — the man Gunn followed to America and lived with, in different configurations, for the rest of his life. And assuming that the person he is speaking to here is real makes the candor, set off in an aside, of acknowledging the loss of their “grand passion,” more dangerous, but more intimate, too, more poignant. This declaration of love must live in the present reality, even as it also lives inside of rhythms drawn forward from centuries ago. The concluding pile-up of modifiers right there at the end does a lot of work. It’s the end of a short sentence that comes immediately after a long one, and it’s a long line (pentameter, in fact) immediately following one that is not only short (dimeter) but plain. And “embrace” reaches back for a rhyme just a few syllables gone by, after “knew” had to stretch all the way back to “twenty-two.”

“Your … embrace” leaps up, getting the last word as well as five different qualities (four if we don’t count its being “your”). The last of them, “dry,” is presumably the least welcome — potentially more disappointing for the two men, at least in isolation, than any other detail in the poem. And for that reason, it feels like the most intimate, as well. Unlike “Words for Some Ash,” “The Hug” doesn’t go out of its way to insist on its artifice. Neither does it feel remote from its supposed audience of one. It does not keep the speaker largely off stage or seem to take him out of himself. It is a love poem — something Gunn almost never wrote. But it still has that quality of giving, of generosity and attention. Of lodging something from his present in a tradition, almost half a millennia old, through which Gunn can move freely by making so much time for the insistent life — and death — of his own time.