On insatiable desires – Sean O’Brien in TLS :

‘The closing chapters may excite a certain told-you-so moral glee in some quarters, but Nott takes Gunn all in all: as a leading poet of the postwar period, as a critic and as a much-admired teacher, a loyal and generous friend, and a man who tried, not without success, to make a life and a family, and to balance the competing claims of insatiable desire (“Boss Cupid”) and his enduring love for Mike Kitay, his partner of fifty-odd years.’ (…)
‘Gunn observed that homosexuality seemed to him as normal as any other orientation, though in the earlier books the speakers’ sexual preferences are left for the reader to infer. Concealment was necessary for him to be able to teach at universities. His teacher and friend Yvor Winters would, he said, have been appalled to learn that Gunn was queer. (Another friend was Donald Davie, the Christian conservative poet and critic.) In an unpublished essay, “Poets and Gay Poets”, Gunn argued that the term Gay Poetry “releases but at the same moment it imprisons”. In the same essay he wrote: “It may be difficult to accept in 1980, but there are larger concerns for a human being than the important one of sexuality”.’

(…)

‘He was inclined to attribute his own escape from infection to a preference for oral sex, but maybe he was just lucky. Lucky or not, he wrote some of his best work about the dead and dying.’

(…)

‘Hunter’s autopsy found methamphetamine in his blood. In later years speed was to become Gunn’s drug of choice. For one thing it enabled sex to go on for entire weekends. In the end it got to him as to many another. In retirement he had nowhere much else to go, no obligation to break the cycle of indulgence. Towards the end he was injecting – or being injected with – rather than snorting the drug. He felt old and unattractive. His wind was gone; he was stooped, neglectful of domestic tasks and in effect paying dubious characters to have sex with him. “Brave, terrible, the will awaits its gradual end”, he had written of the elderly rake in “Modes of Pleasure 1” (in My Sad Captains, 1961). He was found dead in his room on Cole Street in 2004, aged seventy-four. Was it, as he hoped, in a phrase adapted from Hardy, “a cool queer life”? Perhaps. It was certainly, as the Dead put it, “a long, strange trip”.’ (…)
‘In Gunn’s case, neither the risk nor the horror is reduced. Michael Nott has done honour to his complex subject. This, and the Selected Poems edited by Wilmer, as well as Kleinzahler’s selection, are good places for new readers to begin, and for the rest of us to look afresh at this remarkable and at times exemplary poet, while awaiting a revised and expanded Collected Poems.’

Read the article here.

Probably a cool, queer life can suddenly become a long, strange trip.

Any life can become a long, strange trip. What else should it become?

Also: ‘He blurs further distinction, for he knows / Nothing of strength but its apparent drift,’ are line I won’t forget.

Probably time to read Gunn.