MARGINALIA
Upon first glance, it’s hard to conceive of much common ground between the poets Robert Duncan and Thom Gunn. Duncan’s cosmic, bardic, Whitmanian, anachronistically neo-Romantic poems and poetics seem light years removed from Gunn’s understated, tough-minded, often neatly metered and rhymed takes on such disparate late-twentieth-century phenomena as motorcycle gangs, Elvis Presley, acid trips, bathhouse orgies, and the decimations of the AIDS crisis. In an interview quoted in August Kleinzahler’s 1995 essay “Thom Gunn: The Plain Style and the City,” Gunn had this to say about his literary ambitions: “I’m not aiming for central voice and I’m not aiming for central personality. I want to be an Elizabethan poet. I want to write with the same kind of anonymity that you get in the same way somebody like Ben Jonson did” (79). Whatever it was exactly Duncan was aiming for in his work, it certainly wasn’t anonymity. In his poetry, an extraordinary range of references and sources—to choose an arbitrary sampling from his penultimate book, Ground Work I: Before the War, which I will be discussing in this essay: Achilles, Paul Celan, Jakob Boehme, John Adams, how to cook a leg of lamb, Ezra Pound, Albigensian rime, Wallace Stevens, “the metaphysical genius in English poetry (1590–1690)”, and yes, even the poems of Thom Gunn—is absorbed and filtered through the sieve of Duncan’s grand-styled Personality. A famous quote of Duncan’s to pair against Gunn’s statement of anonymous intent is his proclamation in the 1953 essay “Pages from a Notebook”: “I make poetry as other men make war or make love or make states or revolutions: to exercise my facilities at large” (A Selected Prose 19).
Surprisingly, though, despite their surface aesthetic differences, Duncan and Gunn enjoyed a long and fruitful friendship during the many years they both lived in San Francisco. In a 2000 interview with James Campbell, Gunn had only positive things to say about his relationship with Duncan: “Talking with him was, by all accounts, like talking with Coleridge … He was very funny about himself, and had a wonderful sense of humor. He had very wide, beautiful sympathies … Besides [Yvor] Winters he’s probably the poet who meant most to me in my life … Duncan was a person of tremendous generosity, with a wonderful imagination” ( 36–37). Gunn wrote three highly laudatory and appreciative critical essays about Duncan, including the 1979 piece “Homosexuality in Robert Duncan’s Poetry,” reprinted in (1982), and two substantial late-career retrospectives, 1987’s “The High Road: A Last Collection” and 1991’s “Adventurous Song: Robert (1993). The essays are clear-minded, generous, and comprehensive, and taken as a whole, offer one of the most readable and thorough introductions available to Duncan’s often intimidating body of work. Gunn praises Duncan for his inclusiveness, originality, and unfashionable ambition “to pursue exalted themes with passionate feeling” ( 168), and he posits Duncan as a brave counterpoint to contemporary poetic tendencies to find virtue “in understatement and … safety in irony” and to evasively “disown passion or … clothe it in indirection” ( 141). Duncan wrote no critical essays about Gunn and doesn’t mention him at all in any of the pieces included in 1995’s , but he did something perhaps more interesting: in 1971 he wrote a suite of poems in direct response to Gunn’s breakthrough volume of the same year, self-published them privately in a set of 250 in 1972 during his famous fifteen-yearlong “blackout” of traditional avenues and modes of publication, and included the entire sequence, entitled “Poems from the Margins of Thom Gunn’s ,” as a key component in his massive, previously mentioned collection from 1984, .
