Boss Cupid: Poems

by Thom Gunn

Overview

A great poet's freshest, most provocative book.

He dreams at the center of a closed system,
Like the prison system, or a system of love,
Where folktale, recipe, and household custom
Refer back to the maze that they are of.
—from "A System: PCP, or Angel Dust"

Taste and appetite are contraposed in Boss Cupid, the twelfth book of poems by the quintessential San Francisco poet, who is also the quintessential craftsman and quintessentially a love poet, though not of quintessential love.Variations on how we are ruled by our desires, these poems make a startling and eloquent gloss on wanton want, moving freely from the story of King David and Bathsheba to Arthur Rimbaud's diet to the tastes of Jeffrey Dahmer. As warm and intelligent as it is ribald and cunning, this collection of Thom Gunn's is his richest yet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374527716
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/09/2001
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Thom Gunn, born in 1929, has received many awards, most recently a Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader's Digest Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. His works include The Man with Night Sweats and Collected Poems.

Read an Excerpt

Duncan

I

When in his twenties a poetry's full strength

Burst into voice as an unstopping flood,

He let the divine prompting (come at length)

Rushingly bear him any way it would

And went on writing while the Ferry turned

From San Francisco, back from Berkeley too,

And back again, and back again. He learned

You add to, you don't cancel what you do.

Between the notebook-margins his pen travelled,

His own lines carrying him in a new mode

To ports in which past purposes unravelled.

So that, as on the Ferry Line he rode,

Whatever his first plans that night had been,

The energy that rose from their confusion

Became the changing passage lived within

While the pen wrote, and looked beyond conclusion.



2



Forty years later, and both kidneys gone;

Every eight hours, home dialysis;

The habit of his restlessness stayed on

Exhausting him with his responsiveness.

After the circulations of one day

In which he taught a three-hour seminar

Then gave a reading clear across the Bay,

And while returning from it to the car

With plunging hovering tread tired and unsteady

Down Wheeler steps, he faltered and he fell

-Fell he said later, as if I stood ready,

"Into the strong arms of Thom Gunn."

Well well,

The image comic, as I might have known,

And generous, but it turned things round to myth:

He fell across the white steps there alone,

Though it was me indeed that he was with.

I hadn't caught him, hadn't seen in time,

And picked him up where he had softly dropped,

A pillow full of feathers. Was it a rime

He later sought, in which he might adopt

The role of H.D., broken-hipped and old,

Who, as she moved off from the reading-stand,

Had stumbled on the platform but was held

And steadied by another poet's hand?



He was now a posthumous poet, I have said

(For since his illness he had not composed),

In sight of a conclusion, whose great dread

Was closure,

his life soon to be enclosed

Like the sparrow's flight above the feasting friends,

Briefly revealed where its breast caught their light,

Beneath the long roof, between open ends,

Themselves the margins of unchanging night.



The Antagonism

to Helena Shire

The Makers did not make

The muddy winter hardening to privation,

Or cholera in the keep, or frost's long ache

Afflicting every mortal nation

From lord to villagers in their fading dyes

-Those who like oxen strained

On stony clearings of the ground

From church to sties.



They sought an utterance,

Or sunshine soluble in institution,

An orthodoxy justified, at once

The dream and dreamer warmed in fusion,

As in the great Rose Window, pieced from duty,

Where through Christ's crimson, sun

Shines on your clothes till they take on

Value and beauty.

But carved on a high beam

Far in the vault from the official version

Gape gnarled unChristian heads out of whom stream

Long stems of contrary assertion,

Shaped leaf ridging their scalps in place of hair.

Their origins lost to sight,

As they are too, cast out from light.

They should despair.

What stays for its own sake,

Occulted in the dark, may slip an ending,

Recalcitrant, and strengthened by the ache

Of winter not for the transcending.

Ice and snow pile the gables of the roof

Within whose shade they hold,

Intimate with its slaty cold,

To Christ aloof.

Copyright © 2000 Thom Gunn

Interviews

Cupid as Bully: A Talk with Thom Gunn

Bathhouse poems were a pretty risky way to start a poetry career when Thom Gunn first began publishing. In the 1950s, Gunn's sensual, vividly detailed poems about love and homosexual desire -- poems widely considered among the best verse of our time -- delved into subject matter editors felt free to reject on "moral" grounds. The decades have proved that Gunn was no publicity-seeking sensationalist but a masterful poet committed to form and deeply involved in bringing 18th- and 19th-century French influences into English. With the years, Gunn's work has become more vibrant, openly funny sometimes, and cuttingly precise in its observation. Gunn has always been interested in visual detail, and even coauthored a book of poems with his photographer brother, Ander, titled Positives, which traces the arc of life through photographs, elegantly pairing poems to pictures. Writing about a child or a bent, elderly woman in those photographs, Gunn is ever alert to feelings of love, power, and helplessness -- all related to his major repeating theme of desire as the core of humanity. A Briton who moved to California to join his lover, Gunn spent many years teaching at Berkeley and recently retired. Along the way, he's won numerous awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship and a Lila Acheson Wallace prize. But the America he lives in now, the America he has written about so touchingly in many of his 12 books of poems, is not the America he first moved to. Gay literature is a thriving category, and there are many outstanding gay poets actively publishing poems. The then-shocking moments in Gunn's work no longer create waves, and now, the poems' beauty can stand on its own terms. But Gunn still loves his initial subject matter. He can't stay away from it. His latest volume, Boss Cupid, details how we are ruled by desire. As Gunn says, he is interested in "desire as a bully." These poems, once again far from complacent, roamed from David and Bathsheba to Jeffrey Dahmer, with pit stops for attractive guys in the post office. The writing is taut, with constant attention to form. Every line is in place. In our exclusive interview, contributing editor Aviya Kushner talks with Gunn about love, desire, and a career record of being true to oneself -- no matter what society may say.

Barnes & Noble.com: Your most recent book, Boss Cupid, is all about desire. Why is desire so fascinating a subject for you, and why have you kept writing about it?

Thom Gunn: It's one of the principal human preoccupations -- and it certainly has been for me. At least, it has been for 60 years. One of the greatest influences on me have been the 18th- and 19th-century French novelists -- Laclos, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Proust. They've influenced me much more than the ancients. They explore the subject of love and its contradictions, and the idea that Cupid, the god of love, is a bully. He can make us profoundly uncomfortable.

B&N.com: What about your subject matter -- is it easier now to write about gay topics? Tell me a bit about how things have changed since you started writing.

TG: It has opened up a lot. Edmund White has a theory that once my generation and his were enabled to write freely about queer love, we were given an enormous amount of subject matter. It's very hard to imagine now the constrictions on writing about same-sex love in the 1950s, when I got started. You didn't write about same-sex love -- you wouldn't have been published. In 1944, for example, Robert Duncan, the San Francisco poet (who is memorialized in the poem "Duncan" in Boss Cupid) wrote an essay for a periodical called Politics about homosexuality. It wasn't that unusual in its content, but what was unusual was that Duncan said he was a homosexual. And a periodical run by John Crowe Ransom that had accepted Duncan's poems de-accepted them as a result. So things have changed enormously.

B&N.com: And yet Cupid is still boss. Where did the title come from?

TG: The title drew it together. I couldn't think what to call the book, and suddenly I realized that one of the references in the book would be a great title.

B&N.com: I'm interested in some of your previous work, too. In one of the poems in Positives, you write, "Youth is power." Well, what does a poet who wrote that do when he gets older?

TG: I'm not suggesting it as an absolute constant statement. Youth in this instance can be power, but I'm not offering it as a constant truth. For him, it is (the boy in the photograph). He's full of potential -- he's bathing in it. What is getting older? It's getting tired.

B&N.com: On the flip side, I'm curious about what you meant in an early poem about childhood, where you wrote "there is pleasure in reaching/a painful conclusion/with a tooth or with a thought." What is the pleasure, exactly?

TG: It can be painful when a new tooth comes through. It's a painful pleasure, and the mix of pleasure and pain is working something out.

B&N.com: You moved to California in 1954 and have stayed since. How has living in the United States affected your work?

TG: There's no controlled experiment to know what Thom Gunn would have been like had he stayed. Certainly the subject matter has been very much American, since my experience has been American.

B&N.com: In "Duncan," the opening poem in Boss Cupid, you write, "He learned you add to, you don't cancel what you do." Is that how you work?

TG: Duncan didn't believe in revision, he believed in adding. Once I showed him a poem, and then I showed him the same poem some weeks later, revised with a different ending. And he said if he were me he'd put in both endings. That line in the poem "Duncan" refers to the way he worked. He was a wonderful man. We were friends, and as a poet he had a very different following from me, but we were friends.

B&N.com: You've mentioned that you love Baudelaire. What is it about Baudelaire's work that you particularly admire?

TG: Proust pointed out that certain lines in Baudelaire could have been written by Racine. They were so classical in their balance, and the fact that he was able to balance the classical and the modern city -- that's magnificent. The fact that he was able to use the chaste style of Racine to describe the unchaste side of the city -- that's remarkable.

B&N.com: Okay, your wish is granted and you can pick your readers. Can you describe your ideal reader?

TG: My ideal reader would be rather like myself at the age of 21 or so. I don't expect special knowledge from him. I wouldn't expect my poetry to be the first thing the person picked up. I wouldn't need to give any direction.

B&N.com: But if you could offer advice to readers, what would it be?

TG: Read aloud. You should hear it. All poetry needs to be heard.

B&N.com: And what's next for you?

TG: I don't know. Death?! I mean, I'm 70. I'm having a good time being retired. You can get drunk in the middle of the day. I enjoyed teaching and I thought I'd miss it, but I don't miss it. There was always that sense of mild panic before giving a lecture, and any worthwhile teacher is going to worry. I do certainly miss the contact with young people, because they ask elementary questions. They keep you from becoming complacent.

Contributing editor Aviya Kushner is the poetry editor of Neworld Magazine and has served as poetry coordinator for AGNI Magazine. Her writing on poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review and The Boston Phoenix, and her essays on individual poems have been published in Poetry for Students, the college textbook on poetry. She has given readings of her own work throughout the United States and can be reached at [e-mail].

Editorial Reviews

Imagine an Auden less reticent . . . Almost all of Gunn's virtues are on display here: his playful metrical dexterity, his unflinching celebration of both beauty and its transience.” —Paul Gray, Time

“Passion in all its obsessive gnarly complexity [serves as] the dominant motif in Boss Cupid . . . But in the end, Gunn's great lyric versatility, his edgy wit, and his mastery as a portraitist [underscore] 'the intellect as the powerhouse of love'—and of Gunn's poetics. He is at once the most visceral and cerebral of poets, delineating desire and its fallout with an objective precision.” —Carol Moldaw, The Antioch Review

“[He has] a formal expertise as polished and apparently effortless as any in contemporary poetry . . . Gunn can choose his form and can fashion, within its enabling limits, breathtaking sweeps through a wide range of fraught feeling.” —Michael Thurston, The Yale Review

From the Publisher

Big Boss Man

Thom Gunn's acclaimed 1992 poetry collection, The Man with the Night Sweats, significantly broadened both his popular audience and his critical reputation. Yet that collection's contemplative, commemorative poems chronicling the catastrophe of AIDS in his community were so elegantly final, and so absorbed in questions of ending, that one wondered nervously what Gunn might do next. The release of Collected Poems in 1994 made Gunn's silence of recent years all the more deafening.

Boss Cupid shows how well this time was spent. The book is not merely an extension of the concerns and sensibility of The Man with the Night Sweats, it represents a further stage in Gunn's development. Raised in middle-class London, a graduate of Cambridge, and a fixture of the San Francisco gay scene since 1954, Gunn possesses a hybrid dialect, a formal style, and a viewpoint peculiar to itself. His singularity is perhaps most instantly discernible in his use of meter and rhyme; the complaint that "all the good rhymes in the English language have been used up" has met its match in the infernally ingenious pairings of lines like these: "Friends by the bedful, lounging on one sheet,/Playing cards, smoking, while the drugs come on, Or watching the foot-traffic on the beat,/Ready for every fresh phenomenon" ("Saturday Night").

But in Boss Cupid, these idiosyncrasies of style and substance are put to new purpose. Gunn seems to have reached the third phase of the famous paradigm Kierkegaard laid out in his masterwork Fear and Trembling: If the elegiacal, sober tone of The Man with the Night Sweats approximates the knight of infinite resignation, then the spirit of this collection is the knight of infinite faith, who, after having made due sacrifice, receives the world back again. These poems are more exuberant, mobile, and light, but their lightness is the lightness of a dancer, of the expert manipulation of weight, and not a lack of substance. They feel freer, not in the sense of being looser -- for they are, as always, finely chiseled -- but in the sense of a trapeze artist exploring wider and wider arcs. If Gunn's trapeze act is a performance, it is nevertheless accomplished at no loss of intimacy -- the poet throws himself into the breach. Although these poems take delight in executing daredevil wordplay, they never devolve into linguistic games. In fact, the pieces that best show off Gunn's mastery are the ones that are most "serious," such as those dealing with religious topics or with death. Here Gunn demonstrates how a tight wit and intelligence can actually enable empathy, rather than forestalling it by tainting a subject with irony. This is a rare and difficult feat, as exemplified by his consideration of the gay bathhouses of the '70s, in the conclusion to "Saturday Night":

      What hopeless, hopefulness. I watch, I wait --
      The embraces slip, and nothing seems to stay
         In our community of the carnal heart.
      Some lose conviction in mid-arc of play,
         Their skin turns numb, they dress and will depart:
      The perfect body, lingering on goodbyes,
         Cannot find strength now for another start.
      Dealers move in, and murmuring advertise
         Drugs from each doorway with a business frown.
      Mattresses lose their springs. Beds crack, capsize,
         And spill their occupants on the floor to drown.
      Walls darken with mold, or is it rash?
         At length the baths catch fire and then burn down,
      And blackened beams dam up the bays of ash.

Gunn's work is successful in this elaborate maneuver because of its innate generosity. It is generous toward the reader, equally distant from hermetic obscurity as from maudlin confessionalism. And it is generous toward its subject, generous with the unusually high quality of its attention. For example, in Gunn's laments for the dead, the deceased friend himself shines through, instead of being swallowed up by the survivor's mourning and self-absorbed meditation. Even when Gunn turns his scrutiny on himself, as in "The Artist as an Old Man," his gaze is clear and fair:

      Vulnerable because
      naked because
      his own model.

      Muscled and veined, not
      a bad old body
      for an old man.
      The face vulnerable too,
      its loosened folds
      huddled against
      the earlier outline: beneath
      the assertion of nose
      still riding the ruins
      you observe the down-
      turned mouth: and
      above it,
      the assessing glare
      which might be read as
      I've got the goods on you
      asshole and I'll expose you.

Perhaps the art most like Gunn's new work is Roman sculpture; a classical sympathy runs through the poems of this book, which exemplify clarity, beauty, balance, wit, and elegance. They are variously humorous, playfully sexual, mischievous, and above all, squarely human. Gunn might as easily have been characterizing himself when he wrote of William Carlos Williams: "His stylistic qualities are governed...by a tenderness and generosity of feeling which makes them fully humane. For it is a human action to attempt the rendering of thing, person, or experience in the exact terms of its existence."

—Monica Ferrell

bn.com

[Gunn's] Collected Poems are sane, accessible, impressive in their versification and command of language - testaments to intelligence, warmth, and integrity.
—The New York Times Book Review

Richard Tillinghast

[Gunn] becomes more adventuresome as he grows older . . . Sometimes the poems are so emotionally bald and direct that they are deeply disturbing.
— The Threepenny Review

August Kleinzahler

The authority, grace, and, not least, the sheer memorableness of Gunn's lines . . . are naturally composed of temperament, diction, attitude, experience, observation - life itself. But they are expressed (especially early and late in the collection) in measures whose suppleness and strength have the effect of effortlessly italicizing whatever the particular poem's burden is. Gunn's joy lifts the heart; but so do his many recent poems on a topic that could hardly be called joyful.
—The Yale Review

Rachel Hadas

An exceptional and fascinating poet with a formal range to rival Auden's, a sensuality equal to Ginsberg's and a profound yet daily humanity that surely surpasses that of any other poet of our times.
— The Times Literary Supplement

Glyn Maxwell

Gunn, who grew up in England in the '30s and '40s, and has long resided in San Francisco, remains deservedly famous for his poetic chronicles of gay male lust, love, grief and urban life, and for his masterful, unshowy, reader-friendly poems in traditional forms. In his first collection since 1993's lauded The Man with Night Sweats, Gunn treats his readers to lovely stanzaic lyric, amiable Ben Jonson-style epistles, cogent blank-verse essays and taut quatrains; he offers up, too, great descriptions of aging hustlers, versatile bartenders, cool kids, elective affinities and enduring affections, many in a muscular, terse free verse. His interests in disinterested judgment, on sociability and friendship, reappear along with his interest in sex. To his poems about people and places, Gunn adds a brace of short takes on Greek and Biblical stories and legends: Arachne, Arethusa, the loves and lovers of King David. (A brief set of poems in the person of gay serial killer, cannibal and necrophiliac Jeffrey Dahmer are overwhelmed by their subject.) The loose sequence "Gossip"--about a third of the book--consists of quick, memorable, short-lined free-verse portraits: "Frank O'Hara's last lover," the survivor of a brutal "Los Angeles childhood," a Berkeley student "fueled/ on wit and risk/ and Ecstasy." Standalone short poems include a dignified and forceful ode about stained-glass windows and a capsule biography of a man "Raised, he said, not at home but in a Home." While all these ought to satisfy both neophytes and longtime Gunn fans, the latter may be most strongly affected by Gunn's pair of poems on his mother's suicide, a subject on which he has not before published verse: "I am made by her," one poem ends, "and undone." (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Gunn allows his patterns of meter, rhyme and stanzaic form to emerge organically from the material to which he is seeking to give shape. One can almost follow this happening on the page, observation finding its proper rhythm, emotion its spiritual level, the poet discovering new moods, new modes of reflection.
—The New York Times Book Review

William Deresiewicz

Gunn's lengthy and distinguished poetic career includes numerous volumes of poetry and essays, as well as a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader's Digest Fellowship. His acclaimed last book, The Man With Night Sweats (1992), was marked by its wrenching, delicate AIDS elegies. The new collection strikes a tonal balance between an unsentimental awareness of death and a wry but often exuberant account of the everyday tyrannies of love. `Save the word / empathy, sweetheart, / for your freshman essays,` drawls one poem. `In the Post Office` begins by describing a sexual attraction to a stranger, but resolves into a meditation on a friend's death. In the poem's final lines, elegy and celebration merge. The poet becomes the `survivor, as I am indeed, / recording so that I may later read / Of what has happened, whether between sheets, / Or in post offices, or on the streets.` Perhaps the poems are at their best when they take their greatest risks, as in `Troubadour: Songs for Jeffery Dahmer` - in which a catalogue of horrors, including a severed head perched on a shelf `between headcheese and lard,` emerges bathetically from the desire to `find more tangible effects / Than what the memory collects.` Gunn's inventive yet controlled formalism, a hallmark of his work, is reminiscent of Renaissance poets like Wyatt and Donne. His liberal use of classical and biblical allusion is never gratuitous, as the sexy, thoughtful cycle about King David that closes the book attests. A lithe and lyrical volume by a master of contemporary poetry.

Kirkus Reviews