TY - JOUR
AU - Scheffler, Adam
AB - THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER THOM GUNN wrote many fraught poems about enclosed and imprisoned others, and in doing so he reacquaints us with a problem long debated about the lyric. Many famous theorists of lyric have conceived of it as solitary, spoken by someone who is alone;1 and in the last several decades critics have attacked lyric for this exclusivity, arguing that it suppresses ‘otherness’. Lyric’s focus on the self or speaker has been read as an exercise in solipsistic or autocratic authorial control that ignores or appropriates ‘the not–I’2 – as it is by Mikhail Bakhtin, forefather of such criticism, who thought that lyric comprises one voice speaking to itself, or turning the other into the self.3 In ‘La Prisonnière’ Gunn shows how lyric’s propensity for concision and the well wrought – its tendency to compress and to tighten – can find a troubling parallel in a human desire to enclose, distort, and smother other people: Now I will shut you in a box With massive sides and a lid that locks. Only by that I can be sure That you are still mine and mine secure, And know where you are when I’m not by, No longer needing to wonder and spy…4 The controlling poet (or his surrogate in the poem) uses form to bring his addressee to heel, and the doubleness that features in the poem (of rhyme, of phrase) gestures towards a sense of dialogue, of something or someone else, only to deny it. ‘La Prisonnière’ ends in tautology: If my return finds a heap of bones – Too dry to simper, too dry to whine – You will still be mine and only mine. If lyric form is indeed a matter of a first-person voice exercising careful, taut control over a small group of words, then it is not hard to see how it might create well-made boxes or cells, like Gunn’s little poem, in which, if other people do enter, they feel like inanimate material to be manipulated (‘mine and only mine’) and end up dead objects (‘a heap of bones’) rather than living beings in their own right, rather than the kind of realistic or vital characters we look to find in fiction. ‘I wonder if what makes a man decide to be a novelist or a poet is the knowledge that he wants to write of others or of himself?’, Gunn once asked; but he went on to say that he did not want to write poems just about himself, but a different kind of poetry, a social poetry. Indeed, from the beginning of his career, his poetry is full of other people – he never turns his back on them and retreats into, say, Theodor Adorno’s lyric wilderness; but there are much more warmly gregarious poets – such as Whitman or Williams or Frank O’Hara – who have far less trouble welcoming and celebrating others in their poems: Gunn’s work both exemplifies and combats its tendency towards imprisoning others. ‘La Prisonnière’ is evidently a kind of parody of the impulse to control and isolate: after all, the poem’s title is a reference to Proust’s jealousy and wish to imprison Albertine. Gunn is turning to a famous scene of literary possessiveness in order to reckon with its disturbing resonance for him; and, in many of his later poems especially, this line of criticism intensifies, Gunn working to contest any drift towards solipsism manifested by his own controlling lyric temperament, and finding ways for others to come to life within his lyric cells. The constriction of those cells then challenges his characters into vitality rather than imprisoning them, paradoxically finding ways of humanely representing others by way of a proclivity for not normally doing so. Gunn’s early characters, however, do seem like victims of a deforming lyric impulse. These characters lack independent life: his bored demobbed soldiers and his existentialist bikers may be drawn from the world, but once they enter into an early Gunn poem, it is hard to imagine them ever leaving it again: they become props or exemplars of Gunn’s grey emotional climate; of his feelings of rigidity and boredom; of his own existentialist reckonings about how to live; and of his (at that time) unacceptable sexual desires and wishes for self-containment. The brutally ‘realistic’ soldier in ‘Lofty in the Palais de Danse’ (1954) speaks of pursuing glimpses of his dead beloved in each new, tiresome sexual conquest – and in the midst of this process he becomes a grim, disembodied voice that ‘sways’ ‘in the shadowed street’ (p. 10). Similarly, the bikers of Gunn’s famous poem ‘On the Move’ (1957) are at once clearly defined and blurry (‘In goggles, donned impersonality’, p. 39). Though made of thunder, muscle, and noise they remain plural, ghostly, and abstract: Gunn gives few clear images or direct descriptions but instead the observation that ‘Reaching no absolute, in which to rest’, they ride around ‘self-defined, astride the created will’ (p. 40). In these early poems, which describe love with vague partners as a series of wartime stratagems, or tell placeless stories of scheming courts, revolts, and exiles, the metres and the world’s harshness are clear, but the world itself and its inhabitants are often hard to make out. The extreme foregrounding of Gunn’s themes often seems to drown out his characters and simply return us to Gunn – and these themes are often ones of harsh, warden-like control over the self and others. Repeatedly in the early poems Gunn meditates on the existentialist heroes and ‘overdogs’ (p. 56) of history like Lord Byron, Alexander, and Coriolanus whose power, Gunn suggests, comes from their ruthlessness and disciplined will. As Gunn is struggling to control himself, he is also forcing his characters into moulds to help him. In a poem entitled ‘A Plan of Self-Subjection’ (1957), Gunn writes, ‘As Alexander or Mark Antony / Or Coriolanus, whom I most admire, / I mask self flattery. / And yet however much I may aspire / I stay myself’ (p. 46). He adds: ‘before very long / From poem back to original I twist’. The same, though, cannot be said for his characters, who are so dominated by their author that they frequently risk just turning back into Thom Gunn meditating on his painful entrapment: the power Gunn gains through his toughs and the will, is a power that is monstrous in the way it leads him to containment and isolation: ‘Now I will shut you in a box / With massive sides and a lid that locks. . .’. Gunn was interested in prisoners, jailers, torturers, and executioners throughout his career, and as late as the mid-1960s wrote a poem about an endless loop of entrapment: ‘The jail contained a tank, the tank contained / A box, a mere suspension, at the centre, / Where there was nothing left to understand, / And where he must re-enter and re-enter’ (p. 173). The loop is another figure for solipsistic entrapment in early Gunn.5 Remarkably, though, as time passes, Gunn loosens up. For many reasons, including his experiences of the sixties and Gay Liberation, and his readings of Whitman, Williams, and Snyder in the 1960s and 1970s, the other people encountered in his poems start faring better, less like ghostly and distorted inmates and more like actual, tangible people. You get a rich and lively sense of his contemporary San Francisco from these later poems, which are now full of realistic-seeming characters such as barflies, homeless people, skateboarders, drug dealers, nudists, and gay lovers. Many critics have noted Gunn’s transformation as a poet, but not that his very penchant for damaging control and containment – for severity, austerity, form, closure – remains as essential to his later successes as it was to his earlier works. Gunn’s later mode of characterisation is not so much a relaxation of earlier rigour as a counterbalancing. It is often noted that he remains a poet of closed forms;6 it is less often remarked that closure and enclosure remain a threatening aspect of his temperament and aesthetic throughout his career, a force always in danger of stifling the life of his characters and returning Gunn to himself and his own dour, lyrical isolation. Ghosts, prisons, and monstrous tormentors continue to appear throughout his later work, alongside his happier flesh-and-blood characters – from the ‘oubliette’ of Jack Straw’s Castle (1976) – where the people had ‘looked convincing, yet . . . [had] too much of the phantom to them’ (p. 271) – all the way to the gay, necrophiliac cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer in Gunn’s last volume, Boss Cupid (2000), whose desire to possess his beloveds leads him back to a solitude where ‘only myself remained / in which I wandered lost / by my monotonous coast’.7 Keith Tuma writes that ‘finally there is not all that much that distinguishes “La Prisonnière” in Gunn’s first book from the songs of Jeffrey Dahmer in his last’.8 James Breslin has argued that many of the American poets of around Gunn’s age broke through isolated, hermetic, and traditional New Critical forms in order to write looser poems full of scenes and people from the outside world.9 Yet Gunn is unique in that instead of ‘breaking through’ he depicts others who are able to make enclosure work for them, counterbalances to his temperament, so granting him, as he says of Williams, the ‘delight at their freedom which also makes one’s own freedom more precise’.10 Many of Gunn’s later characters are able to treat bounded poems and poetic rules as a sort of obstacle course that challenges and draws out their vitality, rather than as structures of bars that encage it: the tightness and constriction natural to lyric can then come to be seen as a joyous athletic challenge rather than a doom. The surfers in Gunn’s poem ‘From the Wave’ from his mid-career book Moly (1971) provide a clear demonstration of what it means to put enclosure to work: It mounts at sea, a concave wall  Down ribbed with shine. And pushes forward, building tall  Its steep incline. Then from their hiding rise to sight  Black shapes on boards Bearing before the fringe of white  It mottles towards. Their pale feet curl, they poise their weight  With a learn’d skill. It is the wave they imitate  Keeps them so still. The marbling bodies have become  Half wave, half men, Grafted it seems by feet of foam  Some seconds, then, Late as they can, they slice the face  In timed procession Balance is triumph in this place  Triumph possession. The mindless heave of which they rode  A fluid shelf Breaks as they leave it, falls and, slowed,  Loses itself. Clear, the sheathed bodies slick as seals  Loosen and tingle; And by the board the bare foot feels  The suck of shingle. They paddle in the shallows still;  Two splash each other; Then all swim out to wait until  The right waves gather. (pp. 198-9) Enclosure is important here because the scene is enclosed, circular: it starts with a wave forming, then develops to the surfers slicing the face of it, and finally ends with the surfers waiting for another wave. The poem is an entrapping loop, its end leading back to its beginning. Our knowledge about the surfers is clearly limited: they are plural and we learn nothing about them except that they are alternately serious and playful – able to splash each other as well as become quasi-artistic ‘masters’ who have ‘a learn’d skill’. The surfers are impressive in various ways, though enclosed within the described circular activity of the poem. Yet in another sense the poem does not limit its characters to surfing: it presents them in the integrity of a single admirable activity with which Gunn tries not to tamper too much. This is a common strategy in Gunn’s work: many of his later characters appear only through a single motion or activity while he keeps his own presence to a minimum – appearing only tangentially or not at all. For instance, in his poem ‘The Release’ (1976), Gunn watches a man with a ‘beautiful eager’ walk, but then reproaches himself for ‘reading him . . . thinking I can master what is self-contained’. Gunn ends up admiring the man’s unknowable independence: the man is ‘a shimmering planet sheathed in its own air . . . unpredictable, clean of me’ who ‘slouches eagerly’ out of the poem and ‘back to the street he came from’ (pp. 301-2). Without violating another’s ‘self-containment’, it is possible to know at least something about how that other’s body moves through a street or an ocean. Telling only a little about these characters is a way of being respectful of them: it is only their activity that is enclosed, not them; and yet that activity itself is bracing. There is a kind of waking up and coming to attention in the surfers’ presence, or while viewing the man’s ‘beautiful eager’ walk, as a first-person song is temporarily supplanted by other lives each replete with their own meanings. Like the eager man, and unlike the lighthouse keeper or bikers from Gunn’s early poems, it is easy to imagine the surfers walking up the beach and back to the lives they have outside the poem; and part of the reason for that is that they display an independent, skilful energy that’s clearly admired in its difference from the poet’s own, a kind of healthy company, admired for the vital energy and skill they bring to bear on a tangible, realistically depicted activity. Gunn’s poem foregrounds a moment in which the surfers take triumphant ownership over the waves: they find a ‘triumph in this place’ and that ‘Triumph [is] possession’. The surfers still only seem compelling because of the way their skill transforms enclosure, and that transformation here is a formal as well as a thematic accomplishment. The verse form of ‘From the Wave’ might have become deadening and repetitious: the abab stanzas with lines alternating between iambic tetrameter and iambic dimeter call for a rhyme every twelve syllables (Gunn rarely settles for half-rhymes) which could easily have created a dull poem. But the surfers can be seen inscribing their own lively patterns on top of the poem’s overt form in a way that keeps the poem surprising and vital. For example, for the first three stanzas of their activity, the surfers are content to have only have two verbs per stanza, each verb corresponding to two lines (stanza 2: rise/bearing; stanza 3: poise/imitate; stanza 4: have become/grafted). Each two line-bundle contains a strong pause at its end that becomes the full stop of a period at each stanza end. But as the surfers become half-wave, half-men, the two verbs shift from the preceding present tense to past tense – as though the poem’s volume is being dialled down in order to signal that something is about to happen. Appropriately, the fourth stanza then ends not with a period, but a comma that stretches its action into the fifth stanza where, after dragging things out with another clause that describes that delay (‘Late as they can’), the surfers finally perform their key present-tense action (‘they slice the face’). The power of this slicing comes both from this delaying extension and from the fact that the line begins with a trochaic substitution (LATE as they CAN), so that the action of slicing can become a powerful return to the iambic. Finally, after the surfers slice the face, instead of getting the usual surfer-verb in the subsequent pair of lines, we find what is almost a chiasmus: balance-triumph-triumph-possession (and we find no verbs corresponding to the surfers). It is as though the surfers are finding unexpected ways to fulfil the poem’s formal requirements while also adding their own rules and flourishes of pattern on top of them. They are obeying the stanza rhymes and line lengths while also finding room for extra movement and emphasis within and between them; they are inverting the iambic metre while adhering to it overall; and they are setting up their own pattern of verb use and then varying from it while also adding the extra pattern of a chiasmus. In sum, we have a feeling of rules (of rhyme, stanza formation, etc.) being fulfilled but also joyfully surpassed. And the surfers’ taking formal possession of the poem is then highlighted by the wave’s immediate decline in power right after they bend the rules the most in the fourth and fifth stanzas. The surfers slice in the first line of the fifth stanza, but the wave doesn’t get to perform its ‘mindless’ action until the third line of the sixth. More, when that action does arrive it turns out to be merely a self-destructive one (it falls and ‘Loses itself’). The surfers’ vitality, then, is not just a literal sportsman’s skill; it also saturates the formal work of the poem and converts its tightly circumscribed lyric form into a challenging structure meant to draw out playful, vital athleticism. The idea that skill and loosening can work together recurs throughout Gunn’s later career: ‘My dance was play and yet my play was work’, he writes in the voice of King David in one of his last poems.11 ‘If only they [men] / Would free themselves in play, / As we do even in this confining tank’, say the dolphins in ‘Three for Children’ (1992) in Gunn’s penultimate book (p. 431). In both cases, playfulness and rigour are mutually necessary. Similarly, in a poem from the 1970s, Gunn portrays a John Keats whose receptive passivity works in conjunction with the vigour born from constraint: ‘some insight [was always] swelling the mind’s flow / That banks made swift’ (p. 350). Keats’s genius in the poem comes to depend on the banks of sonnet-rhyme and the more passive flow within long sentences working together and achieving a movement neither too constraining nor too loose. In other words, enclosing banks, tanks, work – and poems – are prerequisites for Gunn’s happier, more vital characters, yet are also all incomplete without a counteracting playfulness or receptivity. At stake in this search for such balances and harmonies is whether or not Gunn and his characters can find peace within limitations and remain alive within them. The existentialist bikers in his early poem, ‘On the Move’ (pp. 39-40), relentlessly force the landscape to ‘yield’ to their ‘will’, so as to move ‘always toward, toward’. However, Gunn’s surfers don’t feel any such need to master, get anywhere new, or leave anything behind. Instead of dourly and portentously riding ‘self-defined, astride the created will’, they compromise between seriousness and play, and between movement and stasis, as they accept and work within the looping motion of the waves and stanzas and then splash each other afterwards. And their achieved balance reaches its crowning moment in the action of riding the wave itself, an activity that depends on exchanging total mastery or ‘created will’ for an earned passivity, a yoking together of movement and stasis in an inspired way. Gunn would later call this phenomenon ‘repose’. In ‘The Life of the Otter’ (1992; p. 430), the titular animal within a museum is compared to a figure skater making ‘wide parabolas, / figures of eight / Long loops’; and we’re later told that the otter/figure-skater’s play is ‘Functional but as if gratuitous’, and that when it plunges its ‘speed contains its own repose’. ‘Repose’ then stands for a harmonious state of merged work and play, active effort and passive acceptance, making loops and enclosures freeing. The figure of eight here becomes a kind of gracefully drawn infinity sign, as though the confined space of lyric expands here to contain all one might need. Gunn backs off a little from his characters’ speedy movements, so as to let those characters’ energies have their own say and stand for themselves without too much authorial tampering. These energies need not involve literal sports. In ‘Street Song’ (1971), for instance, we are only given access to its drug-dealing protagonist Midday Mick via his drug pitch. This skilled pitch, like the surfers’ skilled athleticism, turns the potentially circular and repetitive activity of yelling one’s wares to passers-by into a demonstration of edgy, individual energy. And again this limited representation allows Gunn to imagine Mick well enough to give him individual presence without intruding into his larger life. Or consider the protagonist of ‘Bally Power Play’ (1982; pp. 315-16). Even though this poem is in free verse, its topic is still enclosure: it is almost entirely about a man playing pinball, itself a game with a limited set of rules that requires skilled play and that takes place inside an enclosed glass case. Indeed, the last line of the poem – ‘the rest is foreplay’ – encloses the protagonist by looping the poem from the ‘closing time’ of its end back to the poem’s start. We also learn that the man is engaged in a circular routine – night after night he plays pinball and picks up a stranger afterwards. Again, the poem uses its single repetitive skilled activity to express the player’s vitality within that routine. More, there is the suggestion that though the protagonist’s love life is messy, he transforms messiness, through his playing, into a stylish, sexy performance of his improvisatory skill and energy (‘he hardly raises his gold lashes . . . He is / the cool source of all that hurry’). The pinball player resembles Mick, Keats, and the surfers in balancing their admired, skilled, and playful energies against Gunn’s rule-bound lyric enclosures. Yet many of Gunn’s characters do not end up happily triumphing over their enclosed circumstances. For Gunn’s continued wariness about his own tendency to entrap makes him particularly sensitive to real, inescapable traps and prisons in the outside world. The poem ‘Meat’ (1992) begins by praising a pig for its athleticism: ‘My brother saw a pig root in a field, / And saw too its whole lovely body yield / To this desire which deepened out of need / So that in wriggling through mud and weed / To eat and dig were one athletic joy’. After this loving description, Gunn considers the meat he’s currently eating, and imagines the joy and athleticism of the pig being perverted: Not much like this degraded meat – this meal Of something, was it chicken, pork, or veal? It tasted of the half-life that we raise In high bright tombs which, days, and nights like days, Murmur with nervous sounds from cubicles Where fed on treated slop the living cells Expand within each creature forced to sit Cramped with its boredom and its pile of shit Till it is standard weight for roast or bacon And terminated and its place is taken. (p. 451) The poem helps Gunn imitate the confining pressure to which the pig is subjected. Note, for instance, how the couplets tighten the knots binding the pig, yoking sit is to shit, and turning cubicles into cells. The metrical counting of stresses and syllables implicitly becomes another procrustean quota like the ‘standard weight’ needed to make pigs into a uniform meat-substance (chicken, pork, or veal). Yet lyric’s potential for confinement here becomes a vehicle for empathy – for imagining something the world and not the poem has done. Moreover, it begins by imagining the pig’s joy, and ends with ‘The succulent liberties’ the pig ‘never had’ where ‘branches creep and stiffen where they please / Or rosemary . . . shakes in the world’s breeze’. Gunn’s gift for imagining prisons becomes here the means by which to empathise with the predicament of real creatures and to imagine a better life for them elsewhere. Gunn wrote many poems about the homeless in San Francisco, for whom the freedom and edgy energy of the street has soured, reversed itself, and become a trap. What is remarkable about many of these poems is the extent to which their characters are able convincingly to put their dire, imprisoned situation to their own uses: without minimising his characters’ plight, Gunn wants to find and describe such vital, rebellious energies as they are able to muster. ‘The Sand Man’ (1971; p. 193) is a poem about a local homeless street figure who has brain damage from a severe beating, and rolls ‘round and round [in the sand] / In patient reperformed routine’. Despite being painfully reduced to a single repetitive action, the Sand Man finds pleasure in that repetition, playing with sand and feeling ‘a dry cool multiplicity, / Gilding his body feet and hands’. The Sand Man’s tactile pleasure, his gilded self-transformation, and his ability to turn entrapping circles into pleasurable cycles make him a little like Gunn’s surfers. Gunn cannot liberate his characters, but he can offer gentler secondary aesthetic shapes or enclosures within a poem’s primary mimicry of a character’s trapped situation. Put differently, Gunn often presents us with a primary form that is a straightforward representation of a person’s life within a trap, but he then also presents a secondary form – a secondary, closed aesthetic pattern – within the primary one that helps provide a gentler interpretation of the character’s situation. And here we see that a lyric’s form can provide direct aid – it need not only be a means of representing oppression or even of challenging and drawing out vitality. The poem ‘Waitress’ (1982; p. 349) is a vivid example of this. It begins by ‘hurrying us in’ in from the open streets to the enclosed diner where the poem’s titular protagonist is stuck waiting on her abusive customers. These customers have been ‘loosed’ from their confining office jobs, yet have moved into a secondary confining space where they can play the role of boss instead of employee. Here they fixate on the waitress with crass rapaciousness, imaginatively transforming her into a set of increasingly lurid parts (from ‘breasts, face, and hips’, to ‘Pussy, Ass and Tits’). Since there is no escape for the waitress, the poem’s primary form is a kind of seedy trap. We can see this in its circling, chiasmic abba rhymes, and in its refrains, which are made up of different orders barked out by the customers at the end of each stanza (except the last). Hence, in addition to being trapped in a circularity of rhyme and repetitive stanzas, the waitress is fenced in by her customers’ very language. We also find a kind of syntactic inevitability trapping the waitress here in the second stanza’s since X therefore Y formula: since ‘The boss who orders them about / Lunches elsewhere’, therefore ‘they are free / To take a turn at ordering me’. Put differently, the phenomenon of ‘men who are rendered powerless encroaching on a woman’s sexual boundaries in order to feel better’ is seen as a cycle of abuse, a simple matter of cause and effect with little room for manoeuvring within it. Yet within the poem’s primary enclosed circular form Gunn builds in an alternative linear one that puts more emphasis on the waitress’s resistance. At first, it might just seem as though the linear progression here is towards things worsening: as the poem goes on, the men do seem to settle more comfortably and deeply into their abuse. But though the poem’s first two stanzas contain only descriptions of trapped circularity, the waitress begins to gain some self-possession in the third stanza, where the poem’s rhythm shifts as the waitress lists her ogled body parts, thereby drawing attention away from the poem’s end-rhymes. Even as she’s being objectified in a seedy blazon, she’s also shifting attention away from the poem’s entrapping form and taking over the stanza’s rhythm by putting the emphasis on herself (‘My little breasts / My legs’). Moreover, at the end of the third stanza she corrects the men by pointing out that she is not on the menu (‘My little breasts, my face . . . Are not found on the list they read’), right before she describes the men in a way that seems less flattering than ever (‘wiping gravy off their lips’). The waitress finally becomes the foremost actor of the poem in the concluding stanza, in which the men’s action occurs only within a subordinate clause, and the waitress’s action in the main one (‘I dream’). And though the fourth line of each stanza usually describes the office workers’ actions, here the waitress acts instead (‘I serve them up’). The waitress also takes over the workers’ speech and moves their ‘talk’ into the stanza’s second line, thereby incorporating it into her description. The poem can then reach its final and crowning moment when she speaks the final refrain herself at the same moment as she imagines her revenge (‘I dream . . . I serve them up their Special Lunch / Bone Hash, Grease Pie, and Leather Soup’). The waitress’s revenge remains imaginary, and she is still stuck in the diner at the end of the poem; the overall circular form of the poem remains unbroken; but that secondary form does at least register her vitality and rebellion. Perhaps the crowning example of Gunn’s poetry of entrapment and intercession is ‘Lament’ (1992; pp. 465-8), his AIDS elegy for his friend Allen Noseworthy. The poem devotes itself to the extreme pain of Noseworthy’s slow death shut up in a hospital room: the first line (‘Your dying was a difficult enterprise’) is both a one-line summary of the poem as a whole and a commitment from which it won’t swerve, as the rest of the poem is taken up with fleshing out that statement with particulars as they unfold through time. There is a strong sense of inevitability – of the overdetermined nature of the disease’s tightening trap, whose direction is not only easily surmised and medically predictable, but has already finished happening in reality and will now be replayed in the poem. The heroic couplets of the poem are key to creating a sense of being trapped inside an unstoppable chain of events. They convert each painful step of Noseworthy’s journey into a little closed epigram: ‘Once there, you entered fully the distress / And long pale rigours of the wilderness’; ‘On which you lay, bed restful as a knife, / You tried, tried hard to make of it a life’. Yet the poem is also able to give us glimpses of Noseworthy’s vital energy. His vitality appears as a kind of improvisatory spirited movement which bypasses the inevitable march of the epigrammatic couplets, and converts them into something else. The poem starts preparing us for this alternative form in its sixth line, in which we learn that while going to doctor’s appointments and getting X-rays ‘(you read two novels a day)’ (p. 465). This final bit of information occurs parenthetically in a way that works against the epigrammatic will to lock down instead of digress. Next, within the very sentence that describes the painful cyclical movement between tormented sleep and tormented waking (‘the same bad dream . . . with the same short cry’) a kind of loosening occurs since the sentence expands across six lines. The sentence becomes the longest up to this point, and thereby pits unprecedented syntactic momentum against the couplet enclosures. More, this loosening corresponds to the sudden, partial revitalisation of the poem’s protagonist. Noseworthy wakes from the dream with a ‘short cry / Of mild outrage’. A few lines later, this anger increases. ‘I’d never seen such rage in you before’, says Gunn, as Noseworthy is wheeled off to the Emergency Room. The trope is of AIDS patient as warrior;12 the wrath gives a trapped character back his vital edge. And this revitalisation again corresponds to a formal shift: the sentence describing the rage Gunn has never seen before occurs immediately before a six-line sentence, the momentum of which enacts the wheeling motion of entering ‘through the swinging [hospital] door’. This same long sentence also contains several enjambments as well as a hyphen and other caesuras: it is particularly free of epigrammatic lockdown because its movements and pauses draw attention away from its end-rhymes. So, again, Noseworthy’s moments of vitality are associated with a new, freer kind of movement and experience of the poem’s form. The six-line sentence also lists all the pleasures Noseworthy will be missing now that he’s being wheeled away (‘summer on the skin, / Sleep without break, the moderate taste of tea / In a dry mouth’). Even though these sensory pleasures are invoked negatively, they are the first ones mentioned in the poem, and provide a kind of relief from the descriptions of spinal taps and thick coughs that have dominated its lists so far. The loosening of epigrammatic lockdown occurs as Gunn is describing Noseworthy’s own love of chance, improvisation, wit, and speed: ‘It had been chance / Always till now that had filled up the moment / With live specifics your hilarious comment / Discovered as it went along; and fed / Laconic, quick, wherever it was led’. In the following line, as if improvising himself, Gunn adds a one-line sentence as a kind of pivot point – ‘You improvised upon your own delight’ – followed by another six-line sentence that travels even further from the hospital room and enters the sensory realm of memory’s ‘scented summer night’ where Gunn and Noseworthy ‘talked between our sleeping bags, below / A molten field of stars five years ago’. The poem moves from an observed scene, to a general description of character, to an open-air memory outside the imprisoning hospital. Describing that memory, Gunn adds, ‘I was so tickled by your mind’s light touch / I couldn’t sleep, you made me laugh too much, / Though I was tired and begged you to leave off’. The epigrammatic couplets are loosened by enjambments (below / A molten field), weaker rhymes (below/ago), and colons instead of end-stops (‘ago:’). Moreover, the entire verse ends on a first-rhyme word (‘off’), which then has to wait for the start of the next verse for its completing rhyme. Touchingly, it is Noseworthy’s own skilful light touch and social knack for witty improvisation, as remembered, that guide the energetic, flowing, robust movement of the poem’s secondary form. Despite the strong presence of the secondary form, we also get couplets that snap brutally shut, like the following: ‘And so you slept, and died, your skin gone grey / Achieving your completeness, in a way’. But Noseworthy’s dying not only saps his vitality but reveals it too. Just as Gunn learned about his friend’s capacity for rage (‘I’d never seen such rage in you before’) through his death, that death also causes Gunn to recognise what he admired most about his friend: his vigorous, spontaneous inventiveness, and his lifelong knack for relying on chance, for improvising delight, flirting, tickling, and joking around: wit itself is a kind of robust skilled movement, like surfing. Gunn’s strong sense of lyric enclosure here provides the occasion for other people to reveal their rich, countering vitality, while, in other poems, it can make vivid the crush of real-world entrapments and turn an instinct for lyric tyranny into forms of empathy and care. Footnotes Footnotes 1 John Stuart Mill famously said that a lyric poem ‘has always seemed to us like the lament of a prisoner in a solitary cell, ourselves listening, unseen in the next’. Quoted in Herbert F. Tucker, ‘Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric’, in Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (eds.), Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (Ithaca, NY, 1985), pp. 226-43: 288. 2 Donald Wesling, paraphrasing Bakhtin, writes about how lyric is monologic and thereby ‘suppresses’ half a dialogue (Bakhtin and the Social Moorings of Poetry (Lewisburg, 2003), p. 21); Dorothy Nielsen writes of lyric’s ‘repression’ of the “not-I”’ (‘Ecology, Feminism, and Postmodern Lyric Subjects’, in Mark Jeffreys (ed.), New Definitions of Lyric: Theory, Technology, and Culture (New York, 1998), pp. 127-50: 130); and Rachel Cole writes that lyric has been accused of ‘solipsistic exclusivity’ (‘Rethinking the Value of Lyric Closure: Giorgio Agamben, Wallace Stevens, and the Ethics of Satisfaction’, PMLA, 126/2 (2011), 383-97: 383). The lyric poet here becomes a kind of authoritarian or taskmaster: as the Language poet Bob Perelman puts it, lyric poetry places the poet ‘firmly in the driver’s seat . . . firmly in control of all the meaning’ (quoted in Jennifer Ashton, ‘Periodizing Poetic Practice since 1945’, in Ashton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Since 1945 (New York, 2013), pp. 1-14: 12). 3 Wesling, Bakhtin and the Social Moorings of Poetry, p. 32. 4 Thom Gunn, Collected Poems (New York, 1994), p. 14. Further references to Gunn’s Collected Poems appear parenthetically in the text. 5 Writing about Fighting Terms (1954) Charles Leftwich points out that ‘An inescapable circularity is the greatest menace, and its frustrating and ultimately enervating effects are conveyed by the constantly repeated refrains in so many of the poems, usually at stanza beginnings and ends . . . In the first stanza of “Round and Round”, the first and last line [is] “The lighthouse keeper’s world is round”, and the reader is enclosed in a circular verbal prison’. Leftwich, ‘Thom Gunn: From Poet of the Will, to Poet of Being’, Agenda, 27/2-3 (1999), 49-56: 49. 6 See Keith Tuma, ‘Thom Gunn and Anglo-American Modernism’, in Joshua Weiner (ed.), At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn (Chicago, 2009), pp. 85-103: 99; August Kleinzahler, ‘Thom Gunn: The Plain Style and the City’, ibid., pp. 71-83: 81; Alan Jenkins, ‘“I Thought I Was So Tough”’: Thom Gunn’s Postures for Combat’, in Zachery Leader (ed.), The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie and Their Contemporaries (New York, 2009), pp. 187-203: 200. 7 Thom Gunn, Boss Cupid (New York, 2000), p. 91. 8 Tuma, ‘Thom Gunn and Anglo-American Modernism’, p. 87. 9 James Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965 (Chicago, 1985). 10 Quoted in Joshua Weiner, ‘From Ladd’s Hill to Land’s End (and Back Again): Narrative, Rhythm, and the Transatlantic Occasions of “Misanthropos”’, in id. (ed.), At the Barriers, pp. 105-26: 125. 11 Gunn, Boss Cupid, p. 107. 12 Ross Chambers, ‘Attending to AIDS: Elegy’s Rendez-Vous with Testimonial’, in Karen Weisman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of The Elegy (New York, 2010), pp. 382-96: 386-7. © The Author(s) [2018]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
TI - Thom Gunn’s Humane Prisons
JO - Essays in Criticism
DO - 10.1093/escrit/cgx016
DA - 2018-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/thom-gunn-s-humane-prisons-SpySKyfLUd
SP - 108
EP - 125
VL - 68
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -