Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn, Poet
Saturday, June 20, 2:00 pm
Location: SOMAR, 934 Brannan
$5 to $10 Sliding Scale
Contact: 415.552.7709

Thom Gunn’s poetry comes out of his life, experienced or imagined, and so with his sexual poems as with his non-sexual ones. This hour long talk will be based on a number of his poems with queer subject matter, from both published and unpublished material. Gunn will talk about what these works were based on, and what he was trying to accomplish with each. There will also be time for a question and answer session at the end of the talk. An internationally celebrated poet, Thom Gunn was born in 1929 in Britain, and raised in wartime London. His first book, Fighting Terms, published in 1954, consisting of poems he had written as an undergraduate. He arrived at Stanford as a graduate student on a fellowship, and later started teaching at Berkeley, and has lived in SF since 1961. He calls himself an Anglo-American poet. He has published eight books of poems as well as a couple of prose books. He is at present working on a series of brutish, nasty and short poems called Gossip.
Published work
The Man with Night Sweats (poems), 1992
The Passages of Joy (poems), 1982
Collected Poems, 1994
All published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux