Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
quote by Thom Gunn
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I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.
quote by Thom Gunn
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As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.
quote by Thom Gunn
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I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.
quote by Thom Gunn
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I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other.
quote by Thom Gunn
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I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it's too easy to write about my last trick or something. It's not very interesting to the reader.
quote by Thom Gunn
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There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
quote by Thom Gunn
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When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew.
quote by Thom Gunn
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I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.
quote by Thom Gunn
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While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.
quote by Thom Gunn
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