top of page
Exlpore more Poems quotes

"Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems."

"As a friendly one. I would still like to write concrete poems, but I can only do it sometimes."

"I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made."

"By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow."

"I have also written some poems which have not been collected in a volume."

"The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue."

"I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems."

"On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world."
Explore more quotes by Thom Gunn

"When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery."

"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."

"I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop."

"When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to."

"I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic."
bottom of page