1988 ROBERT KIRSCH AWARD : A Minute Holds Them Who Have Come to Go:

The self-defined, astride the created will

They burst away; the towns they travel through

Are home for neither bird nor holiness,

For birds and saints complete their purposes.

At worst, one is in motion; and at best,

Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,

One is always nearer by not keeping still.

California From Thom Gunn, “On the Move”

Thom Gunn, honored as this year’s winner of the Robert Kirsch Award, has lived in San Francisco for 30 years, writing powerful, intelligent poems out of friendship and solitude.

He was born in England 59 years ago. His mother, he tells us, read Gibbon while he was in the womb; his father excelled as a journalist, the Beaverbrook sort, and eventually became editor of the tabloid Daily Sketch. But his parents were divorced when he was 8 and his mother died when he was 15; Gunn’s intransigent independence, which characterizes man and work, perhaps made virtue of necessity.

After finishing secondary school in London, Gunn served two years in the British army before he went up to Trinity College, most artistic or intellectual of Cambridge institutions. Before he was graduated in 1953, he was already known as a poet.

Gunn, therefore, is an English poet: Except that he isn’t: Nor is he American. The point is not legalities of citizenship (Gunn remains a resident alien, fitting a poet both domestic and estranged) but that he may not be labeled by nationality or anything else: His identity is his resistance to the limitations of identity. He belongs to uncertainty, exploration, movement and ongoingness. His early motorcycle poem, “On the Move,” says all that Gunn cares about permanent addresses when it famously ends: “One is always nearer by not keeping still.” Here is the man without conventional supports who refuses title and easychair, political party and national identity. For Gunn, affiliation seems a lie; change alone endures.

His poetry embodies such ideas; my paraphrase blurs them into prose. If he is a poet of thought, his ideas express themselves in poetry’s ethic of condensation and corrosive self-cancellation: Gunn’s ideas occupy poetry not philosophy. The philosopher who makes apothegms like Nietszche (or like Heraclitus in his fragments) may approach this embodiment of thought; but poetry embodies best: The lines of Gunn’s verse, with their pauses and contradictions, word crossing out word, express and withhold in accurate measure. Gunn ends an early poem, “In Santa Maria del Popolo,” by describing Caravaggio’s St. Paul: “Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.” Poetry exists in order to express such a wholeness.

Gunn is least known among the best living poets. In England he is suspect because he defected to the United States; in America he is suspect as an Englishman. Ridiculously, each country refuses to read the other’s poets--and Gunn’s readership suffers twice because he is citizen of both countries and neither. In the United States, where poets perform on platforms, he has not ingratiated himself on the poetry-reading circuit. He teaches as little as he may--one term a year at Berkeley provides him support--and keeps house in San Francisco.

If he belongs to a nation it is San Francisco; or perhaps homosexuality is his country--but I do not find him pledging allegiance to anything except his own alert, unforgiving, skeptical independence. I think of Stephen Dedalus telling Cranly about the voices that ask you to heed them: family, friends, country, church. Gunn’s poetic voice sings out of his chosen isolation, man without a country, in exploration of the value and power of the solitude of spirit which all men share and few admit. Gunn wears the badge noli me tangere in a house of friends.

When he was still young he wrote with astonishing skill. I remember the general flabbergast when Gunn’s first poems went public. In 1952 when his poetry came roaring out of Cambridge, I was at Oxford among the young Shelleys, an alien (older, slightly bewildered) poetic technician from the United States. In Oxford writing poetry was a social accomplishment; it got you invited to parties; it got you mentioned in Isis gossip columns. If there were people who took poetry seriously, they mostly concealed themselves, like Christopher Middleton. (Geoffrey Hill, 20 years old, mumbled in hiding the great epithets of “Genesis.”) Most Oxford poets believed in sincerity, amateurishness, villanelles, adjectives, love, and good manners. Cambridge, they thought, stalled in a critical doldrum, leaving poetry to the sweet singers of Oxford. Imagine the consternation when Gunn’s “The Secret Sharer” broadcast its firm structures on the BBC in the autumn of 1952, and a few months later “Incident on a Journey.” Both poems appeared on John Lehman’s “New Soundings” third programme magazine. “Incident on a Journey” varied a refrain that claimed “I regret nothing,” which was disturbing at Oxford where the poets regretted practically everything. Oxford recoiled before stanzas militant, intransigent, tough, brainy, swashbuckling, and violent.

It’s always useful, looking at a mature poet, to remember what he looked like from the other side. It may surprise readers in 1988 that in the 1950s Gunn shocked the English public because of his violence. His apparent violence has been overshadowed by the language, red in tooth and claw, of Ted Hughes who came later out of Cambridge--more muscular and less philosophical. The two poets do not resemble each other; Hughes insinuates himself into the skin of a crow or a pike, man turning animal in flight from reason, while Gunn embraces action for reasons; by his metaphors, analogies, agonies, contradictions, and rhythms he argues a way to live; or a way to understand living. Gunn seemed violent in 1953 only as he burst upon a scene of British gentility. His pentameters trumpeting of wars, wounds, and journeys interrupted the tea party.

What an interruption it was. Not only Oxford noticed. In England of the 1950s ambitious undergraduates from Oxford expected to shift from the university to London--politicians from a student union to Parliament, actors from OUDs to the Old Vic--with a quick depression of the clutch. Hadn’t Kenneth Tynan done it? Strangely enough, London seemed to agree with Oxbridge. When John Lehman started a new radio magazine, he recruited his innovations among Oxbridge undergraduates. Can you imagine an American editor going to Stanford or Berkeley undergraduates in quest of discovery?

Sandbagged by Gunn, Oxford’s poets did something about it. If you feel under attack in England, you invite your enemy to your club. Gunn came to Oxford for a weekend; at a party the Oxford poets met this modest terror and found him agreeable; maybe the universe could accommodate one more poet. A few weeks later in Cambridge Gunn walked me around to meet his friends.

The following year I found myself in California, working with Yvor Winters at Stanford on a writing fellowship, writing letters from Menlo Park to my English poet-friends. I knew that Gunn was desperate to find a way to the United States. I suggested that he apply for the same fellowship the next year; he did, Winters liked his work--and Gunn came to California.

Gunn worked with Winters for a year, left for a year,and came back to work with him again. The relationship proved useful. Gunn admired Winters and learned from him. For many students, it was difficult to learn from Winters without dwindling into a junior lookalike. Like F. R. Leavis in England--whose lectures Gunn attended--Yvor Winters created more sons than brothers; many Wintersians proved incapable of growing up. Gunn’s intransigency protected him, although he loved the man--Gunn has written the best essay on Winters--and learned greatly from him. He went his own way, making mistakes that Winters would have protected him from, making as well discoveries or innovations that Winters would have protected him from.

While he was at Stanford Gunn began to experiment--the formally-conservative Winters had experimented as a young man--especially with syllabics in which he would do some of his best work. In iambic he has kept a sure strong marching ear--but some poems need not march, or if they march they tell lies. With “My Sad Captains” and other poems, Gunn has explored beautifully in syllabic lines, and he has learned to improvise in free verse, studying the practice of American contemporaries. (His essay on Robert Creeley is also the best we have; Gunn writes few essays but they stay written.)

By 1988, Gunn has worked at his craft until he can do what he pleases; and in the availability of styles, he strides the Atlantic. The swashbuckling young Gunn, Ancient Pistol himself on occasion, has disappeared, replaced by a tone deceptively gentle--deceptive only because the understanding (which the tone enforces) remains courageous, bleak, and uncompromising. The free verse “Elegy” that begins his most recent book, “The Passages of Joy,” ends by making an American sound:

An odd comfort

that the way we are always

most in agreement

is in playing the same game

where everyone always gets lost

Yet it is worth notice: In the rhythm of free verse Gunn still lets us understand that resisting is embracing.