#michael nott

In its last poem, ‘Interruption’, Gunn italicises the line ‘I like loud music, bars, and boisterous men’. Just as we sense that the speaker is communicating something about himself, it is immediately undercut in the following lines: ‘You may from this conclude I like the things / That help me if not lose then leave behind, / What else, the self.’

Gunn speculates: 

I realized it was my 20 year old self, or a simulacrum of him, full of dread about the future, and particularly of the future in store for the sexuality he has only just fully recognized, and that much of my poetry has been written as a kind of signal to him that ‘it’s really all right, you know.’ So I think one of the impulses behind my writing has been to reassure – my past self, even my present self, and anybody else who needs the reassurance.