You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm. Today my guest is

Tom Gunn, and I'm talking to him on the occasion of the recent publication of his collected

poems by Faris Strauss and Giroux. He'd been in Los Angeles on the occasion of a reading

in the Lannin Foundation's Reading and Conversation series,

and he's the author of the award-winning collection, The Man with Night Sweats,

The Passages of Joy, Jack Straw's Castle, as well as other books of poetry.

Well, I thought I'd leap in right away.

You were in an essay that I liked very much on 16th century poetry.

You distinguished between the poetry of discrimination and the poetry of abundance.

And there seems to be, in your own work, a meandering between the sensuous and exuberant on the one hand and the moral and didactic on the other.

And I wondered if you could speak a bit about that.

Well, I'm somebody who does a lot of feeling.

I have a lot of sensations.

And being human, I think about them as well.

So I speculate about them.

You know, what was it?

D.H. Lawrence was always complaining that people had,

about certain people who had sex in the head,

...