Thom Gunn was the great rhapsode of risk. In a 1961 love letter to queer San Francisco, the poem’s speaker looks from afar at the drunken revelers and hungry cruisers in the darkened streets below: “By the recurrent lights I see / Endless potentiality, / The crowded, broken, and unfinished! / I would not have the risk diminished.” In other poems, Gunn “adore[s] / The risk that made robust, / A world of wonders in / Each challenge to the skin,” admires “the pull and risk / Of the Pacific’s touch,” and lauds those who “properly / test[ed] themselves against risk, / as a human must, and does.” Risk was as essential to Gunn’s writing as it was to his living. “You get so absorbed in the experience of writing the poem,” he observed in a 1996 letter, “and take the occasional risk you hope is worth it—no, that’s wrong, you take constant risks, every line is a risk.” To write poetry is to know that you might fail and take the gamble anyway.
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