I feel a little guilty. I am coping with some rather personal stressful stuff at the moment, and to unwind, I have started to watch the Breaking Bad season as it starts up again, on Netflix. I had thought to write another critical love poem to this greatest of TV shows, to compare it to Shakespeare, to speak of how Heisenberg - that co-opted alias - is now synonymous with complex evil, as Iago was. But then I think of Egypt - and a far more complex evil swims into view - or rather, a more evil complexity - for politics and people seem to mix badly some times, and there seems no clear answer in that tragic moment for that great country - because of such confusing paradoxes - the legitimate government was overthrown for being a tyranny in utero, and the new saving revolution is seemingly more steeped in blood than the last guardians of so-called Democracy. How to praise the depiction of one man's ruination, when in the history of today, unfolding, we see a whole nation's self-immolation. Perhaps that is too grand. But I did think I wanted to write it out.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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