I am too
young to grow a beard But yes man it was me you heard In dirty denim and
dark glasses. I look through everyone who passes But ask him clear, I do
not plead, Keys Lids acid and speed.
INTERVIEWER: When you start writing
a poem, do you ever have a form in your head before you write, or do you always
discover the form in writing?
GUNN:Again, sometimes I do,
sometimes I don't. For example, a poem called "Street Song." Part of the idea of
that poem was to write a modern version of an Elizabethan or Jacobean street
song. So of course I knew it was going to rhyme, that it might have some kind of
refrain--it was going to be a particular kind of poem. Other poems I don't really
know what they're going to be like and I will jot down my notes for them kind of
higgledy-piggledy all over the page, so that when I look at what I've got maybe
the form will be suggested by what I have there. That's mostly what happens with
me. I don't start by writing a couplet or something, knowing the whole thing's
going to be in couplets--though even that has happened.
