The Needs of Ghosts: On Poems from the Margins of Thom Gunn’s “Moly”

Abstract

In the 1972 typescript publication, Robert Duncan’s Poems from the Margins of Thorn Gunn’s “Moly” ate variously presented as “from the margins of,” “inspired by,” and “translated from.”¹ In terms of compositional practice, Duncan did not make firm distinctions between marginalia, inspiration, and translation: for him, all three constitute responsive or reactive dimensions of poetry. By habit and conviction, he thought that writing should arise spontaneously from reading, blurring the line between the two activities. Never has this been more clear, yet complexly layered, than in Poems from the Margins. Just as Gunn draws on Book 10 of the Odyssey, writing out of reading, Duncan composes new poems in the margins of Gunn’s book. Writing a poem, we take part in a communal act: the words themselves are shared and constituted by the living and the dead—by past, present, and future usage. Accordingly, poetry is for Duncan “that magic whereby presences of other lives presented themselves in the present of my own life.”²