I knew of Thom Gunn almost as soon as I began writing poetry. His name was a presence, his cadences still more so. Somehow, in the muddle of disillusion and self-defense which was post-war British poetry, his wonderful first book took root. It was called Fighting Terms. It contained twenty or more poems, written in an odd, abrasive tone. The poems were funny and dense and thematic. The themes were sex and urbanity, in both senses of that word. One of the poems, "Carnal Knowledge," became a sudden classic—a splendid charade of music and attack, canvassing attitudes of deception and isolation. It was quoted and re-quoted by the Irish poets I knew all through the sixties.

But I could never have understood as a young poet what I came to understand later: that Thom Gunn, all by himself, was a unique register of the integrity and isolation of a poet. It was easy to misunderstand his poetic progress. From my own childhood in England, I think I have some instinct for the country he left in the nineteen-fifties: the gritty towns, the rationing, the rain, the anti-intellectualism, the lack of resources might have looked worth leaving. In fact, he never left them. He brought that wayward gift for being an island maverick and added it to the culture of the West Coast. He made a wonderful, unusual arc between rootedness and experiment, between being the outsider and having insider access. Few poets in our time have been as deeply nourished by tradition and as lovingly open to change.

I understood all this better when he published The Man with Night Sweats. The project of this book, published in 1992, has a magical imaginative symmetry with his early work, with those first blunt and thumping stanzas of Fighting Terms: In poem after poem Gunn returns to the iconic images of his early poems—to the soldiers, the lovers, the emblems of male strength—and rewrites them as images of suffering, of bodily weakness, of the ravages of disease and the cost of sexual pleasure. The beautiful coherence of the book is in the act of imaginative rescue, cast in mythic reversal: from strength to weakness, from glory to humiliation.

In Autumn 2003, in what must have been his last university appointment, Thom Gunn came to the Stanford Creative Writing Program as the Mohr visiting poet, and taught there for the quarter. Ken Fields, Simone di Piero and myself had wanted nothing so much as to have him there. They were his friends. I was not. But somehow, between us, we managed to persuade him, being careful to arrange transport for him from San Francisco to Stanford. He wrote me a note, to say he would enjoy being driven. "I will feel like a movie star," he said. Indeed, he was a star. Never flattering in the classroom, he made a profound impression on his lucky students. He was gracious, candid, funny, and always kind in the small dealings which make up the day-to-day presence of a writer in any institution. I was always struck by how little America had touched his accent: the old flat tones of Kent were still there. And yet how deeply it had written itself into his mind, in everything from his love for San Francisco fog to his community with West Coast writers.

Thom Gunn made light of his journey, as a poet, as a man. But it was a considerable one, which found spaces and opened them for others. I treasured all and any of our brief conversations about his English origins, his American arrival, and knew I was hearing about a progress which would never happen again, at least not in that way.

Thom Gunn was always polite, delighted at raucous jokes and banter, kept his silence at times but had a loud, boisterous laugh. He wore cowboy shirts, pointy boots, a big chain for his wallet, and a little earring. The shirts were always pressed. There was some massive tattoo on his forearm, you'd see a bit of it, and never more. Might have been a frog. Charming, withholding, fastidious, producing savage and concise poems that would shock and delight, he became a cult figure amongst the writers-manque at Berkeley, several of whom like me came to Berkeley to study with him, and then were allowed only to take one course, and then, as he said, "it's time to move on—you've gotten what you can from me." He taught only one semester a year, sharing an office and alternating days with Ishmael Reed. There were few books on the shelf; he only came to teach.

For many years he was wary of graduate students. After your one course you could show him poems, on which he would write in tiny, very antique penmanship. If you wrote to him, he'd answer on a postcard filled with tiny writing. He always spoke directly on poems, was rigorous on grammar and basic meaning on a level few essayists could sustain, while also allowing for sudden, strangely ontological- druggy explorations of identity and experience. He delighted in precise, economical expression; he liked Ben Jonson...but also Robert Duncan.

His vocal reading style was learned from F.R. Leavis, and his sense of "argument" in a poem was developed with Yvor Winters. Neither of these critics are now much known or taught, and, in fact, Gunn's training from Cambridge and Stanford, where the Renaissance lyric seemed as contemporary as Basil Bunting, and where poems stood as the first proving ground for ideas, is no longer available to most contemporary poets. A world of poetic knowledge and potential has disappeared with him. He sought human truths, and never flinched from uncomfortable ones he found, or sought. However polite, he demanded that poems not use cheap tricks, or take advantage of human stories for aesthetic effects; he disputed poems that "scored points" off of people's problems. He hated the confessional poem, said "Who wants to learn about Lowell's furniture?" But after 40 years of silence he wrote an astonishing, autobiographical poem of his mother's suicide, by inhalation of gas, when he was a teenager ("The Gas Poker").

His modesty and self-control were enormous, and unequalled, perhaps in any major poet in memory: he held his most stunning book, The Man With Night Sweats, in his drawer for ten years because he didn't want to be without poems once his book came out. When he finally published it, he had two more manuscripts finished. The book contains the greatest elegiac sequence since Thomas Hardy's Poems of 1912-13. When in conversation with Wendy Lesser, his great friend and editor, Gunn mentioned that he was surprised to hear of the reoccurring figure of "hugging" in the book. The generosity of those poems drew from a source below the creative imagination, and below the ego and its demands for recognition and reciprocity. When Gunn received a MacArthur Fellowship, he wrote the radically satiric "Troubador" lyrics about Jeffrey Dahmer.

There was some sense that his moderate workday habits were "balanced," if that's the word, but he led an entirely wild night-life, one that poked holes in—or simply stabbed—the lineaments of bourgeois life. He never owned a car, and joked that he earned "less than the salary of a bus driver," which, in fact, he might have known because, whatever was happening at Berkeley, he would leave to catch the 5:10 p.m. "F" bus to the City, where his roommates were cooking dinner, or it was his night to cook. Handsome, thin, with a twinkly gaze, he was an attractive Matterhorn to women, whom he didn't attend to much. He would tell you, "I've dyed my hair to look younger—I think it's not vanity if I tell you I've done it."

When I first hoped to write poetry I sent him some poems, terrible poems, and asked him what to do. He was the first contemporary poet I read with feeling—I was living in London—and when I later lived in San Francisco, and realized that he was teaching at Berkeley, I wrote him. His postcard, written in that ancient hand, suggested the following: "Read all the plays and poems of Shakespeare. Read the entire Norton Anthology of Poetry. And read Pound's ABC of Reading. That should get you started." A task I'm still following.

It was said that his audience was splintered. There were those who loved the formal rigor, those who appreciated the nobility and candor of gay life expressed, those who loved the radical sense of vision and experience from California, and those who wanted more from the best formalist in English, the true successor/extinguisher to T.S. Eliot, whom Thom met when he first published with Faber. All these audiences are now united in being separated from him. Because of their honesty, self-governance, and earned discoveries, because they reach so deeply in poetics, and in the self, his poems will be read and admired long after the works of more popular contemporary poets are forgotten.

Though I'd long loved his poems, and I'd shaken his hand after one of his readings, I didn't actually meet and get to know Thom until 2000, when he spent two weeks in St. Louis as a visiting poet at Washington University. In that brief period, though, Thom's example—an odd mix of American waywardness and English decorum—both challenged and refreshed my notions not only of what it can mean to be a poet but of how to be fully alive to the world as a human being. When I try to point to specific incidents that had this effect, it doesn't work entirely. His excitement at going downtown and being shown the abandoned and gutted warehouses that make for one of the seedier parts of the Mississippi's banks? The calm with which, when I'd arrived to pick him up one morning, he asked if I'd look at the back of his head, since he'd been a bit drunk the night before, had tried to take his boots off while standing, and had fallen backwards, cutting his head on a coffee-table? His joy, first at having found an antique tip tray for his partner Mike, and the joy right after, when my partner Doug gave him a quick lesson in the art of haggling for a better price? Or his look? Or what in anyone else would be called a look, but with Thom had nothing to do with that, as far as I could tell? The leather and levis, the tattoos—these weren't about affect, it seemed to me, as he sat there addressing my prosody seminar, discussing his passage, via syllabics, into free verse, no less professorial for what he was wearing, and so much more passionate—and compassionate—than many a professor I've encountered.

He had just turned 70 that year. I kept having to try to believe that—not just because he was so fit, but because he had the spirit of any 19-year-old, if it's possible to have that spirit, minus the inexperience, minus the innocence. Thom's visit reminded me of the importance of risk, or maybe more of how wisdom and experience shouldn't be allowed to compromise taking chances, if one is to keep growing. I think that's why he continued to surprise with each new book, even as he maintained a signature style and sensibility. And I think his changes as a poet had everything to do with his constantly surprising and challenging himself as an individual—that is, he wrote as he had to and because he had to, without a careerist regard for audience; again, the life seems to have been lived in the same way, free of the by now predictable steps that most writers take from writing program to publication to university. As a poet with tenure at a university myself, I especially appreciated and learned from Thom about the seductiveness of security, the dangers in that, the need to be open to change rather than hiding in what's fixed, the need not to confuse fixity with safety or, indeed, with what might be best for the life of the self, safe or not.

There are countless types of friendship. One of the rarest, I find, is the one that springs from a relatively brief encounter and yet has permanent resonance. That's how it turns out to have been with Thom. I don't even know if he thought about me much, if at all, after that visit—we exchanged a letter or two, Doug and I sent him some cranberries from Cape Cod. But reciprocity isn't the point with this kind of friendship. On the morning that I read of Thom's death, I was shaken in a way that hasn't happened to me before, and it took me a while to figure it out. I hadn't lost anyone I'd loved before. And now I had.

The last time I talked to Thom, he said he hadn't written a poem in two years and added, with a small heave of his muscular chest, "I might be done writing." Had he made a coffin of couplets, elegy after elegy, shutting away the keepsakes of friends as they fell, tens by tens? He felt some defeat in form. And no doubt some defeat in his role as communal mourner. But who could keep pace with the endless toll? Not even the ever-waking Thom could manage. Nights he went about the city, restless: "I gave up sleep for this?" But always searching, prowling, with "a sense of being underground/As in a mine." Here's Thom, lurking late summer night in Dore Alley, haunting the sex-filled streets—his leathery fists shoved deep into his pockets, squinting visage both shy and sexy: "Why pretend love must accompany erection?"

At Bob Gluck's house, shortly before I left San Francisco to come to Boston, Thom arrived first of the guests, somewhat bleary-eyed. Slunk off quietly before the party was even underway. Bob: "He was up all night cruising." Diogenes. Seeker of carnal play.

Whitman: "Double yourself and receive me darkness, receive me and my lover too, he will not let me go without him."

Odd to think how this late in my adult life, Thom is my first queer friend to die not from AIDS and not from violence. He had that small blessing at least, though death can hardly be the blessing of a life. Still, no lingering rattle and no unmerciful attack from a stranger with a knife. A solid death, an ordinary death. Sleep at last? Bless him.