Interviewer: The extension of self and self-discovery, a pre-requisite of Johnsonian variety, went public in San Francisco in the Sixties of course, and Gunn acknowledges that, while the experience of Acid was essentially non-verbal, his next book after it, Moly, reflects the removal of blocks with the help of LSD. In the title poem, Gunn throws recollection to the winds:

Moly

Gunn: It’s a dramatic monologue, and it’s not spoken by myself – it’s spoken by one of Odysseus’s sailors in a time of – well you might say of enormous stress because he’s just been transformed into some animal – he doesn’t yet know what it is.

Interviewer: Moly is the magical herb given to Odysseus to ward off the transforming charms of Circe of which the speaker of the poem is still a victim.

Moly

Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake.
I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take?

Leathery toad that ruts for days on end,
Or cringing dribbling dog, man’s servile friend,

Or cat that prettily pounces on its meat,
Tortures it hours, then does not care to eat:

Parrot, moth, shark, wolf, crocodile, ass, flea.
What germs, what jostling mobs there were in me.

These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough.
No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof.

Into what bulk has method disappeared?
Like ham, streaked. I am gross–grey, gross, flap-eared.

The pale-lashed eyes my only human feature.
My teeth tear, tear. I am the snouted creature

That bites through anything, root, wire, or can.
If I was not afraid I’d eat a man.

Oh a man’s flesh already is in mine.
Hand and foot poised for risk. Buried in swine.

I root and root, you think that it is greed,
It is, but I seek out a plant I need.

Direct me, gods, whose changes are all holy
To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly:

Cool flesh of magic in each leaf and shoot,
From milky flower to the black forked root.

From this fat dungeon I could rise to skin
And human title, putting pig within.

I push my big grey wet snout through the green,
Dreaming of the flower I have never seen.

from Collected Poems (Faber, 1994), copyright © Thom Gunn 1994, by permission of the publishers, Faber & Faber Ltd and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.

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