Dive Into The Great Fires Produced By Jack Gilbert Published As Leaflet
Gilbert recently died. Andrew Sullivan posted a few of Gilbert's poems on his Dish blog, leading me to this book,
This probably isn't the most fair criticism, but the poems were so introspective, reading them felt like being bludgeoned with introspection.
I can't really object to the fact that many of the poems hewed to themes of personal loss Gilbert's dead wife Michiko is a widelycovered subject.
Perhaps Gilbert has other poetry collections where he ventures outside himself, into the larger world, and addresses big themes rather than smallbore confessional topics.
After a collection like this I want to pick up Paradise Lost, or listen to a few Beethoven symphonies, works that drop you into some kind of bottomless enormity.
Det var några rader i romanen Fire Sermon som ledde mig till Jack Gilberts poesi.
En ny favoritpoet, sida vid sida med Nina Cassian från tidigare i år, Det här är ett nedslag mitt i hans produktion, Först letar jag upp dikten Exceeding och de här raderna:
"We go into the orchard for apples.
But what
we carry back is the day among trees with odor,
coolness, dappled light and time.
"
Får omedelbart två egna associationer, Litteratur ska fungera så:
, En pågående utställning i Ealing med titeln Dappled Light, Håller på till september,
sitelink pitzhanger. org. uk/whatson
. Ett foto jag tog i Sissinghursts fruktträdgård, Det var september, tidigt under pandemin, Vi var alla permitterade en dag i veckan, för min del fredagar, och under en av dessa Furlough Fridayutfärder fann jag mig i eftermiddagsljuset i denna förtrollade orchard, men jag tänkte inte på döden och det var en befrielse.
sitelink etsy. com/uk/listing/
Övriga dikter handlar mycket om de kvinnor Gilbert levde med, särskilt om sorgen efter Michiko, men en annan tillägnas Linda Gregg: "From this distance they are unimportant, standing by the sea.
the marriage is almost over", Det är inte svårtillgängligt, varje dikt är som en liten värld, Så här kan de inledas:
"The sultry first night of July, he in bed
reading one of Chandler's lesser novels.
Rain makes a sound on the birches"
Lyssnade på någon podd och läste den här intervjun med stort nöje, t.
ex. när han får frågan om han är den del av Beatrörelsen svarar han " God, no! And I dont go in for freakish behavior nor esoteric knowledge.
" Lite senare i artikeln säger han något om ett "urban Walden" och det gör att jag kryssar i kategorin 'literary soulmates'.
sitelink wordpress. com/
Kuriosa: en stund senare noterade jag att just den här diktsamlingen även lästs av Stewart O'Nan och efter hans Last Night at The Lobster kryssade jag också i 'literary soulmates'.
A curious thing about Gilbert is that for all his enormous
cunning, toward his intellect, alas, skepticism remains a reader's best procedure.
"The Spirit and the Soul" reading that poem, it's as if he doesn't get that these are heavy literary terms, and his minding them will only focus us on his selfmythologizing lexicon, his speaker's "insistence" a crucial word throughout on what "in the heart lasts".
Idioms, as idioms, a way of saying said over and over again Gilbert's own "insistent" craftwork on his poems comes to seem to him the whole story of the language he's working in, and it's an aggrandizement deduced from something we after all are prepared to share with him, his sense of the significance of the poet's role.
Of course, the selfmythologizing is what many Gilbert readers love witness the reviews on this site.
Again, too little noticed in this love is the tradition "of the poet" Gilbert toils in, I mean Graves and Riding first of all our troubadourperipatetic worldly poet with the basic, "Word Woman" schema on his agenda.
"Sects," a poem in Monolithos, mentions "the old dream of woman, " Gilbert's poems are a persistence in 'the tradition of the poet', a tradition repudiated heavyhandedly among the century's professionalized, academic haters of woman Yvor Winters and Allen Tate on Riding Jarrell on H.
D. Jarrell on Rukeyser Vendler on Loy etc, And I'm all for the persistence, Unlike the critical generation invoked above, Gilbert does not appear, for all his WordWoman schema, to be a homophobe.
Greece is a lure, as Alexandria is for Durrell, because of Cavafy, the tradition of the poet of the cosmopolitan tribe, and the interest in entertainments, in the pornographic novel as the historical novel was Riding/Graves' interest, is an effort to tune in rhetorically to cosmopolitan ranges of diction.
Here's where I read the cunning the effect of this novelistic positioning within language is to repudiate the professionalized mainstream in American poetry while promising to make the whole work worth reading, vide bad poems and all.
Let's be clear: focusing on how bad Gilbert frequently is does him no justice at all.
We may know how crucially marriage tropes for Gilbert, so that in "Betrothed" "the middle of a life" "goes pure" in "perfect inhumanity" when a "black and white of me mated" in "this indifferent winter landscape" and so forth and so on and the thing unravels into its various tropes, the speaker's conviction in which gets to be naturalized all too readily.
Whereas at his best Gilbert understands the clarity of perception to be an ineffable triangulation of resemblances, and "Relative Pitch" is an example of this.
Three analogies are balanced very carefully: On his way back up the mountain presumably in Greece the speaker hears children "playing as though they were happy," and the speaker's uncertainty as to whether they actually could be happy is exposed by the "measure"'s similarity to a man the speaker has heard of in Virginia who took one of Fuller's geodesic domes and renovated it, despite knowing nothing of Fuller.
All the renovator had of the prior experience of the house's residents was a chair, from which, Gilbert suggests, the renovator worked his way out to a consideration of the whole.
And so these parts of the poem have become, for the speaker, "the religion" "whispered" of "upstairs in the dark, sometimes in the parlor amid blazing sunlight, and under trees with rain coming down in August on the bare unaccustomed bodies.
" It's Gilbert's tendency to claim this set of resemblances as a sound, a note on the analogy to music, as in Pound, here a "Relative Pitch," but I actually think the title, like the concept it describes, is only approximate to the perception the poem enacts, which is one of mysterious clarity in solitude.
With many people on this site, nevertheless, then, I would agree that this is Gilbert's best book.
I wrote this based on the poetry, and on having met Gilbert several times during a brief period he lived in Iowa City in.
But as I should have known, these make a poor basis for such a remark, especially since Gilbert is a writer especially concerned to confound the work with "the poet," to essentialize the work as "the man.
" Subsequent reading turns up that when Gordon Lish asked Gilbert on July,, who were the living American poets he read, Duncan and "once upon a time, Ginsberg," are among the named.
Lish questions Gilbert further about the figures of whales, elephants, and Alcibiades, in the Views Of Jeopardy poem, Gilbert admits he likes the scale of the former two mammals, and says, of Alcibiades, "It's so much the problem today.
It is so much our most endowed people who go wrong become corrupt, sexually distorted, criminal, mad, You might just as well call it Evil as it has been so often called to simplify things.
But whatever the name, it is clear that Cordelia has little relevance for us except as a lost Eden.
What concerns our time is Goneril, That's why insanity, homosexuality, and semicriminality are so common among poets, These prevent him from escaping into the obliviousness of normal life, Especially in modern times, the poet has a builtin inability to succeed, so he is forced to associate with whales.
" Lish smartly answers back: "And you intend to continue to live with them by choice" And Gilbert replies: "Well, I'm not crazy, queer, or crooked!"
What's going on, here, aside from the blandishment about "sexual distortion," which would gain total assent from John Crowe Ransom, is Gilbert playing at the Duncanian "drama of the psyche" as this works itself out in his letting King Lear read his world.
He's poaching the "Jocasta" cultural analysis of Laura Riding, and making a mess of it, And letting his own sexualcultural location "pass" as the unmarked one, It's a kind of minstrelsy he's not entirely aware he's playing,I like this. I like it a lot, with reservations, I've read it before, at the urging of a friend, and I liked it then too, though not enough to urge it on others.
But recently I read an interview with Jack Gilbert in the Paris series, and by the end I was actually in tears thinking about his life and what he'd said and hadn't said about that life in his interview.
This is a guy who knew Ginsburg back in San Francisco before 'Howl' who in all probability was a mentor to Ginsburg, helping him with an early draft of 'Howl'.
Who lived not in the city where the party was, but up in some derelict cabin on the outskirts, and anyway moved on quickly enough and went on to live in various parts of the world, not much caring for celebrity or money.
A guy who got famous quickly and enjoyed it for aboutmonths before moving on and didn't publish another book foryears.
A serious guy.
OK, so respect, I like that kind of guy the opposite of 'careerist', But at the same time you can be too serious, and I guess I wonder if at times Gilbert is just that.
His poems are, at their best, like arrows to the heart, In few words, with few adornments, he takes you to a place deep inside inside him, inside you where few artists are able to reach.
In the poem 'Trying to Have Something Left Over' he speaks of a doomed affair with a woman whose baby he would take care of, throwing him up in the air and whispering 'Pittsburgh' to him each time,
So that all his life her son would feel gladness
unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined
city of steel in America.
Each time almost
remembering something maybe important that got lost,
Wow. I think that's beautiful. That Gilbert loves the child that much, that he loves his hometown, that in this poem he extends the gift to all who read it.
In the poem 'Gift Horses' he's also at his best:
He lives in the barrens, in dying neighbourhoods
and negligible countries.
None with an address.
But still the Devil finds him, Kills the wife
or spoils the marriage,
Then he speaks of the pleasures the Devil allows us despite all this:
.
. . Maybe because he is not
good at his job, I believe he loves us against
his will,
Again, wow, Maybe this is Gilbert's speciality: to make us glad of the concessions grief allows us, Certainly the landscape of these poems is desolate, but we are left with the sense of a man who knows and enjoys pleasure, and who finds it in unexpected places.
Writing often of the death of his wife in her thirties, from cancer he clearly knows grief, Yet never does he allow this theme to overwhelm us, Instead he takes us to the places that grief has taken him to a bare mountaintop where many of the poems take place:
.
. . When I hit the log
frozen in the woodpile to break it free,
it makes a sound of perfect inhumanity,
which goes pure all through the valley,
like a crow calling unexpectedly
at the darker end of twilight that awakens
me in the middle of a life.
I cannot but love anyone who brings me so vividly into such moments of solitude, which I have lived myself though all too briefly and hope to live again.
Moments brilliantly illuminating yet almost unbearable,
Alone with the heart howling
and refusing to let it feed on
mere affection.
Gilbert tells it like it is, And I like it. At times, I love it, But at the same time I can't help but feel something is missing, The language is brilliant the polish, the precision, At times it seems about to keel over into its own parody, but each time he pulls back, just in time.
Yet in this control is a sense of something withheld, Perhaps from my imperfect knowledge of poetry, I think of Raymond Carver, of his very informal, conversational take on similar themes.
And though I can sense Gilbert's mastery, I can't help but feel that at his best a poet like Carver gives us more, though maybe precisely because he does not work so hard at it.
Of course at times Carver slides into selfparody, something that Gilbert never allows himself, But is there a touch of pride in this For someone clearly so skilled and dedicated, Gilbert's oeuvre is suspiciously thin.
After his death, will someone uncover riches undreamedof among his papers I would like to think so, but I don't know if I believe it.
The jury is out on this poet, A skilled practitioner, but a miser Childless myself, alone, and having not published foryears, I see in these poems a warning: give more, before it's too late.
That said, I am glad for what little Gilbert offers us, .