Once, after a period of extended meditation, I went out to the front porch with Jack Gilbert’s collection The Great Fires – maybe a year or two after I’d first discovered it – flipped through the book seeking a poem to read, but became quickly and acutely aware of each poem he’d planted as a living thing. But with mouths, like piranha plants. Except they were singing. They were impossible to interpret but clear. I didn’t have to read them, they were already with me.
Jack Gilbert, like G*d, is sometimes unapproachable, but always available. It takes special glasses to look at the sun.
Mingus said true genius was in making the complex simple, seeing as anyone can make something simple complicated. Jack Gilbert adds to that magnitude. It’s impossible to pick favorites among your children and parents, but if I were stranded on a desert island for the rest of my life with one book: Gilbert’s Collected Poems would give me insight and meaning to my survival.
Start with A Brief For The Defense from his book Refusing Heaven. Next, What Else Is There To Say? from the same book. Then, from,The Great Fires, start with Married, about finding the hair of his dead wife Michiko in an avocado plant (see above). This was the first poem of his I read, thanks to David Bottoms, who did not spare his undergraduates the intensity of it, which I still see as a sign of respect. Then, there is the piece The Great Fires itself. Searching For Pittsburgh, Going Wrong, Dante Dancing. The Forgotten Dialect of The Heart. Here’s one:
Or this one:
I just opened the book and there they were. The Great Fires and Refusing Heaven were certainly high water marks, but each of the books in their time was a flood. In his book Monolithos, a lady asks the poet what poets do between poems. Between passions and visions:
I believe a poet should be designated such by others, one should not call oneself a poet. I think I read somewhere this was first espoused by Robert Frost. If anyone has earned the right to do so, it is Jack Gilbert. In my mind, he truly understood the simultaneous absurdity and magnitude of the title. Unfortunately, he died in 2012. Fortunately, for us, he lives in his poems, still vibrant and fearless.
He was originally from Pittsburgh, traveled widely, though, living for a time in Greece. But like all of us, he was always trying to get back to Pittsburgh:
May he rest there in peace.
