Jack Gilbert (1925 – ) published his first book of poems, Views of Jeopardy, in 1962, and his second, Monolithos, nearly 20 years later. In between he moved to Europe, traveled as a lecturer on American literature for the U.S. State Department. He’s also the author of three other books of poetry: Transgressions: Selected Poems, The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992, and Refusing Heaven, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He’s also received numerous other prizes and grants, and has been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. (We reviewed The Great Fires here at TweetSpeak last November.)

Author and poet James Dickey said this about Gilbert’s work: “He takes himself away to a place more inward than is safe to go; from that awful silence and tightening, he returns to us poems of savage compassion.”

For National Poetry Month, here are three by Jack Gilbert.

The Great Fires

Love is apart from all things.
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.
What is not love provokes it.
What is not love quenches it.
Love lays hold of everything we know.
The passions which are called love
also change everything to a newness
at first. Passion is clearly the path
but does not bring us to love.
It opens the castle of our spirit
so that we might find the love which is
a mystery hidden there.
Love is one of many great fires.
Passion is a fire made of many woods,
each of which gives off its special odor
so we can know the many kinds
that are not love. Passion is the paper
and twigs that kindle the flames
but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes
because it tries to be love.
Love is eaten away by appetite.
Love does not last, but it is different
from the passions that do not last.
Love lasts by not lasting.
Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart.

The Abnormal Is Not Courage

The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German
Tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers,
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
The bravery. Say it’s not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn’t that. Not at its best.
It was impossib1e, and with form. They rode in sunlight,
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.
It is too near the whore’s heart: the bounty of impulse,
And the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
Not the month’s rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
That is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.

In Dispraise of Poetry

When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,
he gave him a beautiful white elephant.
The miracle beast deserved such ritual
that to care for him properly meant ruin.
Yet to care for him improperly was worse.
It appears the gift could not be refused.

Related:

Audio: Jack Gilbert reads his “Big and Small: Midnight to Four A.M.”

Postings and News Updates:

Monday’s Poem A Day from the Academy of American Poets was “The Widows of Gravesend” by L.S. Asekoff, from The Gate of Horn published by Northwestern University Press.

Poet Jack Gilbert wrote his first book of poetry in 1962, Views of Jeopardy, which attracted considerable media and critical acclaim and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. And then – retreat and isolation, almost as if the attention was too overwhelming for the then 37-year-old (and what do you for an encore?).

In the intervening years, Gilbert continued to write and publish in various journals, and produced several other volumes of poetry, including Monolithos (1984), The Great Fires (1994), Refusing Heaven (2005), Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh (2006), Transgressions (UK, 2006), and The Dance Most of All (2009). He’s now 84, and lives in Northampton, Mass.

My introduction to Glibert’s poetry has been The Great Fires, which falls approximately in the middle between his triumphant first volume and the works published in the current decade. His poems are lyrical and clean, like clear ice. They suggest a distance, a separation. The poet is sitting on the side, detached, watching and not participating. From “The White Heart of God:”

The snow falling around the man in the naked woods
is like the ash of heaven, ash from the cool fire
of God’s mother-of-pearl, moon-stately heart.
sympathetic but not merciful. His strictness
parses us. The discomfort of living this way
without birds, among maples without leaves, makes
death and the world visible. Not the harshness,
but the way the world can be known by pushing
against it. And feeling something pushing back.
The whiteness of the winter married to this river
Makes the water look black. The water actually
is the color of giant mirrors set along the marble
corridors of the spirit, the mirrors empty
of everything. The man is doing the year’s accounts…

And there’s a reason for the detachment – the poet, and the poems are haunted. All of these poems, some directly but most indirectly, even the ones about an affair with a Danish woman named Anna, are about the death of Gilbert’s wife, Michiko Nogami, in 1982. The poem in the collection that bears her name:

Michiko Nogami (1946-1982)

Is she more apparent because she is not
anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white
because she was the color of pale honey?
A smokestack making the sky more visible.
A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko
Said, “The roses you gave me kept me awake
With the sound of their petals falling.”

Haunted and haunting, indeed.