It's a poem with one foot clearly in the 1950s (and Lowell and Berryman and all their training), and another in 2012. It has formal integrity, extraordinary grace, a deep relation to the poems of the past. He completely lacks Post-Modern irony—there's nothing winking at you here, there's not a sense of pointlessness despite his fundamentally tragic view of the world. Courage is the key.

Gilbert dodged his own celebrity by moving to Europe after marrying Linda Gregg. He was always closer to the Moderns than the Beats and part of his old Europe wanderlust was to relight the paths first trod by Pound and Eliot. This long honeymoon ended in divorce six years later. Gilbert's love crash was softened by Michiko Nogami whom he also married, but Michiko would die suddenly at thirty-two. The great promise of his debut collection and the tragedies that punctuated his life had many readers anticipating his next book. Gilbert held them off for twenty-two years, finally publishing Monolithos in 1984 which became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ten years later he published his third collection, The Great Fires.
Gilbert had also co-written two sex novels with Jean Maclean in Paris. These were published by the erotica division of Olympia Press, the Paris Indy-publisher which had first published Lolita and Naked Lunch. Apart from these mercenary writings, his poetry was Spartan. This makes it all the more surprising that at the age of eighty Gilbert would suddenly produce a flurry of works. Refusing Heaven was the first of these, appearing in 2005. The book won the Los Angeles Book Prize as well as the National Book Critics Award. The next year saw its companion, Tough Heaven, as well as the collection Transgressions. He published another collection, The Dance Most of All, at eighty-four. This sleeping beauty had at long-last roused himself and although he'd never owned a home and had driven a car only twice in his life, Gilbert seemed ready to engage himself and the larger world and try to determine what all the fuss was about. Three years later he was dead.
The fuss of poetry is all about love. Poets and preachers hear the call, but Jack Gilbert scanned whole conversations. Man's first words were dialogue, not exposition. “We carry language as our mind,” Gilbert wrote in “What Song Should We Sing.” Gilbert transited a level line between language, poetry, spirit and spirit voices: “Our body is not good at memory, at keeping. It is the spirit that holds our treasure.” His poem “Kunstkammer” continues:

...Again and again we put our
sweet ghosts on small paper boats and sailed
them back into their death, each moving slowly
into the dark, disappearing as our hears
visited and savored, hurt and yearned.

Gilbert's internal dialogues are a montage of synthesis and rebellion. Sometimes Gilbert heeded the old voice, but he would also argue before surrendering to another voice taking over his poem, breaking his heart.
This was the man who gathered his papers in his late seventies to rest a while and compose Refusing Heaven. In “A Brief for the Defense (of poetry)” he wrote: “We must admit there will be music despite everything...To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat/ comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth/ all the years of sorrow that are to come.” Sometimes the oars are talking. In “Naked Except for the Jewelry” a lover admonishes her partner, “You must talk no more about ecstasy.”

The woman wandered about picking up
her shoes and silks. “You said you loved me,”
The man said. “We all tell lies,” she said,
brushing her wonderful hair, naked except
for the jewelry. “We try to believe.”

The voices are the spirits and the spirits don't always see eye to eye. The ones that don't echo with a partner are often the loudest. “Put Her in the Field for Kindness” tells of an old woman locked up. Maybe she's insane or some kind of witch. Each day her voice escapes: “Some days the pounding inside/ made the heavy wooden door shudder. Often, a voice,/ screaming,” Not all of Gilbert's voices are human. At least one is a rooster: “They have killed the rooster, thank God, but it's strange to have my half of the valley unreported.” Without the rooster's voice, the speaker doesn't know where he is, “as though I'm gone.” A young rooster is intended to replace the old one but the youngster doesn't know how to crow properly. Older surrounding roosters won't answer him. Gilbert's parable of young and old poetry continues:

a long time the roosters on the other farms would not
answer. But yesterday they started laying
full-throated performances on him. He would come
back, but couldn't get the hang of it. The scorn
and the failing went on until finally one day,
from the other end of the valley, came a deep
voice saying, “For Christ's sake kid, like this.”
And it began. Not bothering to declare parts
of the landscape, but announcing the glory,
the greatness of the sun and moon.
Told of the heavenly hosts, the mysteries,
and the joy. Which were the Huns and which not.
Describing the dominions of wind and song. What was
noble in all things. It was very quiet after that.

This poem's sentences begin just before line endings and end just after line beginnings so that the stanza feels formless. It's a big valley and there's room for plenty of voices to crow. It's also important to read this poem as a parable, and the telling of parables in general helps us to connect with Gilbert for whom love and life is only a parable of art.
There is a fine line between focus and tunnel vision. A similar tightrope exists between disassociation, or separating oneself from one's own reality, and transcendence. At times Gilbert leaned to one side or the other, but our marvel as readers was to watch him not only walk but dance on that wire as if he were Nietzsche's sad-eyed, soft-skinned twin. In “Failing and Flying” Gilbert joined the many celebrated poets since Baudelaire to create an Icarus poem. He wrote: “I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,/ but was just coming to the end of his triumph.”
“Happening Apart from What's Happening Around It” is a wonderful poem to look at Gilbert's poetic style. Often he begins with a chorus or even a hook, much like the Beatles might—She loves you, yaa yaa yaa—before proceeding to the expository lyric. For this reason his first lines often have the ring of titles, or subtitles, or titles underneath the bigger titles His poems then build to a cascading “bridge” where all the reeds in the horn section are moistened up and then he uses a pausing effect before giving his denouement. In the rooster parable, this was the line “It was very quiet after that,” where the pause and the denouement were one in the same. “Happening Apart...” begins: “There is vividness to eleven years of love because it is over.” Gilbert than riffs on this theme: how he can see Greece with clarity only when he's in Manhattan or New England, how subjectivity inhibits understanding. The poem hinges on a hike with a Japanese man in the mountains and their trying to describe the sound of a waterfall, which they conclude is silence. Cue the horns, because this silent waterfall begins the leap:

...what
is the sound of women? What is the word for
that still thing I have hunted inside them
for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy,
the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still
in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper
down where a woman's heart is holding its breath,
where something very far away in that body
is becoming something we don't have a name for.

There is a natural pause in the last line after “becoming something” which is caused by suddenly ending the repetition and the crescendo so that a new title of the poem emerges: “What...we don't have a name for.” This poem like so many of Gilbert’s reveals not merely someone with a gift, a talent, whose dabbling along with it. Gilbert is a master in the use of cadence, pace and phrasing to open each poem's flower. Dialing through his poems we are not just readers and lovers of Gilbert's words. We are his eavesdroppers, hearing things about ourselves which may not be meant for our ears. To the pleasure of a good read—our acting out our secret desires, the rewards of perfect pitch and modulated balance—we may add some mischievous glee. And Gilbert, who's spent years roasting hot dogs on the devil's pitchfork, couldn't be happier.

© Barrett Warner

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