a new old to keep company with
Jack Gilbert is probably not a new name, especially if you are an avid reader of American poets.
My knowledge of American poetry is appallingly thin - it begins with Emily Dickinson, resuscitates for a bit with Lorine Niedecker and George Oppen, and peters out with Louise Gluck. Jorie Graham I should read more of, except I almost always see looming over a shoulder a dark cloud of readerly inadequacy. Marianne Moore I have yet to encounter though every time I see her Complete Poems in a bookshop I feel a pang of apology. Elizabeth Bishop, Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay are all in my pantheon but I've not had that sense of being struck by a bolt of lightning, I've not felt that I need to stop everything, put all calls on hold, postpone all distractions, halt and concentrate on listening until their pages run out of song. I could never really get Frank O'Hara even though one of my house-mates in graduate school tried her best to evangelize. I nibbled at John Ashbery and concluded that I was probably missing something since I could not see why his stuff's called poetry.
Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven was published in 2005. I bought it last week from PageOne. I became curious about him after reading an interview he did with the Paris Review. When asked "Were you a good teacher?" Jack Gilbert answered: "Excellent". When the interviewer said: "Many writers talk about how difficult it is to write. Is poetry hard work?" Jack Gilbert said: "They should try working in the steel mills in Pittsburgh. That's a very delicate kind of approach to the world - to be so frail that you can't stand having to write poetry. There are so many people who are really in trouble just making a living, who are really having a hard life. Besides, with poetry you're doing it for yourself. Other people are doing it because they have to feed the babies. But I do understand that it's hard to write, especially if you have a family."
His poems bowled me over. He has a voice like a stream in a forgotten place. It is pure even when saying rude words like "sonofabitch". It is gentle and forceful at the same time. I would quote you some lines like a diligent lit student but it seems a travesty to his poems to rip lines out. They are perfect pieces, I simply haven't the heart. I love the purity of his spirit, and I admire the way he has managed to show it through writing, foiling the dull and distortion of language.
I've also learnt from him that it's possible to make art from being obtuse. That it is oftentimes necessary to say no to worldliness if you don't want to settle for silence, which is a different thing altogether from quiet.
My knowledge of American poetry is appallingly thin - it begins with Emily Dickinson, resuscitates for a bit with Lorine Niedecker and George Oppen, and peters out with Louise Gluck. Jorie Graham I should read more of, except I almost always see looming over a shoulder a dark cloud of readerly inadequacy. Marianne Moore I have yet to encounter though every time I see her Complete Poems in a bookshop I feel a pang of apology. Elizabeth Bishop, Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay are all in my pantheon but I've not had that sense of being struck by a bolt of lightning, I've not felt that I need to stop everything, put all calls on hold, postpone all distractions, halt and concentrate on listening until their pages run out of song. I could never really get Frank O'Hara even though one of my house-mates in graduate school tried her best to evangelize. I nibbled at John Ashbery and concluded that I was probably missing something since I could not see why his stuff's called poetry.
Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven was published in 2005. I bought it last week from PageOne. I became curious about him after reading an interview he did with the Paris Review. When asked "Were you a good teacher?" Jack Gilbert answered: "Excellent". When the interviewer said: "Many writers talk about how difficult it is to write. Is poetry hard work?" Jack Gilbert said: "They should try working in the steel mills in Pittsburgh. That's a very delicate kind of approach to the world - to be so frail that you can't stand having to write poetry. There are so many people who are really in trouble just making a living, who are really having a hard life. Besides, with poetry you're doing it for yourself. Other people are doing it because they have to feed the babies. But I do understand that it's hard to write, especially if you have a family."
His poems bowled me over. He has a voice like a stream in a forgotten place. It is pure even when saying rude words like "sonofabitch". It is gentle and forceful at the same time. I would quote you some lines like a diligent lit student but it seems a travesty to his poems to rip lines out. They are perfect pieces, I simply haven't the heart. I love the purity of his spirit, and I admire the way he has managed to show it through writing, foiling the dull and distortion of language.
I've also learnt from him that it's possible to make art from being obtuse. That it is oftentimes necessary to say no to worldliness if you don't want to settle for silence, which is a different thing altogether from quiet.
posted by wheyface at 11:43 AM
4 Comments:
The thing with american poetry is the intimacy they assume, even if they are rambling on about wars and democracy or bridges and wheelbarrows. Maybe there's some kind of confessional impulse innate in american poets - aha, I can see a theory about the protestant lack of the confessional box!
(*sigh* back to work.)
There's a cinematic or theatrical quality to their intimacy (a staged-quality), I find, that's not in Seamus Heaney's poems for e.g. It's not insincerity, far from it in fact.
Hiya, firstly I want to say that apart from Emily Dickinson and Dorothy Parker, I have no idea who the others are.
Secondly, I really like Jack Gilbert's answer to "is poetry hard work?". Imagine, such humility and coming from an American!
Thirdly, I just finished eating some canned sardines with rice, and drinking decaf coffee. I can't really think of anything intelligent to match the quality of the post so I shall end at that.
HA HA HA!
Hiya! Canned sardines with rice sounds good. Sardines have edible bones, good value for money. If I sound phunnee, it's because I had THREE cups of tea in the afternoon, which is a lot by my standard. I'm in The Land Of Tea Drunk With Milk And No Sugar, which is why I broke my own no-tea-after-2 pm rule.
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