and two lambs laggardly to the top of the valley,
past my stone hut and onto the mountain to graze.
She turned twelve last year and it was legal
for the father to take her out of school. She knows
her life is over. The sadness makes her fine,
makes me happy. Her old red sweater makes
the whole valley ring, makes my solitude gleam.
I watch from hiding for her sake. Knowing I am
there is hard on her, but it is the focus of her days.
She always looks down or looks away as she passes
in the evening. Except sometimes when, just before
going out of sight behind the distant canebrake,
she looks quickly back. It is too far for me to see,
but there is a moment of white if she turns her face.
Weeds in the gully are white
with the year's first snow.
A lighted train goes
slowly past absolutely empty.
Also going to Fukuoka.
I feel around in myself
to see if I mind. Maybe
I am lonely. It is hard
to know. It could be
hidden in familiarity.
Rain
Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone gray
and yellow
a terrible amber.
In the cold streets
your warm body.
In whatever room
your warm body.
Among all the people
your absence.
The people who are always
not you.
I have been easy with trees
too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
suddenly
this rain.
In the small towns along the river
nothing happens day after long day.
Summer weeks stalled forever,
and long marriages always the same.
Lives with only emergencies, births,
and fishing for excitement. Then a ship
comes out of the mist. Or comes around
the bend carefully one morning
in the rain, past the pines and shrubs.
Arrives on a hot fragrant night,
grandly, all lit up. Gone two days
later, leaving fury in its wake.
For Susan Crosby Lawrence Anderson
Horses at Midnight Without a Moon
Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Tear It Down
We
find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By
redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after
darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By
insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade
mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see
the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The
village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more
than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the
sound
of racoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the
garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the
garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth
forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat
through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to
reach the body within the body.
Going Wrong
The fish are dreadful. They are brought up
the mountain in the dawn most days, beautiful
and alien and cold from night under the sea,
the grand rooms fading from their flat eyes.
Soft machinery of the dark, the man thinks,
washing them. "What can you know of my machinery!"
demands the Lord. Sure, the man says quietly
and cuts into them, laying back the dozen struts,
getting to the muck of something terrible.
The Lord insists: "You are the one who chooses
to live this way. I build cities where things
are human. I make Tuscany and you go to live
with rock and silence." The man washes away
the blood and arranges the fish on a big plate.
Starts the onions in the hot olive oil and puts
in peppers. "You have lived all year without women."
He takes out everything and puts in the fish.
"No one knows where you are. People forget you.
You are vain and stubborn." The man slices
tomatoes and lemons. Takes out the fish
and scrambles eggs. I am not stubborn, he thinks,
laying all of it on the table in the courtyard
full of early sun, shadows of swallows flying
on the food. Not stubborn, just greedy.
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when
love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they
knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work.
That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth
doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer
ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading
out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights
that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every
morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the
gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each
afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field
after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on
the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How
can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came
back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty
but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he
fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
A Year Later
for
Linda Gregg
From
this distance they are unimportant
standing by the sea. She is
weeping, wearing
a white dress, and the marriage is almost
over,
after eight years. All around is flat
uninhabited
side of the island. The water
is blue in the morning air. They
did not know
this would happen when they came, just the two
of
them and the silence. A purity that looked
like beauty and was
too difficult for people.
I Imagine the Gods I imagine the gods saying, We will make it up to you. We will give you three wishes, they say. Let me see the squirrels again, I tell them. Let me eat some of the great hog stuffed and roasted on its giant spit and put out, steaming, into the winter of my neighborhood when I was usually too broke to afford even the hundred grams I ate so happily walking up the cobbles, past the Street of the Moon and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers, the Street of Silence and the Street of the Little Pissing. We can give you wisdom, they say in their rich voices. Let me go at last to Hugette, I say, the Algerian student with her huge eyes who timidly invited me to her room when I was too young and bewildered that first year in Paris. Let me at least fail at my life. Think, they say patiently, we could make you famous again. Let me fall in love one last time, I beg them. Teach me mortality, frighten me into the present. Help me to find the heft of these days. That the nights will be full enough and my heart feral.
Going There
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
Michiko Dead
He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,
he moves the hands forward, hooking them
on the corners, pulling the weight against
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
drains out of the arm that is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down.
Alone
I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody's dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on their lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other's eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.
Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina
There
was no water at my grandfather's
when
I was a kid and would go for it
with
two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past
the cow by the foundation where
the
fine people's house was before
they
arranged to have it burned down.
To
the neighbor's cool well. Would
come
back with pails too heavy,
so
my mouth pulled out of shape.
I
see myself, but from the outside.
I
keep trying to feel who I was,
and
cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the
bucket made hitting the sides
of
the stone well going down, but never the sound of me.
splashed out. He got home in time, but was angry
about the mess she had made of his room. I stood behind,
watching them turn into something manageable. Thinking
how frightening it must have been before things had names.
We say peony and make a flower out of that slow writhing.
Deal with the horror of recurrence by calling it
a million years. The death everywhere is no trouble
once you see it as nature, landscape, or botany.
Say You Love Me
Are the angels of
her bed the angels
who come near me alone in mine?
Are the
green trees in her window
the color I see in ripe plums?
If
she always sees backward
and upside down without knowing it
what
chance do we have? I am haunted
by the feeling that she is
saying
melting lords of death, avalanches,
rivers and
moments of passing through.
And I am replying, "Yes, yes.
Shoes and pudding."
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 impossible, 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.
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
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.
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jack Gilbert - 1925 - 2012
A self-described “serious romantic,” Gilbert had a relationship with poet Linda Gregg, and was later married to sculptor Michiko Nogami, who died after 11 years of marriage. Many of his poems are about these relationships and losses. Gilbert’s fourth book, Refusing Heaven (2005), contains, as poet Dan Albergotti describes, “poems about love, loss, and grief that defy all expectations of sentimentality. All of them are part of the larger poem, the poem that is the life of the poet, perhaps the most profound and moving piece of work to come out of American literature in generations.”
Refusing Heaven won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Gilbert’s work has also received a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His second book of poetry, Monolithos (1982), won the Stanley Kunitz Prize and the American Poetry Review Prize. Despite these awards, some critics have ignored or dismissed Gilbert, and critic Meghan O’Rourke, writing for Slate in 2005, pondered why: “Gilbert isn’t just a remarkable poet. He’s a poet whose directness and lucidity ought to appeal to lots of readers . . . the poet who stands outside his own time, practicing a poetics of purity in an ever-more cacophonous world—a lyrical ghost, you might say, from a literary history that never came to be.”
In an essay he wrote to introduce his own work in the anthology New American Poets of the Golden Gate (1984), Gilbert pointed to the spareness of his work: “I am by nature drawn to exigence, compression, selection,” he wrote. “One of the special pleasures in poetry for me is accomplishing a lot with the least means possible.” Publishing only four books since he began writing over 50 years ago reinforces for his readers Gilbert’s love of economy. In a 2006 interview on NPR, he reflected on his relatively sparse list of publications: “It’s not a business with me . . . . I’m not a professional of poetry, I’m a farmer of poetry.”
On the rare occasions when Jack Gilbert gives public readings—whether in New York, Pittsburgh, or San Francisco—it is not unusual for men and women in the audience to tell him how his poems have saved their lives.
The fascination with Gilbert is a response, above all, to the power of his poetry, but it also reflects the mystique of a life lived utterly without regard for the conventions of literary fortune and fame.
In 1962 Gilbert’s first book, Views of Jeopardy, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was considered for the Pulitzer Prize alongside collections by Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams. The New York Times called Gilbert “inescapably gifted,” Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz praised his candor and control, and Stephen Spender hailed his work as “witty, serious, and skillful.”
"All Jack ever wanted to know was that he was awake—that the trees in bloom were almond trees—and to walk down the road to get breakfast,” Gregg, who remains close to Gilbert, says. “He never cared if he was poor or had to sleep on a park bench.”
“Jack rises up like an eel,” says Alice Quinn, The New Yorker’s poetry editor. “He dictates how and when the world sees his poems.”
During the day, my mother and father went into town, leaving my siblings and me all alone in this magnificent house, three stories high and no one there but us. We played on the roof, in the laundry chutes. It was extraordinarily dangerous. It was lovely, legendary. We owned that little world. In the back of the house were two orchards, one filled with peaches, the other with apples. We were always in the apple trees—frequently falling down.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think you would have become a poet if you’d stayed in Pittsburgh?
GILBERT
Why not? I was kind of a strange boy to be in Pittsburgh. I spent so much time reading. Even if I started a book that was boring, it was almost impossible for me not to finish it. I couldn’t get the story out of my head until I knew what happened. I had such curiosity. And you might not think it, but the power of Pittsburgh, the grandeur, those three great rivers, was magnificent. Even working in the steel mills. You can’t work in a steel mill and think small. Giant converters hundreds of feet high. Every night, the sky looked enormous. It was a torrent of flames—of fire. The place that Pittsburgh used to be had such scale. My father never brought home three pounds of potatoes. He always came home with crates of things. Everything was grand, heroic. Everything seemed to be gigantic in Pittsburgh—the people, the history. Sinuousness. Power. Substance. Meaningfulness.
INTERVIEWER
Were you surprised when your first book, Views of Jeopardy, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was considered for the Pulitzer?
GILBERT
Sure. It was an accident.
INTERVIEWER
Is it true that they couldn’t find you to tell you that you’d won?
GILBERT
It was more of an accident than that. I had gone to Italy and fallen in love—for the first time—with an extraordinarily beautiful woman, but her sister convinced me that I should give her up. She said, You’re never going to hold a job. You’re not going to be able to support Gianna. She should have babies. Gianna was made to have babies. And it was true. But that was an awful thing for me to do; I should have talked it over with Gianna. Anyhow, I was gathering all of my things to leave Italy. Gianna’s brother-in-law—Cleve Moffet, a writer—had an application for some kind of competition. He talked about it but decided he wasn’t going to do anything with it. When he got up to go to lunch he picked up the form and threw it in my lap saying, You should do it. I forgot about it until I was leaving to go back to America. The application must have gotten mixed in with the stuff I was packing. When I got to New York and was throwing things away, I must have found it and sent it in. I don’t know. I forgot about it. Later, I was living in the East Village and this one night there was pounding on the door and there was Cleve standing in the hall. He was agitated and said, They’re looking all over for you. I asked who, and he explained that somebody wanted to give me the Yale prize. I didn’t know what to do, how to express it. I took him out with my two friends and we had milkshakes. The next day I roamed about trying to find a way to feel about what had happened. I finally lay down under the Brooklyn Bridge to try to feel something. I lay there all afternoon, and then I called the people at Yale.
You were only thirty-seven years old.
INTERVIEWER
You went abroad soon afterwards—to Greece on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Did success influence your decision to go? Were you running away from something?
GILBERT
It wasn’t that. I didn’t want to stay in New York and go to dinners. I was also puzzled by the fact that so many of the established poets didn’t like each other. There’s competition, naturally—and naturally you relate to someone who can promote you. That’s not awful; that’s the way the world works. It’s just not the way I work. But don’t get me wrong, what they’re doing—these meetings where they give each other prizes—I think it’s wonderful.
INTERVIEWER Really?
GILBERT
Yes. The people who are famous have earned it; they’ve earned it to an extraordinary degree. They’ve given their lives to it, they’re professionals, they work hard, and they raise families. And they’re very smart, they stay at their desks all the time—they send out everything. They teach, which is not easy. What they do is important, but there’s no way that I would use my life for that.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think it’s important for American writers to live abroad?
GILBERT
At least at some point—so you have something to compare to what you think is normal, and you encounter things you aren’t used to. One of the great dangers is familiarity.
INTERVIEWER
When you were abroad, did you consider yourself an expatriate?
GILBERT
No. You have to understand I didn’t visit places; I lived places. It makes all the difference in the world.
INTERVIEWER
Did being removed from the literary community benefit you?
GILBERT
Sure.
INTERVIEWER
What did you like most about it?
GILBERT
Paying attention to being alive. This is hard—when I try to explain, it sounds false. But I don’t know any other way to say it. I’m so grateful. There’s nothing I’ve wanted that I haven’t had. Michiko dying, I regret terribly, and losing Linda’s love, I regret equally. And not doing some of the things I wanted to do. But I still feel grateful. It’s almost unfair to have been as happy as I’ve been. I didn’t earn it; I had a lot of luck. But I was also very, very stubborn. I was determined to get what I wanted as a life.
INTERVIEWER
When you lived overseas, did you get up every day and write?
GILBERT
If I was in an extraordinary place, I didn’t want to take out my notebook and start writing down what the front of the pagoda looked like. I wanted to experience it before I wrote it down.
A couple of decades ago, I finished going all the way around the world. And after that I suddenly realized I had lived all of my dreams. I had lots of them and I’ve fulfilled them all. Now it’s time to live the adult dreams, if I can find them. The others were dreams from childhood—first love and such, which is wonderful. It’s interesting to discover that we don’t have adult dreams—pleasure and pride, but not really adult dreams. Let me try to explain. I have a poem, “Trying to Have Something Left Over,” in which I’ve been unfaithful to my wife and she knows it and she’s mad. It’s the last night and I’m going to say goodbye to Anna, the other woman. She’s had a baby—not by me—and her husband has left her because he couldn’t take all that muck of a baby being born. This is the last night I’ll ever see her and I feel incredibly tender and grateful and loving toward her. And we’re not in bed—previously we had a wild relationship. Anyway, here’s the last night to say goodbye. She’s cleaning house quietly and sadly, and I’m entertaining her boy, her baby, throwing him up in the air and catching him. It’s a poem about that. Sad and tender. A truly adult dream. Profound tenderness. That’s what I like to write as poems. Not because it’s sad, but because it matters. So much poetry that’s written today doesn’t need to be written. I don’t understand the need for trickery or some new way of arranging words on a page. You’re allowed to do that. You’re allowed to write all kinds of poetry, but there’s a whole world out there.
INTERVIEWER
My Mother Taught Me, an erotic novel, wasn’t it?
GILBERT
It’s about sexuality. You have to understand, people were writing sex books but no one was writing them well. I thought pornography should be as much of a genre as cowboy stories. But pornography is boring. Childish. Unhealthy. I thought, Why not have a novel of sexuality that’s not paralyzed by the need for orgasm? So I wrote a good pornographic novel to show it could be done. An enjoyment rather than a momentary excitement. There were so many pornographic novels written; why weren’t they effective? A momentary spasm. Some people will have an orgasm if you say a dirty word or say, What he did to her body was … But what if you approach it as a real novel? The idea of entertainment intrigued me at the time—so I wrote one.
INTERVIEWER
Did school influence you as a young writer?
GILBERT
No, I failed high school; I got into college by mistake. I failed freshman English eight times. I was interested in learning, but I wanted to understand too, which meant I was fighting with the teachers all the time. Everybody accepted the fact that I was smart but I wouldn’t obey. I didn’t believe what they said unless they could prove it.
INTERVIEWER
In your interview with Gordon Lish in Genesis West, you say that there are two kinds of poetry. On the one hand, there are poems that give delight; on the other, there are poems that do something else. What do you mean by “something else”?
GILBERT
I think serious poems should make something happen that’s not correct or entertaining or clever. I want something that matters to my heart, and I don’t mean “Linda left me.” I don’t want that. I’ll write that poem, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about being in danger—as we all are—of dying. How can you spend your life on games or intricately accomplished things? And politics? Politics is fine. There’s a place to care for the injustice of the world, but that’s not what the poem is about. The poem is about the heart. Not the heart as in “I’m in love” or “my girl cheated on me”—I mean the conscious heart, the fact that we are the only things in the entire universe that know true consciousness. We’re the only things—leaving religion out of it—we’re the only things in the world that know spring is coming.
INTERVIEWER
How do you start a poem?
GILBERT
There’s no one way. Sometimes I’m walking along the street and I find it there. Sometimes it’s something I’ve been thinking about. Sometimes it’s an apparition.
INTERVIEWER
How do you know when you’ve finished one?
GILBERT
If I’m writing well it comes to an end with an almost-audible click. When I started out I wouldn’t write a poem until I knew the first line and the last line and what it was about and what would make it a success. I was a tyrant and I was good at it. But the most important day in my career as a writer was when Linda said, Did you ever think of listening to your poems? And my poetry changed. I didn’t give up making precreated poetry, but you have to write a poem the way you ride a horse—you have to know what to do with it. You have to be in charge of a horse or it will eat all day—you’ll never get back to the barn. But if you tell the horse how to be a horse, if you force it, the horse will probably break a leg. The horse and rider have to be together.
INTERVIEWER
Is that why your style is unadorned and not ornamental?
GILBERT
Oh, I like ornament at the right time, but I don’t want a poem to be made out of decoration. If you like that kind of poetry, more power to you, but it doesn’t interest me. When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart—in all its forms—is endlessly available there. To experience ourselves in an important way just knocks me out. It puzzles me why people have given that up for cleverness. Some of them are ingenious, more ingenious than I am, but so many of them aren’t any good at being alive.
GILBERT
There were people I respected, but we weren’t fighting. Today, you have to do something to distinguish yourself. Maybe because there’s so much money in poetry now. We used to type our poems and then go around and nail them up. Nobody would give Allen Ginsberg any money for “Howl.” It wasn’t in the running.
…One day, he got on a bus and went across the Golden Gate Bridge to see me in Sausalito. The streets turned to lanes, and the lanes to gravel, and the gravel turned into a path and then just woods. Up and up. He finally reached the abandoned house where I was living. After we talked, he said he had something he wanted to show me. He got two pages out of his bag. I read them and then read them again. I looked at him and told him they were terrific. Those two pages eventually became “Howl.”
INTERVIEWER
Some of the Beat writers used drink and drugs to spur their work. What about you?
GILBERT
I did smoke tobacco for about a week when I was thirteen. It was boring. I was never interested in chemicals making me excited or loving or happy. It’s like with sexual stimulants—it would make me feel as if someone else were making love to the woman I was with. I want to be the person making love to her, not the chemical.
INTERVIEWER
Many writers talk about how difficult it is to write. Is poetry hard work?
GILBERT
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.
INTERVIEWER
When you write, do you read your poems out loud?
GILBERT
Sometimes. If my instincts register that something is wrong with the rhythm then I work on it, but it’s almost always unconscious. The hard part for me is to find the poem—a poem that matters. To find what the poem knows that’s special. I may think of writing about the same thing that everyone does, but I really like to write a poem that hasn’t been written. And I don’t mean its shape. I want to experience or discover ways of feeling that are fresh. I love it when I have perceived something fresh about being human and being happy. Ezra Pound said “make it new.” The great tragedy of that saying is he left out the essential word. It should be make it importantly new. So much of the time people are just aiming for novelty, surprise. I like to think that I’ve understood, that I’ve learned about something that matters—what the world should be, what life should be.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve said before that you don’t miss being young.
GILBERT
Oh, of course I miss being young.
INTERVIEWER
How is that different from not minding growing old?
GILBERT
Growing old is a mistake. It seems natural that we die and grow old. It’s part of the bargain. You get to be young for a long time and then you start to get old. It’s also a wonderful time, but it’s a different kind of wonderful. When I was young, I was very aware of death. I was determined not to die until I’d lived my life. So much so that I used to pray and make lists. I would say, I know you have to take me away. You have to kill me. But not yet. I’d make a sort of bargain—I accept that you will kill me, but don’t let me die before I’ve fallen in love. And then the second prayer was, Don’t let me die a virgin. I started making lists about what I wanted before I died. When I finally finished going around the world, I discovered that I’d lived every one of those lists.
INTERVIEWER
So discipline is important to you?
GILBERT
Yes, because I’m lazy. If you have it in you, you want to create, but I won’t force myself—because it’s dangerous. People who are organized are in danger of making a process out of it and doing it by the numbers.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever thought of writing your memoirs?
GILBERT
Yes. Every once in a while someone asks to do it for me. Sometimes I’m interested because I’ve forgotten so much of the past and I like the idea of walking through my life. What’s more, it’s a profound experience to be with people from my past again. To be with my memories. Things that I thought I’d forgotten all of a sudden become visible, become present.
INTERVIEWER
Like a film?
GILBERT
Different than that. It’s more like a feeling rising from the tops of my knees. Then I start remembering. It’s complicated; a child seldom remembers anything before he’s four years old. I just wonder how much I know, how much I’ve been through, that I no longer remember.
INTERVIEWER Do you still wake happy but aware of your mortality
GILBERT Yes, though sometimes I have to have a cup of tea first.
