Cosmopoetica

I’ve held off reading the last few poems in Jack Gilbert’s latest (The Dance Most of All) for months. Literally. Gilbert is one of those rare touchstone authors I was just ruminating about (finishing this book, in fact, inspired those brief thoughts) and– as much as I hate to mention it again– I really do worry, selfishly, that this might be his last.

Many of the poems in this collection convey a sense of finality. Not of the end, but of ending. Of being able to accept the ineffable and that doing so isn’t giving up even if it isn’t transcending it either… at least not in the way we might dream of for most of our life.

More than any other poems except, perhaps, Ray Carver’s, Gilbert writes a poetry that I cannot (and will no longer attempt to) explicate. I can only point to it and ask– even plead– "See? See?" Gilbert’s poetry is unadorned. He has a manner without being mannered, but is wholly identifiable– I can easily tell a Jack Gilbert poem in a few lines and just as easily distinguish an imitator. It’s a kind of poetry that is easy to parody, filled with references and words that we’re all taught not to use because they aren’t "poetic" or specific enough– love, dark, beauty, pleasure– but apparently practically impossible to duplicate.

Which isn’t to say that Gilbert’s poems are monotonic or predictable, but that they are, whether reflecting on the profound or the absurd, consistent and still of a single, often spectacular, nature. I’m sharing just a few poems here which illustrate some of this diverse singularity…

"Going Home"

Mother was the daughter of sharecroppers.
And my father the black sheep of rich Virginia
merchants. She went barefoot until twelve.
He ran away with the circus at fourteen.
Neither one got through grammar school.
And here I am in the faculty toilet
trying to remember the dates of Emperor Vespasian.

"Trying"

Our lives are hard to know. The gardens are provisional,
and according to which moment. Whether in the burgeoning
of July or the strict beauty of January. The language
itself is mutable. The word way is equally an avenue
and a matter of being. Our way into the woods
is according to the speed. To stroll into the loveliness
or leaves blowing so fast they would shred
birds in an explosion of blood. It’s the Devil’s
mathematics that Blake spoke of, which I failed
all three times. Everyone remembers the wonderful day
in Canada when the water was perfect. I remember
the Italian afternoon when I carried Gianna on my shoulders
in the pool, her thighs straining around my head.
My falling awkwardly and getting water in my nose.
The embarrassment forty-nine years ago which I have rejoiced in.
"To war with a god-lover is not a war," Edith Hamilton write,
"It is despair." What of the terribly poor Monet
scrounging for the almost empty tubes of paint his students
left. Or Watteau dying so long near Versailles. Always
the music of the court and the taste of his beautiful
goddesses constantly going away.

"Winter in the Night Fields"

I was getting water tonight
off guard when I saw the moon
in my bucket and was tempted
by those Chinese poets
and their immaculate pain.

Posted in: reading log No Comments »

I was excited to discover that Jack Gilbert—possibly my favorite living poet—has a new book out: The Dance Most of All. I know Gilbert’s health is precarious. For a few years now he’s been saying (without drama or apparent regret) he’s probably going to die in the next few years. I hope that day remains distant for a while yet.

No copy of the book in my hands yet, but here’s a poem I admire quite a bit (I’ve posted a few others in the past):

“The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart”

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
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 language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 4 Comments »

“Betrothed”

You hear yourself walking on the snow.
You hear the absence of the birds.
A stillness so complete, you hear
the whispering inside of you. Alone
morning after morning, and even more
at night. The say we are born alone,
to live and die alone. But they are wrong.
We get to be alone by time, by luck,
or by misadventure. When I hit the log
frozen in the woodpile to break it free,
it makes a sound of perfect inhumanity,
which goes pure all through the valley,
like a crow calling unexpectedly
at the darker end of twilight that awakens
me in the middle of a life. The black
and white of me mated with this indifferent
winter landscape. I think of the moon
coming in a little while to find the white
among these colorless pines.

–Jack Gilbert
from The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992

Posted in: Commonplace Book No Comments »