Gilbert, Jack
GILBERT, Jack
Nationality: American. Born: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 17 February 1925. Education: University of Pittsburgh, B.A.; University of California, Berkeley, 1958–59; San Francisco State College (now University), M.A. 1962. Career: Associated with San Francisco State College (now University), 1956–71, University of California, Berkeley, 1958–59, Humboldt State College (now University), Juniata College, Rikkyo University, Tokyo, 1974–75, and Syracuse University, 1982–83. Awards: Yale Younger Poets award, Yale University, and Pulitzer prize nomination, 1962, for Views of Jeopardy; Guggenheim fellow in poetry, 1964; Stanley Kunitz prize, American Poetry Review prize, Pulitzer prize nomination, and National Book Critics Circle nomination for best book of poetry, 1982, for Monolithos: Poems, 1962 and 1982; Borestone Mountain Poetry award. Address: 136 Montana Street, San Francisco, California 94112, U.S.A.
Publications
Poetry
Views of Jeopardy. New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1962.
Monolithos: Poems, 1962 and 1982. New York, Knopf, 1982.
Kochan, with Four Poems by Michiko Nogami. Syracuse, New York: Tamarack Editions, 1984.
The Great Fires: Poems, 1982–1992. New York, Knopf, 1994.
*Critical Studies: Interview with Ralph Adamo and John Biguenet, in New Orleans Review (New Orleans), 22(3–4), fall-winter 1996; "Between Truth and Meaning" by Allen Hoey, in American Poetry Review (Philadelphia), 26(1), January-February 1997; "Jack Gilbert: Noh Getting Overview" by Janet C. Moore, in Hollins Critic (Hollins College, Virginia), 35(1), February 1998.
* * *Throughout a career spanning half a century, Jack Gilbert has scrupulously avoided career moves and the collective movements that make careers. In San Francisco during the 1950s, he attended evenings at Kenneth Rexroth's home, helped to arrange one of the first performances of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," and participated in Jack Spicer's "Magic" workshop, yet he cast himself ironically as the title character in "Malvolio in San Francisco," more self-critical than Shakespeare's character yet just as contemptuous of the drunken revelers who surrounded him: "The first rate seems unknown / In this city of easy fame." Later, amid the counterculture movement of Haight-Ashbury—"no rules for the arts, let the kids educate themselves," he recalled in an interview—Gilbert attempted to teach the rules of art to the "kids" at San Francisco State College. While his respect for the passion that moved the counterculture aligns him with the antiacademic new American poetry, in his insistence on craft Gilbert retains an allegiance to the great modernists of the early twentieth century. "The craft of the invisible," as he calls it, to distinguish it from the cosmetic formalism of midcentury academic poetry, is form in the service of content. The content includes passion, but there is a greater "fire," which differs from passion as adolescent sexuality differs from mature romantic love:
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.
For Gilbert the impossible challenge facing the poet is not merely to commit himself to the fires of passion, as the hero does in "Don Giovanni on His Way to Hell," but also to return from that mysterious hell and sing about it, as Orpheus does in the story Gilbert retells throughout his career. For the poet the story implies a choice between two modes of responding to the central experience of losing what one loves, as Orpheus lost Eurydice the first time. "He might have grieved / Easily," as "Malvolio in San Francisco" recognizes. The emotion alone would justify his song, the "Orphic Fallacy" that Dudley Fitts sought to oppose by conferring the Yale Younger Poets award on Gilbert's Views of Jeopardy. Jeopardizing his relation to his audience, Gilbert opts for "the difficult journey," following Orpheus to hell and back in an attempt to recover in loss what is never lost, the "love [that] lasts by not lasting."
This timeless point of view establishes the terms on which the details of Gilbert's life enter his poetry. His volumes memorialize a series of love affairs: with Gianna Gelmetti (Views of Jeopardy), Linda Gregg (Monolithos), and Michiko Nogami (Kochan and The Great Fires). Although the series unfolds in time, each love is viewed retrospectively, as an instance of loss. Thus each woman is a type of Orpheus's Eurydice, while at the same time she is celebrated for "all her fresh particularity of difference," the knowledge sought by Gilbert's Don Giovanni. Ironically, the more Gilbert seeks to hold onto the particularity, the more alien his language must sound to an audience, as he himself acknowledges in "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart." His almost ritualized recital of his lovers' names—"Gelmetti and Gregg / and Nogami lasted"—leaves the reader with nothing but names, instead of a sense of persons. Still, while failing to recover Eurydice, Gilbert manages to capture a world transformed by the experience of love. When Orpheus makes the fatal decision to look back at Eurydice, in "County Musician," it is
to have at least the face
seen freshly with loss
forever. A landscape.
Particular landscapes are associated with particular lovers in Gilbert's work—Italy with Gianna Gelmetti, the Aegean islands with Linda Gregg—but the world that emerges most powerfully in the late work, as if in contrast to the exotic homeland of his dead wife Michiko Nogami, is the Pittsburgh of Gilbert's own childhood. In "Threshing the Fire," a sequence at the conclusion of Monolithos, and throughout The Great Fires images of Pittsburgh evoke a nightmare of industry, as if Orpheus, having failed to rescue Eurydice from hell, succeeded in retrieving the landscape of hell itself. But this is the hell of Blake as much as of Orpheus, for it burns with the creative fires of imagination as well as of desire:
He does not understand, but he knew the wanting.
Remembers working in the mill, the titanic shear
Cleaving the slabs into sections. Halfway
To something. Smell of Pittsburgh after rain.
This is "the smell of journey" that "Malvolio in San Francisco" attaches to Orpheus. Unable to name the destination, Gilbert persists in that journey, "halfway / to something."
—Terence Diggory