1.

Would Jack Gilbert have rejoiced at being named the “poet-laureate of my life” for Elizabeth Gilbert?

I don’t know, but the question interests me. It interests me because what Elizabeth loves about Jack (in her own words) is what others have loved about Rainer Maria Rilke—the dedicated focus on commingling of joy, beauty and terror (not to mention the view of children as a curse in the writer’s life). Although part of me wishes to know nothing the poetry that undergirds Eat, Pray, Love or its endless cacophony of sequels and lifestyle products, the other part of me feels it holds a key that unlocks the cultural mood as The Secret unlocked the prior decade.

A different part of me is exhausted by the number of humans who fall off cliffs to catch the perfect travel-selfie in the species of journey that the Elizabeth Gilbert industry has propagated.

A fetal part of me accepts critiques wherein birthing a few kids is bad for the planet as the adult part of me sees planetary catastrophe in industry of navel-gazing travelogues and conspicuous-travel-media birthed by E. Gilbert Inc.

Is this because I envy it? Is my envy a critique about myself as individual or a critique of the culture which monetizes envy through aspirational production targets? Of course there is a mirror in anything I write when staring across this particular room….

2.

Maybe it’s the tone: a triumphalist redemptive positivity bestowed as a reward for living one’s life without worrying too much about what it asks of others. This tonal fool-hardiness, rooted in Americanism, is infectious, of course, as our COVID-denying tribes demonstrate in the past year of “just living” their (maskless) lives. And so I turn again to both Gilberts when wanting to speak of the man.

Elizabeth references Jack’s interview in The Paris Review, where he explains how the only time he was hospitalized was after falling 90 ft from a tree and breaking his spine. Why did he climb the tree? The poet says:

Showing off. I was with Linda and her father didn’t approve at all. I mean, he was resentful that I was bedding his daughter without any official rights. On Christmas Day we went up on his mountain to find a tree that would suit Linda. We were walking along and he was behaving himself. We kept walking until we came to these trees. He was crazy about nature. He said, You know, if you cut off the top of that tree—if you could cut just the top—the tree wouldn’t die, and it would make it a more attractive tree without that spindly, weak top. 

Being the bad guy with his lovely daughter, I immediately took the rope and saw and started climbing. I didn’t know anything about it. I knew a lot about apple trees because I’d spent time in an orchard. But not a forest. I was way up there. I climbed to the top, but I’m no fool—I tied myself to the trunk. I thought I would tug on the treetop until it snapped, except in the middle of doing this there was a big gust of wind that snapped the thing, and it fell on me and was pushing me down…. I was heroic about it, but my thighs gave way, and the rope too. I plummeted down, shearing off the branches. I was going so fast that the speed just butchered the tree. Luckily I landed on dirt.

Jack goes on to evoke a childhood memory of being 13 and living through the Great Depression in Pittsburgh:

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.

In an interview with Gordon Lish (also referenced by Elizabeth Gilbert), Jack offers more insight into what he takes to be a lack of subject and inspiration in poetry peers. He laments the banality of life, or the dullness of poetry which takes its tone from ordinary survival and bourgeois comfort:

Isn’t a great part of poetry now being produced to support an established reputation? The poet is actually tired of poetry, but he must turn out poems to qualify for prizes, grants, and academic positions. What’s he going to do? He manufactures verse. And it’s a lot easier to deal with a small subject when you’re getting by on merely careful technique. And if he’s a man teaching at a university, as he probably is, and married to a wife he courted years ago, and has several quite healthy children…what’s he going to make his poems out of? He makes them out of books or he makes them out of the incidents of a normal, commonplace life. If he goes sailing off Long Island on Sunday afternoon and he wants to write a poem after dinner, he will probably write a poem about sailing off Long Island.

The solution, for both Gilberts, requires traveling to exotic places and landscapes where one cannot speak the local language in which people live what many might describe as ordinary lives. They aren’t committed to becoming part of the culture or learning the language or raising children in those countries—thus showing an actual emotional and literal investment in places that fascinate them.

It is lovely to breeze through for the postcard or the essay or the feature piece, and I don’t mean to disparage it as a mode so much as note how the mode, itself, is noncommittal and slightly inflected by histories of colonialism. It is okay to acknowledge this. I think Gilbert, himself, acknowledges it the posthumously-published conversation in American Poetry Review.

It is better to begin from acknowledgement than repudiation on a planet where the American footprint is so costly to other nations.

3.

Which brings me to Jack Gilbert’s magnificent poem, “Thinking About Ecstasy”, where adjectives modify the subject in a way reminiscient of property ownership and national projection of power.

Notice the juxtapositions of violence, image, glass, sacralized female suffering, and pain:

Gradually he could hear her. Stop, she was saying,
stop! And found the bed full of glass,
his ankles bleeding, driven through the window
of her cupola. California summer. That was pleasure.
He knows about that: stained glass of the body
lit by our lovely chemistry and neural ghost.
Pleasure as fruit and pleasure as ambush. Excitement
a wind so powerful, we cannot find a shape for it,
so our apparatus cannot hold on to the brilliant
pleasure for long. Enjoyment is different.
It understands and keeps. The having of the having.
But ecstasy is a question. Doubling sensation
is merely arithmetic. If ecstasy means we are
taken over by something, we become an occupied
country, the audience to an intensity we are
only the proscenium for. The man does not want
to know rapture by standing outside himself.
He wants to know delight as the native land he is.

“Ecstasy is a question” I like to pose to mirrored ceilings over beds in motels that charge by the hour.

This is where I go in order to see what I want from the ecstatic, or how much I can afford to pay it.

It’s difficult to see what one wants if the gaze focuses on the desired rather than one’s relation to the desired.

It is humbling to realize what we crave is a form of power, and to witness ourselves in its expression, its verbiage, its rapt attention and actions.

4.

Everyone agrees that Jack Gilbert is a complicated poet—one who sought a form of lived authenticity which made space for error, for humanity, for risk—and most accept that his conception of humanity de-humanized other humans.

William Doreski reflects on the excavations in Gilbert’s poems:

Genuine honesties are hard to find because the world itself has concealed them. Gilbert’s best poems—and certainly he has his clunkers—require subtle and ironic readers to appreciate them. If that makes their essential honesty difficult, it is difficult in the way that Robert Frost (in “Directive”) required, “so the wrong ones can’t find it, / So can’t get saved.”

Alex Dimitrov describes meeting Jack Gilbert at Linda Gregg’s place:

What comes to mind, as I type this now, is a moment months later (I would continue to go over to Linda’s apartment every two to three months and we’d do the usual thing: talk, drink, smoke for hours) when she said to me, “that day when you met Jack, that’s probably going to be the only time you see him. He’s not coming back to the East Coast.” But I also knew that what she meant was, he was dying.

Curtis Faville reads this hunger to “be close to lived experience” in Gilbert’s poems, and how it takes the shape of “incremental disagreements with expediency” to the point where “even language itself may seem an expedient” with respect to expressing emotions.

I can love Jack Gilbert’s poems while acknowledging that his choices are not available to me, and that the form this unavailability assumes is both iconic and blasphemous.

I can sit in the pew while wishing others had the time, ability, and funding to sit in the pew beside me, in the church of famous men.