“You Don’t Know Jack!”: Jack Gilbert and Me
I. Love is one of many great fires
As I sit here writing this essay in early June in my high-school classroom where I teach English, I am thumbing my way through Jack Gilbert’s landmark poetry collection The Great Fires 1982-1992. It is a little dog-eared, and the black and white non-descript Knopf cover is curling up at one cover from countless readings.
This book has traveled with me for over twenty years. It has gotten me through three different moves, four pet deaths, and one marriage. I have a letterpress broadside of the title poem framed outside of my bathroom that I share with my current partner Aura Samara, and our thirteen year old mini-fashionista Olivia.
It is quite possibly the one poem I have read more than any other.
Love is one of many great fires is a line of poetry I have tattooed onto my right forearm. This is how much Jack Gilbert’s poetry has come to mean to me.
At one time, I owned well over five hundred poetry titles. I had them organised alphabetically by country: American, Canadian and U.K. poets. Three huge black bookcases.
When I moved in with Aura five years ago, I trimmed and winnowed my poetry collection down by almost half, and gave all the books I could part with to the poet-editor-professor Paul Vermeersch to give to his creative writing students at Sheridan College.
I kept only those books to my mind that were essentials: first editions, influences, friends’ collections, and books other poets signed to me.
And then there is the poetry of Jack Gilbert. Why Jack Gilbert?
I think Jack Gilbert has a special place in my poetic imagination not only because of how direct, intelligent, and approachable his poetry is, but also because of his post-Romantic mythos. He is a poet’s poet.
This is a guy who grew up in Pittsburgh, won the Yale Younger Poets’ Prize in 1962, became incredibly famous and had his pick of university teaching positions, and then promptly left America for little Greek islands at the height of his poetic fame for twenty years.
I only discovered his poetry while sitting in my friend Erina Harris’s apartment in Kitchener, Ontario around 2003. I think we were having tea when I saw The Great Fires sitting on a windowsill or a coffee table so I picked it up. “Jack Gilbert?” Erina smiled, “Oh, you will like him!”
And I did. I read and reread The Great Fires. Like Leonard Cohen, there is an astonishing directness to Gilbert’s poetry and an ineluctable quality too. I would say genius, but most MFA milque-toast poets make “sour-puss” faces when you put someone’s poetry on too high of a pedestal.
Gilbert’s poetry is a Viking treasure hoard of memorable lines. 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 must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
Did I mention all these lines come from a single tiny poem “Tear It Down”? Not even the best poem in the collection? Well, they do, and they are not the only lines from that poem worthy of mention. Love is not enough. We die and are put in the earth forever. We should insist while there is still time.
I am just going to say it: there is no living modern Canadian or American poet who is willing to write something so right, so revealing, so vulnerable as Love is not enough... …We should insist while there is still time.
Like the best Leonard Cohen poems, or the “ear-worm” elegance of Fats Domino’s Blueberry Hill, there is a bright-burning lyric intensity distilled into the best of Gilbert’s lines.
I was enchanted. In Gilbert’s poetry, even “the postcard-worthy” romantic facade of Greece is interrogated, over and over, and the dirty industrial city of Pittsburgh is a lost childhood Eden never to be returned to.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh. Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
II. It appears the gift could not be refused.
In the next few years, I began to seek out all of Gilbert’s poems. His 2005 collection Refusing Heaven had been published to wide acclaim. The Dance Most of All was not out just yet. A copy of his first book Views of Jeopardy published in 1962 was not in my book purchasing budget as it went for hundreds of dollars, and I was a young teacher low on the pay grid at the time. Even his 1982 collection Monolithos was expensive and by now a collectible item, but I managed to find a library copy of the book and photocopied some of the poems. By this time, I had already won a national award in Canada for my first book of poetry. A follow-up sophomore poetry collection was expected from me, and I began to write new poems, but this time not so much coloured as steeped in my reading of Jack Gilbert’s work. I began writing poems like “Thinghood” where the influence of Gilbert is unmistakable:
Thinghood
Men and women are sold every day at Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
Their lives are baubles since they are already dead. Culture
has been auctioned off in recent years to popular culture
at a price no one is willing to pay. More and more churches
are closing their bronze doors forever as split-level homes,
strip malls and chiropractic offices continue to be built up
in our neighbourhoods. Art is where the sirens are heading
when you hear them pass by late at night. People forget
their own bodies. They move through each other, and yet
lose sight of all the people they touched, or once had been.
They worship at the altar of Thinghood. I tell you if I could
sing the leaves back onto the trees, I would take us all back
to the celebrated life calling out to us across this distance.
I think this is a terrific poem for a young upstart poet, and it captures some of the unflinching wisdom and lyric economy of Gilbert’s poetry, but I did not yet have the life experience to match Jack Gilbert’s. So the poem, although very good, still does not manage to touch the hem of his best work. How could it?
I was recently married after a whirlwind long distance relationship with my wife Teresa who had been teaching at Seoul International School in South Korea. We were married quickly, within two years, and I could not afford to quit my high school teaching job and move my life to Paros, Greece. Hell, I could not afford to go there for a one week holiday!
I put out another book in 2006 which, although reviewed well, did not sell the same numbers of my previous book. It was critically ignored by prize juries which was normal after a poetic debut that had landed on a few prize shortlists, and I told myself it did not matter. I had found love. I moved Teresa and I into a large featureless house on a small lot which was a near Xeroxed copy of every other house in the same bland suburb.
If IKEA built communities, they would look largely like this one. I began to suffer creatively, and my drinking problem began its downward spiral. I still read great swaths of poetry–American, Canadian and British– but I was more likely to reach for a tall boy of lager, or a glass of wine, rather than a moleskine or a laptop to tap out a little bit of inspiration.
My bout with major depression returned, and this time it was here to stay. I went to my doctor who prescribed an antidepressant Paxil which effectively kept me going to work, but left me emotionally flat, and basically a chemical asexual robot for years.
Teresa’s mother then passed away, and she was unable to deal with a functioning alcoholic, depressed husband who only drank wine and watched television, so she threw herself into her work and raising our two young children.
Looking back on this time in my life is difficult, and I think about lines from Jack Gilbert’s poem “A Year Later”: They did not know / this would happen when they came, just the two / of them and the silence.
III. The heart lies to itself because it must.
My next poetry collection Winter Cranes came out in 2009. I had been very vocal in the small Canadian poetry community, both online and off, that our poetry had to be larger than what a small coterie of largely formalist poetry critics were trying to do, which was to define and control what constitutes the ‘X’ in Canadian poetry ‘Excellence’.
There were mean-spirited reviews, hilariously bad anthologies, and the odd well-deserved ‘pricking’ of a Tall Poppy poetry ego.
I felt these critics were trying to cancel the ‘I’ in poetry. The kind of poetry Jack Gilbert wrote, and that I was trying to write. “Do you think it’s easy for him, the poor bastard?” Gilbert writes in his poem “Leporello On Don Giovanni ''. Well, these guys did.
Like a self appointed Canadian poetry hall monitor, I spoke up, and loudly, that this was all nonsense, and meant to elevate the very poetry these critics themselves wrote. I felt, and I still do, you could not in good conscience say So and So’s book of narrative lyric meditations from the West Coast was not on par with What’s-Her-Name’s Montreal book of small formal cosmopolitan elegies based on ‘X’ if the former poet did not have the same set of poetic intentions as the latter. This is mixing apples with gold-fish.
Yes, there is good poetry, and there is bad poetry, but I argued there was no one “cattle-brand” of Canadian poetry that one could stamp onto the great unwashed poetry reading masses in Canada. America had fought the free-verse versus formalist wars in the early 1980s which had come to an impasse. The result? They were able to celebrate both Dean Young and Anthony Hecht. Why couldn’t we?
Well, my particular viewpoint did not go over very well with the Jig-a Jig-a sonnet crowd. I was notably called a “critical relativist“ by the editor of Quill & Quire, Steven W. Beattie. I shot back, and said Canadian poetry criticism was essentially a Mickey Mouse clubhouse. A kind of “bush league” aesthetic tribalism. This was perhaps not fair as it was reductionist, and I was mocked. I was belittled.
Meanwhile, I was quietly writing a poetry book which, at its core, had a large clutch of narrative syllabic poems written in seven and ten syllabic lines. I intentionally left off any mention of form from the book’s jacket copy, and waited for critics to fall into my trap. In hindsight, this was just as juvenile as the behaviour I was calling out.
The young critics either read my book and saw through my schemes, or more likely, ignored it, but a few hanger-ons and toadies wrote my book was “too narrative” and disregarded the rigours of more formal work.
One embarrassing critic-blogger actually quoted a great Canadian poet-editor Catherine Owen who wrote “a willingness to experiment with form is also paramount in increasing the ‘energy potential’ of one’s poems” to describe what he saw lacking in my book.
The review is still up today, even after a poet friend took the critic-blogger out to lunch, and politely, and patiently, explained how to read syllabics to them. After a year from its release, not one critic mentioned a third of the book was written in strict syllabics. I came to believe very few people know how to read poetry in Canada.
Very shortly thereafter, I fell into a deeper depression than I was already in, and did not write another book for seven years. Around that time, my marriage ended, I moved into a small three bedroom townhouse, I was stopped by police and blew an alert which caused me to have my driver’s licence taken away for a week, and then three months later I was off work, in rehab, for my alcoholism.
I gloss over this section of my life, not simply because it is painful to talk about, but because it is also not fair to my ex-wife Teresa, or my children who were very young at the time. If you want to know what rehab is like, just imagine there is a lot of standing in line for medications, afternoon classes on leather work, plant therapy, and the first three steps of AA, and, of course, daily bouts of guilt and self-inflicted shame.
As for my marriage, I will let Jack Gilbert’s poetry speak for me about my thoughts on that particular subject. In his poem “Once upon A Time”, he wrote “we thought excitement / was love, that intensity was a marriage. / We meant no harm”. Other lines of Gilbert’s I had first read, and that had so thoroughly enchanted me a decade before, now came back to me imbued with new significance: We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows…
In the seven years leading up to the publication of my fourth poetry collection, I wrote very little, drank much, and then did not drink, but thought constantly about this little poem of Jack Gilbert’s from Refusing Heaven:
Doing Poetry
Poem, You sonofabitch, it’s bad enough
that I embarrass myself working so hard
to get it right even a little,
and that little grudging and awkward.
But it’s afterwards I resent, when
the sweet sure should hold me like
a trout in the bright summer stream.
There should be at least briefly
Access to your glamour and tenderness.
But there’s always this same old
dissatisfaction instead.
IV. They are groping for something else, but don’t know what.
After three years of being newly sober, I found both profound love in my life and strangely, a new poetic “voice”. This was around 2017. Jack Gilbert had died five years earlier, and I had been fidgeting with new poems and online dating apps, and both were going about as well as one would expect a reading of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” would go down at a drunken college frat party. Then I met Aura Samara.
What can I tell you about Aura other than she saved my life.
I had changed medication the year I got sober which took away my suicidal ideation and large scale social anxieties, but I still suffered from strong feelings that life was meaningless, and that I was a “wage-slave” handcuffed to a high-school teaching job which I desperately needed to pay for my medication which was the only thing preventing me from falling seriously mentally ill.
When I was able to parlay a brief online conversation with someone on a dating app into an actual first date, I usually self-sabotaged the whole thing. I would say things like “I’m in recovery from alcoholism” rather than “I stopped drinking three years ago and feel great!”, or I would inadvertently blurt out “I suffer from recurrent major depression” rather than boast about my two small children, my teaching job, or my skills as a published poet. In short, I was a real catch.
When I first met Aura at a coffee shop, she was late and I was already catastrophizing the whole date. She texted me that she was in an Uber and when she walked into the coffee shop I told her awkwardly I had already bought a coffee and pointed to the line. She smiled in her green “Very Kissable '' T-shirt and designer glasses she was wearing, bought herself a latte, and then sat down.
Aura looked like what I imagine the manic pixie dream girl from all the movies looks like if she was a real person, early middle-aged, and had two kids. I was smitten immediately.
We began to talk about our children. I mentioned that I don’t drink and I suffered from major depression. She was unfazed. Aura was not a big drinker herself, and not looking for a wine buddy. We chatted for another half an hour, and I told her about my job, my French bulldog Truman, and my love of poetry. Aura told me about the end of her marriage and her small bakery. The next few weeks were full of texts back and forth, and we started dating.
Around the same time, my entire poetic voice changed virtually overnight. Suddenly, the American poet Dean Young , a poet whose work I had always found inscrutable and too outlandish, was wildly entertaining. I also began to read Bob Hicok’s poetry with near obsessive attention because, at least to me, his poetry drew a strong connecting line between the autobiographical humility of Jack Gilbert and the delightful zaniness of Dean Young. Maybe I did not want to write too directly about my own personal experiences anymore because the last five years were such a creative and emotional famine. Too much sadness. Too much brokenness. Maybe the change was because I had found a new love with Aura.
Whatever the reason, I was suddenly writing more poems than I had ever written previously! And they were so different! The poems confronted alcoholism and mental illness, sure, but also quantum physics, genetic engineering, endangered species, Ian Curtis and Andy Kaufman, Neil Diamond’s lp Hot August Night. The poems seemed to contain all things at once!
In his poem “A Brief For The Defense”, Gilbert writes, “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”. After years of being burnished by sadness and the embers of my previous life, I was dumbfounded that I could write again, but Aura wasn’t. She believed in me and encouraged me to write more deeply, and weirdly, than ever before.
Honestly, I could not believe how lucky I was that this person, Aura Samara, with her blue wigs she wore out dancing with friends, her extensive knowledge of all things food, her closet full of one hundred dresses, wanted to be with me.
After dating for a few months, I gave Aura a copy of Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems for her birthday amongst other things. She gave me, quite simply, a way to enjoy life again. Our kids hung out, we went to Las Vegas on a lark, we shared small plates at every dinner (Aura insisted!), and we moved in together within eighteen months.
We have already lived in the real paradise, writes Gilbert in his poem “Getting Away With It”. I don’t know Jack, but I think I know what he means. Things are not perfect with Aura—she refuses to break down boxes, she cannot sit still and just relax if there is any work for her small bakery to be done, there are the usual silly fights associated with blended families—but overall I would not change anything. I am happy.
V. The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward / to know its merit with attention.
I have been reading the poetry of Jack Gilbert for almost twenty five years, and although my poetry has changed, my love for his oeuvre has not. The terrific American poet Philip Levine once said in his essay “Two Journeys'' that, “I believe the truth is we form a family with other poets, living and dead, or we risk going nowhere.” Although I never knew Jack Gilbert, I made his poetry part of my family and my life. How I read that poetry changes, as I change but my love and admiration for his work is constant. In my poetry collection Alternator, I wrote a narrative sonnet about Jack Gilbert. It seems as fitting a way as any other to end this essay.
Desire, love, longing and happiness: all are tempered in middle-age’s
forge. We surge forward after these titanic forces with all the fervour
of youth, then cry theft when they retreat from us, not realising until
much later, when we are quite older, they underlay most things. Jack
Gilbert knew it. He sat on a Greek island, until he felt the unusual heft
of his contentment overtake his thoughts. Twenty years ago, I wanted
to write about great things, but now, it is enough to feel them waking
in me, the light in my yard revealing my own bright hungers. The fence
shall be mended. The spirit shall remember its agency. Dandelions poke
through fresh grass like yellow bulletins from another world. How am I
happy and whole again, after years of sadness? The sadness makes you fine,
I hear Gilbert’s poems whisper, and I remember waking years ago, on
Naxos, the blue and white of the buildings, places hewn from ancient
volcanic rock, thinking the Aegean had sewn its moody allure into me.
A photo of Naxos or Paros (Greek islands) from a vacation Chris took when he was 28.
Works Cited
Gilbert, Jack. Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014.
Levine, Philip. So Ask: Essays, Conversations, and Interviews (Poets on Poetry). University of Michigan Press, 2002.
