Issue 175 of The Paris Review, Fall/Winter 2005
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.
Tue, Nov 21, 2023