“When the King of Siam disliked a courtier, He gave him a beautiful white elephant." ….” In Dispraise of Poetry by Jack Gilbert I made a great find this past weekend at Capitol Books, a
used bookstore in D.C., with floor-to-ceilings offerings in a row house near the Eastern
Market—a copy of the poet Jack Gilbert’s Views of Jeopardy, his first book of
poetry from The Yale Series of Younger Poets, published in 1962. I am not a
collector of things— I’ve never felt the urge to bring anything but words into
my house. I believe there may be a chapbook out there. I remember he
published one while I was at Syracuse University, the one year he taught at
this upstate New York college, and I believe I even bought it. But it’s lost to
the years and a dozen or so moves. “Three days I sat Bewildered by love. Three nights I watched The gradations of dark. Of light …” Before
Morning in Perugia by Jack Gilbert What I remember most about him was that he was slight man,
white haired and in his sixties by the time I was his student. He was
passionate about the poetic line and about women, especially those he found himself with in places foreign
to him, a guy from Pittsburgh, and I find that these passions imbued in this
early set of poems. “… When I got quiet she’d put on usually Debussy and leaning down to the small ribs bite me. Hard.” Portrait
Number Five: Against A New York Summer by Jack Gilbert I think of him so young writing these poems, and want to cry
out, but instead I read on, gorging on the lines, ebullient with my find. |
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