Jack Gilbert, a Reappraisal: Part Two
B. Renner

In 1982 Alfred Knopf gave Gilbert the opportunity to reintroduce himself to the American poetry-reading public, to remind readers of Views of Jeopardy even while extending his claim upon the audience with poems composed in the 20 years since Views had appeared. The subtitle of Monolithos, as well as the jacket copy, suggests that the book is a "new and selected poems." The 1962 publication date of Views is prominently cited, and the book is divided into "1962" and "1982" sections. But "1962" is not a mere selection from Views: it is a recasting of the book and thus of Gilbert's early career. Views contains 34 poems, 18 of which are excluded from "1962." If "1962" consisted then of the 16 remaining poems, it would be simply a suitably weeded selection. But "1962" contains 26 poems and is, then, an almost wholesale revision of the first stage of Gilbert's career. In light of the relatively unkind things I wrote about Views last time around, one might fairly wonder if I believe Gilbert did the "right" thing in this shuffling of his younger days.
Certainly he did himself no harm in excising the poems he did. Most are merely competent and forgettable. "Letter to Mr. John Keats" is perhaps a bit better, but not greatly, and there are a couple of nice pieces of comedy that might have served to deflate in some degree the seriousness which Gilbert invests in his poetic "I." (It should not be necessary for me to clarify, but it probably is: at any point in this or any other essay at which I say, "Gilbert says," or some similar formulation, I mean the "I" speaking the poem, and am not presuming that "I" to be identical to Gilbert the man.) "A Poem for the Fin de Monde Man" (a title more characteristic of Henri Coulette than Gilbert) begins--

In the beginning
There were six brown dragons
Whose names were
Salt, Salt, Salt, Salt,
Bafflebar
And Kenneth Rexroth.

The poem goes rapidly downhill from this inconsequential stanza, but the abrupt shock of encountering Kenneth Rexroth's name, at a time when his poetic stock was probably at or near its height, is nicely absurd and good for an intellectual chuckle. And these lines from the otherwise unnecessary "Malvolio in San Francisco" also contain a delightful snippet of truly self-deprecating humor--

That's why your poetry's no good,
They say.
You should turn yourself upside down
So your ass would stick out,
They say.
And they seem to know.

True, the imagery is technically incorrect: that is, if Gilbert were upside down, his feet would "stick out" [presumably from his shirt collar], rather than his ass. His ass would remain more or less in the center of his body, wouldn't it? Even so, the ludicrousness of the idea is sharp, in a simple-minded sort of way.
Of course a far more pertinent question, in examining "1962," is--Did Gilbert keep good poems in his selection? If you have read the previous section of this essay, then you will already know at least part of my answer to this question. I don't believe that Views contains 16 good poems overall, so a selection containing so many cannot help but include weak poems. On the other hand Gilbert did himself the very considerable favor of keeping "Orpheus in Greenwich Village", a poem any poet ought to be proud to have written, and the "other" Orpheus poem, "County Musician," which is not flawless but is nevertheless a writing of some power. Likewise he hung onto "The Abnormal Is Not Courage," in which a concise 2-line poem is submerged in 20 lines of dross. The jewel is--

Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.

In these 16 words Gilbert says everything the poem needs to say, creating a precise and personal definition of both courage and love through the intelligent selection of allusions. And if some of you argue that he really needs only that first line above, the first eight words, to produce that effect, you will get no objection from me.
But what of the more remarkable aspect of "1962," the adding in, as it were, of poems to an already 20-year-old (and out of print) book? One might reasonably expect Gilbert to be at his most deliberate and astute here, since he is looking back, approaching his "youth" from the vantage point of middle age. And the good news is that Gilbert mostly rises to the occasion. The 10 "new" poems of "1962" are not of equal weight, nor are all the poems consistent throughout, but a higher percentage of them are good than is true of Views as a whole, or of the 16 poems from Views included in "1962." Which is a roundabout way of saying that 4 of 10 poems are rather good, not equal perhaps to "Orpheus in Greenwich Village," but much better than almost anything you are likely to find in any American journal published in the 1990's.
The first of the new poems appears in the second position in the selection, immediately after "The Abnormal Is Not Courage," which might have been, up until Gilbert's reemergence, his most "famous" poem. "Between Poems" is wry, minimal to the point of abstraction, and both an ironic deflation of Gilbert's Romantic stance and a clever reassertion of that stance.

A lady asked me
what poets do
between poems.

A "prosy" but interesting beginning. Then Gilbert moves back into Romanticism, albeit via the inquisitor's persona.

Between passions
and visions.

If we take "passions and visions" as the lady's "definition" of poetry, then Gilbert has provided himself with an opportunity to correct her ideas. But he does not, and so it is possible to see this "definition" as emitting from "I," a gloss to the lady's question. Gilbert's response is

I said
that between poems
I provided for death.

This answer does not satisfy his interlocutor.

She meant as to jobs
and commonly.

He continues--

Commonly, I provide
against my death,
which comes on.
And give thanks
for the women I have
been privileged to
in extreme.

And thus Gilbert reestablishes his inherently Romantic grounding--the poet as paramour par excellence, which is merely one function of being a "feeler" par excellence, a more sensitive being. The ending jars because Gilbert's earlier response seems admirably stark and anti-Romantic, which in this case also means anti-cliche, the cliche being the popular concept of poet as Byron or Keats, the doomed, star-crossed hero. This abrupt shift raises an obvious question--Is Gilbert being funny? Is he goosing his inquisitor? Taken alone, "Between Poems" might suggest that he is, but the larger context of his work suggests otherwise, that the "depth" of his "thought" is the comfort a man can take in women on his lonely way to the grave.
And yet I sort of like this poem, until its crass final lines. I like the easy colloquial voice, the initial jabs at poets' pretensions.
The next "new" poem is "The Plundering of Circe," a poem which starts with a stumble but recovers quickly and moves confidently forward. The first stanza reads--

Circe had no pleasure in pigs.
Pigs, wolves, nor fawning
lions. She sang in our language
and, beautiful, waited for quality.

This is simply exposition and fairly clumsy exposition at that. If Gilbert wanted to begin with bald statement he might have limited himself to "Circe had no pleasure in pigs. / She waited for quality," but even that is unnecessary. The second stanza, on the other hand, begins with sharp narration--

Every month they came
struggling up from the cove.
The great sea-light behind them.
Each time maybe a world.

Yes, "great" is unnecessary, but otherwise Gilbert's lines give us a setting, a sense of the difficulties with which Circe's guests "arrive," and insight into her hopes--"maybe a world"--which Odysseus, in many senses, was. Furthermore, by indicating the monthly arrival of the "guests", Gilbert suggests a connection to Circe's fertility.
Next we share with Circe her continual disappointments.

Season after season.
Dinner after dinner.
And always at the first measures
of lust became themselves.

Notice how variously "measures" moves, indicating measures of grain and meal, measured cups of wine, the playing of background music, and even-- if one want to be [porno]graphic--the men's erections. Gilbert's usage of the sailors' animal forms as metaphor is not original, to be sure, but his evocation of this traditional interpretation is deft and direct. And then he tricks us--he takes us into a new place--in his conclusion.

Odysseus? A known liar.
A resort darling. Untouchable.

This final couplet reveals to us not only that Circe is not fooled by Odysseus but also that Odysseus is another "type" than he has been previously depicted as--a "resort darling." This is a remarkably astute observation that, with an almost vertiginous speed, snaps Odysseus into "our" present or--if you prefer--hurls us back into his time. Is Odysseus a clever hero, as we have been taught, or merely an extraordinarily adroit con-man? "The Plundering of Circe" is an important addition to Gilbert's work and its absence from Views a puzzle indeed.
Across the page from "Circe" is the next poem of some merit, "Island and Figs." The title and the opening images return us to Gilbert's (and Odysseus's?) Greek "home." This opening is, like so many of Gilbert's, simply a place to begin, though in this case the lines are merely unnecessary and not clumsy as well. But the true poem is this second half--

In the weeds
an old woman
lifting off
snails.
Near
two trees
of ripe figs.
The heart
never fits
the journey.
Always
one ends
first.

The words are simple, exact, undecorative--as stark, one might suggest, as the scenes on Greek red-and-black pottery. We see an old woman collecting food--an unnotable event until we think about the foods in question and their potential as sexual metaphors. In this way, Gilbert prepares us for the poem's conclusion, lines which otherwise might seem non sequitur. Though a particularly cynical reader might suggest that such lines belong on a "Sorry you got divorced" card, I prefer to see them as an instance of Gilbert's ability to tap into a truly classical mode, to attain with a minimum of words and effect the essential simplicity of the classical authors. But these short lines suggest something else on the surface--we seem not to be reading about a dead love affair, but rather about the inability of men and women to keep their "hearts" as long as they live or--alternately--the early deaths of those who still have "heart". And however we read the metaphor, we are cast back to the preceding lines and the simple image of the old woman at work. Who is she? Has her journey outlived her heart? We cannot know. But this circularity gives the poem a real kernel of feeling and emotion that so many others assume without earning. And notice also how, even here, Gilbert is still firmly in stance, speaking in such a "hard-boiled" fashion that one might almost imagine Bogart speaking these words in a black-and-white film.
The final good new poem in "1962" is the penultimate, preceding "The Whiteness, the Sound, and Alcibiades," Gilbert's other famous early poem. "Bartleby at the Wall" begins somewhere--in its title, at least-- that Gilbert usually avoids, i.e. American literature. And when we read the poem we see not Bartleby, but "Gilbert"--that is, there is no mention of Melville's story in any direct fashion, and there is no attempt on Gilbert's part to "adapt" his tone to what we might consider a Melvillean approximation. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that Gilbert intends us to see him in this poem as meditating on whatever it was that moved Bartleby; that the poem is an explication, as it were. Oddly enough, the poem itself is, for all practical purposes, an essay in verse, even though the verse is free. Gilbert gives us "himself," or his "narrator," or even Bartleby, staring at a wall along which a knotted rope hangs. He is trying, he tells us, "to see the rope. / The wall. / Carefully looking / at the bricks." We might indeed imagine at this point that the speaker is Bartleby, even though Bartleby never expressed himself so cogently. And could Melville's character have said, a few lines later, "But it's like Poussin. / Too clear. / The way things aren't"? In character or not, these are the lines where things shift most sharply into focus, becoming--forgive me--"clear." We start to imagine that we are with Gilbert in his reverie and are beginning to understand what he's driving at, that--if we pay close attention--we might come to a realization with Gilbert of something about the way things "aren't," and then, by extension, about the way things are. And Gilbert's methodology here, his linguistic approach to carrying us with him, is sound--

I try not staring.
Not grabbing.
Allowing it to come.
But just at the point
where I'd see,
the mind gives a little
skip
and I'm already past.

These are lines both effective and somehow disappointing--both a nice reenactment of how the mind tries to force itself to do something it cannot do and a too-prosaic explanation of what Gilbert can't reenact. And then the poem fails completely. Gilbert reaches for what can only be a predetermined ending. "I'm already past," he says--

To all this sorrow again.
Considering
the skip between wildness
and affection,
where everything is.

Reading this, we feel that Gilbert has moved us through an experience of some sort, an exercise in "not getting it," if you will, but that he has achieved this effect dishonestly, through trickery. If previous generations mocked Tennyson for learning about life from a flower in a crannied wall, we are not--I think--to withhold our disappointment at Gilbert's not learning about life from a rope and a wall, both of which-- at some level--are already symbols of "dead ends."
There are six other newly printed poems in "1962," but none merits a close look. Even so, Gilbert has managed, with this reconstituted selection, to shore up the beginning of his career and to present a better case for himself as a poet of substance. But we are still looking at the "early years," at the period in which a poet ought to be making his mistakes. With "1982," the real heart of Monolithos, Gilbert has much more at stake because he is not simply trying to advance his powers as a writer, as any poet hopes to do with his second book: he is also reintroducing himself to an audience from which he has been mostly absent for two decades. And surely a poet who can condense the work of 20 years into 60 pages of poetry needs to make sure that every one of those pages counts.

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