Wednesday, January 16, 2013

The Release of Jack Gilbert's Complete Poems

March 13, 2012 Knopf released Jack Gilbert's Collected Poems. Over the course of his life Gilbert wrote five small books of poetry all contained within 380 pages.

Fourteen years had elapsed between his first published book and his second book. In an October 26, 2012 review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, David Orr wrote, Gilbert " believes that poetry is worthy of devotion, that it ought to be subordinated to the things that clutter up day-to-day life."

Gilbert died mid-November 2012. His last days spent in a nursing home.

Alzheimer disease slowly diminishing his capacity to think and speak.

The previous month he attended a book release celebration at Pegasus Books in downtown Berkley and according to an article in the Los Angeles Times "the place was packed and the honoree beamed and even applauded."

The book's initial printing sold out in two weeks and it spent thirty weeks on the Poetry Foundation's list of bestselling contemporary poetry books. At the present time Amazon has sold out and promises delivery in late February.




I read about the Feminist Writer's Workshop in a now defunct feminist newspaper at a time when so many of us were sprouting wings—albeit small ones, at first. My poetry—filled hardback notebooks and a three-ring looseleaf binder. Short poems, often filled with the pinch of being in a relationship that felt wrong. It was the era of the personal is political.

With some trepidation about my ability to write a decent poem or even struggle with stopping long enough to edit and edit again, I sent off my registration fee. Two weeks with other women who wrote—women who called themselves writers felt both frightening and an opening, a beginning.

Twenty five women gathered together—to write, to talk politics, to breathe. Morning workshops, afternoon workshops, evenings spent reading our work to one another. We came from all over—the west coast, the south, New England, Italy and Germany.

A woman from Utah and a woman from New York City fell in love. A woman from Louisiana and the woman from Germany talked about getting together in Greece. I went swimming in a lake until the sun disappeared—swallowed up by the water.

We ate vegetarian food from large family platters.

We took early morning walks to places to find berries. We wrote about wars and babies, about love and loss. We wrote about berries and pies—our grandmothers. We identified ourselves by our name, daughter of, granddaughter of. We spoke about our last names.
Two women decided to change their last name to one they chose.

And we wrote and wrote and wrote. We discarded the male list of must read poets and we sought women poets. We had been taught in English courses by male teachers who held up a male dominated list of writers for us to praise, revere, and emulate.Now we found new poets, new prose writers— women who eschewed the old ways.

A woman who played the violin with the Metropolitan Opera practiced in her room and we sat outside and listened. A woman from Utah wrote about running a cattle ranch. She introduced us to women who rode horses, lassoed horses—"drank with the guys."

We drank Grand Marnier liqueur out of plastic glasses and read our poetry. We created a syllabus of women poets and read poems from an anthology of women poets. We discussed whether to spell women as womyn—all the while continuing to write and craft words.

I met a woman who worked for a small press and she asked me to submit some poems to the press for a possible chapbook. "About twenty poems."

I came home as a womyn who still wrote small poems, but I began to work on finding the emotional truth of a poem.

My twenty poems became a chapbook—no release party. I took ten copies down to Grolier Poetry Book Shop where I often shopped for poetry books. Louise Solano, the owner at the time, took five books on consignment and placed them on a table where all manner of new poetry books were showcased.

I asked five friends to stop in there and purchase a book—which they did. Within a week the books sold. I'm certain that Louise knew exactly how the five flew out of her store. She sent me a check—never cashed.

Many people write poetry and a few—very few—really attain that level of poetry that Emily Dickinson refers to in her definition of poetry," If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry."

Many of Jack Gilbert's poems fit Dickinson's definition of poetry.






0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home