May 3 SOME BEAUTIFUL DEFIANCE Transgressions: Selected Poems by Jack Gilbert Review by Luke Kennard Gilbert is one of those beautiful curmudgeonly American recluses who has published four books in fifty years. He’s written great lines like, “The horse wades in the city of grammar.” and
(From ‘They Call it Attempted Suicide’) This is the first time Gilbert’s work has been available in this country – or, at least, it would be if all of us didn’t buy our books on import from Amazon anyway. Let’s put it another way: this is the first time Gilbert’s work has been available in Waterstones. The Waterstones where I grew up used to stock a whole shelf-load of Charles Bukowski’s Black Sparrow Press titles. This was odd because it wasn’t a big poetry section by any means – in fact apart from thirty plus large-format 200-pagers of Bukowski’s unedited, self-published, seemingly endless poems about drinking and masturbating, all they had was the collected Pam Ayres, "The Nations Favourite Love Poems" and then BANG! you were in Theatre and Criticism. I guess this was in the days of relative autonomy and the store manager was a big Chuck fan. I don’t recall a single volume ever leaving the premises, but the edges were all smudged black with casual thumbing.
Gilbert makes a lot of direct references to ancient mythology (which usually sets my teeth on edge, but here not so much) and has that big John-Fante-Chuck-Bukowski style arrogance – never wholly unattractive – a kind of ‘I’m a godamn writer’ swagger. So exactly who Gilbert is defying probably depends on who you think of as fashionable – and whether you think of “fashionable” as a slur. Maybe he’s anti-academic. But not anti-Yale. (Which is about as academic as they come.) Maybe he’s anti-post-avant. Is post-avant fashionable? I don’t even know who I am anymore. [Sobs.] What I think the blurb means here is that Gilbert is “defiantly unfashionable” as far as the avant-garde are concerned (or so the blurb conjectures) – and the avant-garde, as any fule kno, define themselves by being defiantly unfashionable (“fashionable”, as they see it, meaning prize-winning, university-lecturing, magazine-publishing poets with nice hair). “Defiance” is the watchword, kids. Naturally, there is nothing less fashionable than wanting to appear fashionable. So if anything, Gilbert is defiantly fashionable. All of this shows, I think, the rhetorical force of Ron Silliman’s “School of Quietude” carping. It’s not going to sell any books on either side, but it sure fuels a lot of anger, bitterness and boredom. Anyway, fuck politics (which in poetry world just means sour grapes or wounded defence of your greenhouse – and probably couldn’t be further from the mind of a poet who has lived as rich and full a life as Gilbert. Did he piss away every evening posting bitchy messages on discussion forums? Hell no! He was getting drunk and married and cheap properties on Greek islands! If ever a better case against the internet has been made it’s this one.) – let’s dance. ‘In Dispraise of Poetry’ is from the 1962 collection "Views of Jeopardy":
Now, I don’t have much patience with the complaints of poets, but the elephant story is wonderful, right? My wheelie bin just blew over. I’ll be back in a second. Some of Gilbert’s other 1960’s poems are a bit 1960’s:
Yes, those are bongos you can hear – and over there is Ken Kesey feeding your teenage daughter acid. So the 80’s come as a relief:
Sometimes all you have to do is mention stuff:
Maybe hating classical reference in contemporary poetry makes me an inverted snob: maybe that’s what I am. It especially gets under my skin when combined with a self-consciously demotic register. It started and finished with Eliot. End of story. But just when I’m cursing Gilbert for getting the ludicrous “fine cunt” stuck in my head (being sung in madenning falsetto by a man with a twisty moustache and a trilby) I’m utterly stunned by something like ‘The Cucumbers of Praxilla of Sicyon’:
Woo! Yeah! That confidence, that Giant-of-American-Literature vibe is totally persuasive here – just like it is with Raymond Carver’s verse. My favourite of Gilbert’s 80’s poems is a tiny little thing called ‘Games’ which perfectly mixes the playful and the furious:
That one is going in my teaching scrap-book – which is more or less the highest accolade I can give. In Gilbert’s 90’s collection, "The Great Fires", this plain-spoken wisdom is combined with a eulogistic sensibility – following the sudden death of his wife, Michiko. These are poems rich with the sweetest correlations:
Bam! There are plenty of hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck moments in "The Great Fires". It’s great, isn’t it, when poetry is as good as a film or a novel or some music: when it gets over its inferiority complex and isn’t just poetry about films, novels and music; when it’s actually just good poetry? Of course it is: that was a rhetorical question.
It’s really hard to make happiness readable or interesting. Even despite the fact that we’re probably too squeamish about money in this country to understand the Chinese attitude to gifts, the above poem is gorgeous, somehow poignant and uplifting. Gilbert achieves joy in the face of agony and personal tragedy. At one point he writes about the abbot of a monastery giving him syrup-water and cake as a kind of treat – but Gilbert can barely stand it: it is far too sugary. Gilbert observes that this is a simple misunderstanding of pleasure due to inexperience; the idea that joy is born of undilluted, uncontrasted sweetness. I’m not going to quote from that poem directly as I really like the way the central image has stayed with me. The only exception to this superb writing is the collection’s title poem, ‘The Great Fires’. Maybe I have no soul, but lines like this:
make me want to bring up Coldplay or Keane. Read it again: can you hear the one-finger piano line, jangly guitars and soupy production in the background? Part of Gilbert must be aware that this is the syrup-water of poetry. If he wanted to seduce me, he’d better start waxing lyrical about the arches of my feet and avoid telling me what love is altogether. It’s moments like these where the Giant of American Letters strut starts to feel obtrusively like a strut. Still, it’s only the occasional passage that feels emptily ponderous to this sarcastic smart-arse. And Gilbert is wise; probably wise enough to reject being called wise; his wisdom shines out of every other poem. Soon the seer is back with his concrete specifics:
That’s better, right? And you have to love the simple Walden-of-the-90’s feel to ‘The Edge of the World’:
He’s not trying to do any more than evoke the simple pleasures of solitude – and it works. Another good decade, then. "Transgressions" concludes with a set of poems selected from Gilbert’s most recent collection, "Refusing Heaven" (2005). The sheer force of these poems is breath-taking. As you can probably tell, he’s not a poet afraid of drawing grand conclusions from the mistakes and the baffling detritus of everyday life:
There is a powerful sense of weighing-up to these last poems. The writer reflecting on his life and his craft. And I guess Gilbert is famous enough to get away with name-dropping:
(From ‘The Lost Hotels of Paris’) ‘What I’ve Got’ depicts the poet crawling around his house, completely isolated and suffering some severe and debilitating fever.
It’s odd – the poets who make it across the Atlantic and those who don’t. Why do we insist on the loveless, lowest-common-denominator brutality of Bukowski and his imitators? Why do we sell him to our students on the flimsy pretext that poetry doesn’t have to be about flowers and clouds? We could have it so much better. Jack Gilbert deserves to be more of a household name in this country – and this selected should go some way towards addressing that. © Luke Kennard, 2007 May 8 ASHBERY AT THE NY TIMES I just came across an interview with John Ashbery at the New York Times.... it's from two or three months back but it's worth looking at. You can see it by clicking here but I've saved you all that effort by cutting and pasting the thing down below. They used to say I was inconsiderate and uncaring, but all that's changing. Albeit slowly. Your new collection of poems, “A Worldly Country,” reminds us of the demanding nature of your work and your resistance to personal confession. Do you think Americans are too enamored of their own life stories? Yes, I do. In my case, it is things that I don’t know yet that most interest me. My own autobiography is so uninteresting to me I have always thought it surely wouldn’t interest anyone else.
I thought other people would find it boring. My mother was always telling me not to talk about myself or put myself forward. That’s where I got this idea. Whenever I went to visit a friend, she would say, “Don’t wear out your welcome.” I always worried about this throughout life: is my welcome wearing out at this particular moment? Which hasn’t kept you from publishing a very large quantity of poems, more than 20 collections in all? If I wrote much more, would anybody read it? Does anybody read it now? There can be such a thing as too much poetry, and I try not to write it. That’s very considerate of you, and I assume there are at least a few hundred of your own poems that you have chosen not to publish.? Well, that’s what everyone is talking about with Elizabeth Bishop. You’re referring to the controversy that erupted last year when her leftover poems and rough drafts suddenly appeared in a book of their own, a generation after her death. Various critics argued that she should have destroyed them since she didn’t want them published? I think she just hadn’t made up her mind. Some writing you don’t like that much at the time you write it, but you don’t want to destroy it either, because maybe someone will come along sometime and find it more interesting than you think it is. Are you saying you won’t mind if all your scribbles and random jottings are brought out in a book after your death? No, I won’t mind. I think it will be understood that I didn’t publish them myself if they are published posthumously. Your name is practically synonymous with bohemia’s last flourish in New York in the ’50s, and I am wondering if you feel much nostalgia for those years. I left the country in 1955 and stayed away for 10 years, in France. So I missed out on a very crucial period. I am still trying to piece together things that happened while I was gone, like the Everly Brothers, for instance. Of all the main members of the so-called New York School of poetry — Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch and Barbara Guest — you’re the only one who is still alive. Do you think of them often? I do. I had a dream not long ago about James Schuyler, who seemed to be kind of nudging me to see if I had finished writing the introduction to a reissue of his selected poems, which is coming out soon, actually. In the past few years, poetry sales have reportedly been climbing, perhaps because a poem appeals to shortened attention spans. That’s true. It doesn’t take so long to read a poem, and if you need a quick fix or consolation, you can get it. Where do you turn for consolation? Probably to a movie, something with Barbara Stanwyck. Although you have won dozens of awards and accolades, including a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur grant, you have never been asked to serve as poet laureate of the U.S. Is that a snub? I really don’t think I’m poet-laureate material. It’s not something you would like to do? I don’t think so. To be poet laureate you have to have a program for spreading the word of poetry. I’m just willing to let it spread by itself. May 12 FIN (WHAT MATTERS) Two quite unrelated things…… First, my good mate Nigel Pickard back in Nottingham has finally lost all sense of reality and decided to start, in partnership with poet Rosie Garner, a poetry magazine called FIN. I think it’s not going to be on the infoweb but on good old-fashioned paper. The address is Rosie Garner and Nigel Pickard, FIN, PO Box 9207, Nottingham NG14 7WP, and I quote: It needs bloody good poetry and subs at £12 for 4 issues. Cheques made payable to FIN. First issue so far includes poems by Mark Halliday, Hugo Williams, Sheenagh Pugh; oh, and hopefully someone called Stannard. Out September. And when they say “bloody good” they mean it. * Second, my son (I have more than one, but this is the one called Tim) Tim has a website here, but if you click here instead you will go directly to a remarkable piece of honesty posted there by his girlfriend and partner of quite a few years now (how many? I have no idea but quite a few) Charlotte. I’ve known Charlotte quite a long time, but didn’t really know most of this, I’d just seen some of the outward manifestations of her problems. I’ve also lived with someone who had a severe but different kind of mental illness, and I’ve never been able to find the words to describe what life at that time was like – for me, I mean. For her, I know that life could be … well, beyond words, I think. Fucking horrible. Think yourself lucky if even being in the same house as someone suffering like that has passed you by. But also, if this had to happen, which perhaps it did, think yourself lucky if you have had to deal with someone you love suffering like that, because (unless you’re a total idiot) you will learn something about what matters in this life, and what doesn’t. Whatev. I think Charlotte’s thing is worth reading. May 16 EXPLAIN, KEMO SABE! The explained person Separate flush nuts and impress temperature grids. Remove all large or discoloured leaves. Mark growth points with inedible pencil or waterproof masker. Align all outlet valves and fluent lines. Encompass all living beings within realm of spiritual endeavour. Place shadow lines on window still at twilight. Increase number of warning fires as the year progresses until growing area is encircled by internal flame. May 22 (IT'S BEEN RAINING HERE FOR 4 DAYS....) My American pen-pal Crystal has been complaining to me of late about online poetry discussion forums. Crystal is a poet with a healthy interest in picking fights with people, but she also has a very low boredom threshold. She told me once that when she has sex she expects the man, whoever he may be, to Oh, I’m digressing already. Anyway, she’s been complaining to me about poetry forums. Apparently something called “ameripoet” (I think that is its name; I could be wrong; I could even have dreamed it) is one of the busiest American-based forums, but Crystal says that nobody there has talked about poems for a month and a half. But she says it’s pretty good if you want to know about who has books coming out when, and readings and book launches, or if you need to get laid in the Chicago metropolitan area. Which Crystal doesn’t; she’s done Chicago. Crystal also says that on another site she got into an argument with a self-opinionated poetry professor from one of the leading colleges in the top left-hand corner of North Dakota; the argument started out by being about whether capital letters should be at the beginning of lines or the end, and wound up being about hair, and whether poets should care or not about how they look. (Answer: They should, but they don’t.) I don’t know much about poetry forums here in the UK. I’m technically a member of a couple, but my contributions to them, and my interest in them, dried up a long time ago. It was like being in a club I’d joined by mistake. Sometimes there would be one member of the club who was talking all the time and nobody was getting a word in edge ways; other times everyone was talking at once but not about anything that had much to do with my interests, which are primarily poetry about model aircraft, the history of mittens, and how to avoid stomach problems when travelling in Asia. Also they were not listening to each other. And though this club boasted lots of members there only ever seemed to be the same little handful there whenever I showed up. It reminded me of the Methodist Church my parents dragged me to when I was a kid: that boasted hundreds of members too, but where were they? Never in church, that’s for sure. To tell you the truth (for a change) when I get together in real life with my mates who are also poets we don’t seem to talk about things like line-breaks, or whatever happened to the semi-colon we used to love so much, or how much a sestina is worth these days; we seem more often to have a few beers and complain about the lack of parking in the city centre, or the price of underwear in Marks & Spencer. Oh, we usually slag off a few poets just for the sake of it; if you’re going to have some beers you want to have fun, too. On special occasions we do have get-togethers where we talk about poems – kind of like a workshop in a pub, but with people you actually like; but not often: special occasions are rare when you get to our age. None of us will ever see 25 again. Anyway, is being online real life? Sometimes I’m troubled by myself. Am I ungenerous? Too smug but with nothing to be smug about? Do I think I have nothing left to learn? Do I need help? Do we? Do plumbers, for example, have online discussion forums about plumbing, but then rarely discuss actual plumbing? When they meet their plumber pals do they sit around talking about copper piping and washers? (Actually yes they do (my uncle the plumber (who lives next door to a pub) tells me) but pretend the answer is no, just so as I can continue with this.) Are poets lonely people? Do they spend sad hours at the computer sweating over the next great poem, and relieve the tedium by going online and, if not adding their two penn’orth to whatever the latest “thread” is, starting up another one of their own? Does being online, and having what people call a web-life, confirm your existence? Does it convince you you’re actually alive? Does that question, online as it is, and coming as it does from someone who has two websites, take the biscuit, and when the biscuit is gone, also the cake? Crystal says that poets have websites for the same reason people have blogs. Crystal has lots of opinions; you have to admire someone like that. And you also have to admire her underwear and her hats. Especially her hats. (I’m sorry. There is a big time gap here, about 35 minutes or so. I fell asleep, and dreamed of [text deleted; kitten inserted Did you ever see that episode of “Father Ted” where they have a TV advert for a priests’ chat line? If you didn’t, the clip is here …
Maybe they should have a similar thing for poets, but would you call it? Yeah, so would I. May 30 PLEASE WAIT A MOMENT I just realised the next post is a few days overdue. I'm sorry. It's been raining and I've been busy. I went to Guangzhou and got sick and it was raining torrential sub-tropical rain and I got wet. Please wait a moment. I am not usually this remiss. The next post will be posted shortly. |