Jack Gilbert

(This review of Jack Gilbert's Collected Poems originally appeared in Harvard Review Online)

Jack Gilbert’s first book, Views of Jeopardy, appeared in the Yale Younger Poets series in 1962. Soon out of print, it became a kind of cult classic. Gilbert’s revision of the classical lyric in a terse, colloquial modern idiom provided a brisk alternative to the beat and confessional voices coming into vogue. But twenty years of near silence ensued, until in 1982 he published Monolithos, which reprinted most of the first book and added a few new ones. Gilbert’s modest output still made him one of the most admired poets of the post-Lowell / Bishop generation. The publication of The Great Fires in 1995 significantly enhanced his reputation.  The poems about the death of his wife struck a tragic note that resonated with those who deplored the lack of drama and emotion in much contemporary poetry. Since then he has published two more books, making his old age (he is now eighty-seven) seem far more prolific than his youth. Now he has gathered this material, with twenty-one additional poems, into a Collected Poems more substantial than anyone would have predicted, given the output of his early years.

Reviewers typically dwell on the apparent simplicity of Gilbert’s poetry, its tendency toward statement, its lack of stanza breaks, its blocky form, and its candid emotional themes. “Plain-spoken, unmetered, pared to essentials,” claims Dwight Garner in a recent review.  But this describes what his poetry lacks rather than what it accomplishes. Gilbert’s best poems may seem readily grasped, but they are aesthetically complex and emotionally oblique. They layer imagery and registers of diction to construct small but highly charged worlds in which the slightest nuance can be life-changing. The tone is consistently elegiac, and leaves little room for the jokiness currently fashionable.  Irony abounds, but some reviewers are oblivious to it, and consequently miss the self-critical stance the speaker takes toward his own experience. The experience referenced in the later books is painful. Gilbert’s wife, Michiko Nogami, a sculptor, died of cancer in 1982. She was only thirty-six. She haunts Gilbert’s poetry, but so do many other women, including Linda Gregg, his partner for some years. He mourns the death of their relationship almost as poignantly as he does the actual death of Michiko. But elegy, however authentic, requires no triggering event; it is a way of seeing the world. The elegiac tone dominates even Views of Jeopardy, published long before the tragedy of life fully enveloped him.

“Recovering amid the Farms” (142) typifies Gilbert’s oblique aesthetic perceptions. The poem opens by toying with elements of the pastoral elegy:

Every morning the sad girl brings her three sheep

and two lambs laggardly to the top of the valley,

past my stone hut and onto the mountain to graze.

This could be a moment from Theocritus or Virgil, but the child’s sadness, we learn, turns not on the loss of a beloved but on her father’s determination to keep her out of the modern world:

            She turned twelve last year and it was legal

for the father to take her out of school. She knows

her life is over.

And now the speaker’s irony intervenes: “The sadness makes her fine, / makes me happy” because her presence not only completes the mock-pastoral scene but aesthetically enhances it:  “Her old red sweater makes / the whole valley ring, makes my solitude gleam.” In turn, his presence, although she may not realize it, enhances her dreary life: “I watch from hiding for her sake. Knowing I am / there is hard on her, but it is the focus of her days.” The astonishing egoism of this observation turns the whole poem in on itself. Far from being a pastoral elegy or pastoral anything, the poem is a profound self-critique of a life lived for the sake of aesthetic sensation. It is an argument against the notion of pure poetry, yet it also asks the reader to acknowledge the elegance of this willfully self-regarding perception:

            She always looks down or looks away as she passes

in the evening. Except sometimes when, just before

going out of sight behind the distant canebrake,

she looks quickly back. It is too far for me to see,

but there is a moment of white as she turns her face. 

The closure echoes Stanley Kunitz’s powerful “Father and Son”: “Among the turtles and the lilies he turned to me / The white ignorant hollow of his face” as well as the glimpse of whiteness in Robert Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something”: “What was that whiteness? / Truth? A pebble of quartz?  For once, then, something.”  In all three poems, this glimpse of white answers a question the speaker hasn’t known how to ask. Also in all of these poems this whiteness looms over a gap between speaker and subject that embodies the difficulty of grasping the ineffable: the aesthetic, social, or psychological ideal. That ideal also emerges as emotional defiance. When the “girl shepherd” recurs in “A Kind of Courage” the speaker consoles her for her situation through an ironic contrast with  woman who loses her mind and undergoes serial rape, an ordeal that generates in the speaker a vision of “singing and dancing / and throwing down flowers nevertheless.” (257)

            Few contemporary poets write as paradoxically, ironically, and subtly as this. Fewer still can manipulate the elements of classical lyric genres to enrich the postmodern idiom of quotidian speech. Gilbert works this vein even in his grim Pittsburgh poems, in which America’s industrial dark, gloomy as Hades cross-grained with Blake’s dark satanic mills, gives way to high modernist irony:

            He thinks of the multitude of giant rats he killed

in those cavernous, Sunday-empty, neon-dark

steel mills. Remembers piling them up

on winter nights, the weight of each one after

the other. White mist on the black river outside.  (“Factoring,” 162)

In Gilbert’s white-on-black world nothing is simple, even when established in the plainest diction. White mist concealing a river is the negative reversal of a poem’s black type concealing (but also defining) a page. In our discourse-world of binary oppositions, concealment is the other face of revelation. William Logan claims in a review of Refusing Heaven that Gilbert’s poems “are interesting, not for the honesties they intend, but for the ones they conceal.”  But they aren’t concealing honesties: they are working to uncover them. Like all genuine honesties they are hard to find because the world itself has concealed them. Gilbert’s best poems—and certainly he has his clinkers—require subtle and ironic readers to appreciate them. If that makes their essential honesty difficult, it is difficult in the way that Frost (in “Directive”) required, “so the wrong ones can’t find it, / So can’t get saved.” Poetry like Gilbert’s doesn’t seek to save everyone, but a few perceptive readers may get lucky.

           

Galway Kinnell, Collected Poems

(this review appeared in Harvard Review Online, but has disappeared from their site)

Galway Kinnell’s muscular free verse became an important model for poets in the 1960s when his first three books appeared. While his friend Denise Levertov offered delicately constructed poems derived from William Carlos Williams’ terse rhythms, Kinnell reached back to Whitman’s poetics to embrace the irregular sequence of poems like “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.” The most memorable poems of Kinnell’s first decades were sequences like “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” “The Last River,” “The Bear,” “Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock,” and The Book of Nightmares. These poems consist of series of distinct perceptions, each in a numbered section complete in itself but linked to those preceding or following.

The common subjects of these poems are the texture of the environment and the ways in which we weave ourselves into it: the rural landscape, in poems like “Freedom, New Hampshire,” or the urban scene, in the monumental “Avenue….” Kinnell’s primary concern is how we engage with these worlds and come to understand them . But in poems of totemic ritual and magic like “The Bear,” a mythic and instinctual grasp of nature and the cosmos comes into play, most fully realized in Kinnell’s 1971 volume The Book of Nightmares. In “Maud Moon” the speaker intuits an animal presence both inside and outside himself.  He reflects upon the birth of his daughter as concurrent with the forces of nature:

It is all over,

little one, the flipping

and overleaping, the watery

somersaulting alone in the oneness

under the hill, under

the old, lonely bellybutton,

pushing forth again

in remembrance,

the drifting there furled in the dark….                   (215)

Under the Maud moon, the moon commemorating the birth of his daughter Maud, he baptizes himself in the night and the dark river to ensure that his voice will survive him through this sequence to inform his daughter in the future. 

In the late 60s and early 70s, Kinnell became a popular reader at anti-war events. “Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond” contrasts the primal lives of frogs with the casual violence of deputies shooting dogs and napalm dropped by American warplanes. The poem reminds us that we are creatures of blood and flesh, and that the “drifting sun gives us our lives,” that we are continuous with the universe, with frogs and dogs and other humans, rather than creatures apart. Kinnell’s dramatic readings of this and other poems from Body Rags enthralled his audience, and made him one of our most visible poets.

While Kinnell remained a popular and effective oral performer, his work shifted after The Book of Nightmares. Becoming more intimate and personal, more focused on family, his poems also became more diffuse, losing some of the intensity of the earlier work. By slipping into domestic sentimentality, some poems in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980), nine years after Nightmares, are a little embarrassing, as in “After making Love We Hear Footsteps’:

            In the half-darkness we look at each other

            and smile

            and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—    (282)

Some of the other poems in this collection try to re-engage the ritual magic of nature, but only a couple of them succeed, including “Daybreak,” an entrancing and compact poem about starfish, and “The Gray Heron,” with its closure linking nature to human self-awareness:

            It stopped and tilted its head,

            which was much like

            a fieldstone with an eye

            in it, which was watching me

            to see if I would go

            or change into something else.        (294)

The Past (1985) temporarily abandons the sequence in favor of solid blocks of short poetry about Vermont rural life, some of which in their simplicity could have been written by Walter Hard. The few poems that court the natural sublime seemed forced, but many of the simple narratives, like “Break of Day,” are effective in their atmospheric realism. A few poems attempt a long Whitmanesque line, like “On the Oregon Coast,” but these tend toward wordiness and slack language.

When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990) returns to sequences, to good effect. The title poem, which occupies the entire fourth section of the book, is one of Kinnell’s masterpieces. It is a fine evocation of the act of turning inward, focusing on the way the self changes and is changed by the creation surrounding it. Instead of looking outward to the magic of the natural sublime, this poem looks deeply into the complexities of the human animal alone with itself:

When one has lived a long time alone,

and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,

and the bullfrog head half out of water utters

the cantillations he sang in his first spring,

and the snake lowers himself over the threshold

and creeps away among the stones, one sees

they all live to mate with their kind, and one knows,

after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken

away from one’s kind, toward these other kingdoms,

the hard prayer inside one’s own singing

is to come back, if one can, to one’s own,

a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,

when one has lived a long time alone.                        (425)

Imperfect Thirst (1994), and after a twelve-year gap, Strong is Your Hold (2006) mix sequence and narrative with varying degrees of success. Although he sometimes slips into garrulousness and cliché, Kinnell never entirely loses his way. Readers in the future will value him mostly for his masterful poems of the 1960s, but Kinnell’s lifelong love of the world and its creatures, his faith in natural process, and his attempts to reconcile nature and culture will continue to appeal to those who care about and want to understand our place on this planet.

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Mark Strand, Collected Poems

(this first appeared in Harvard Review Online in 2015, but is no longer available on that site)

If unbalanced or strangely dramatized emotions characterize the romantic poet, then Mark Strand’s work exemplifies romanticism in the postmodern era. Harold Bloom has called him “a perpetual elegist of the self,” which places him in the flux of Wordsworth and Whitman, although Wallace Stevens is his aesthetic mentor. “Violent Storm,” from his first collection, Sleeping with One Eye Open, maps the terrain of his strongest work, and suggests why his less forbidding and less aleatory poems sometimes falter:

            Those who have chosen to pass the night

Entertaining friends

And intimate ideas in the bright,

Commodious rooms of dreams

Will not feel the slightest tremor

Or be wakened by what seems

Only a quirk in the dry run

Of conventional weather. For them,

The long night sweeping over these trees

And houses will have been no more than one

In a series whose end

Only the nervous or morbid consider.

But for us, the wide-awake, who tend

To believe the worst is always waiting

Around the next corner or hiding in the dry,

Unsteady branch of a sick tree, debating

Whether or not to fell the passerby,

It has a sinister air.

Those who are nervous or morbid, including the out-of-phase romantic poets among us, remain awake to the threat and tragedy of the world. Those who dream friendly dreams evade the “long night sweeping over the trees” and proceed uneventfully through life. This is rather the opposite of surrealism, which argues that the authentic life is the dream. As Strand puts it in his Paris Review interview, “there is another type of poetry, in which the poet provides the reader with a surrogate world through which he reads this world.”

Because Strand’s best poems invoke the situations and imagery we associate with surrealism we might mistake them for fantasy. For Strand, however, and the force of his work confirms this, the apparently surreal is the actual waking world, presented through a dramatized surrogate scenario, and the ordinary world is the dream. And “poems aren’t dreams,” he insists. As he says in the same interview, speaking of the reading experience, “it’s really that place which is unreachable, or mysterious, at which the poem becomes ours.” He adds, “He [the reader] comes into possession of a mystery, you know—which is something that we don’t allow ourselves in our lives.” It is not surprising, then, that Strand’s lesser poems derive from ordinary experiences and occur in everyday landscapes. Even those poems dealing with personal tragedy, such as the death of his father, even when executed with impressive rhetorical ingenuity, lack the force of poems like “The Accident,” “The Way It Is,” or the first poem in Dark Harbor. After his first collection, Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964), Strand published two important collections in relatively quick succession, Reasons for Moving (1968) and Darker (1970). In these seminal collections the more tragic poems affix the reader’s imagination.   

“The Way It Is,” from Darker, may be Strand’s most memorable poem. Its nightmare world is all the more nightmarish when we realize it is not a dream, not surrealism, but the strangeness of real life that skewers first the helpless speaker, then the larger world:

My neighbor marches in his room,

wearing the sleek

mask of a hawk with a large beak.

He stands by the window. A violet plume

rises from his helmet’s dome.

The moon’s light

spills over him like milk and the wind rinses the white

glass bowls of his eyes.

Strand’s psychodrama creepily externalizes the narrator and his neighbors’ actual if secret lives. The mask does not conceal but extrudes the neighbor’s actual character. The elemental cleansing by moon and wind prepare him for his ritual tasks, which include threatening the speaker (“I am a dog, who would kill a dog?”), sex, dancing, and apparently dying, possibly self-sacrificed. The various dramatic actions of the poem lure the speaker into a variety of postures, and finally expand to encompass a whole dark city. But no summary or quotation can convey the absorbing strangeness of this poem with its terrible closing lines, “The graves are not ready. The dead / shall inherit the dead.” Revealing the world in which such perceptions and events occur is the gift of the visionary romantic poet, and like Blake the Mark Strand of these early books X-rays the dreamy mundane to expose its bones.

With The Story of Our Lives (1973) Strand’s work shifts ground. As Stevens might say, the pressure of reality becomes greater. Although that apparent reality lacks the authenticity of the visionary experience of his earlier poems, it comes to dominate or at least to direct the poems. The work in The Continuous Life (1990) seems to grope for the earlier visionary gleam while acknowledging its loss: “For us, too, there was a wish to possess / Something beyond the world we knew, beyond ourselves, / Beyond our power to imagine, something nevertheless / in which we might see ourselves” (“The Idea”). But twenty years previously Strand had possessed that power of imagination and had generated poems that accomplish precisely what he longs for. From The Story of Our Lives through The Monument and The Late Hour his poems lose some focus, and sometimes seem too caught up in the routine of living. The familiar vocabulary stales. He sometimes drifts into the banal and awkward, as in “Pot Roast”:

I gaze upon the roast,

that is sliced and laid out

on my plate,

and over it

I spoon the juices

of carrot and onion.

And for once I do not regret

the passage of time.

The blandly comic effect suggests a parody of the so-called Iowa School of poetry, which for a time in the 1970s was the butt of many critical jokesters. The Deep Image vocabulary of Strand’s earlier poems no longer functions, and at this point in the late 1970s and 1980s he has found nothing to replace it. The Monument (1978), in particular, becomes entranced with its own daring as prose poetry, too dependent on a complex structure of quotation, surrendering Strand’s simple, earthen vocabulary and syntax for an allusive structure that doesn’t seem to work with his sensibility. Many of the poems in the second half of this collected volume feel perfunctory, only slightly animated by the poet’s latently powerful sensibility. By standards other than those Strand has set for himself, most of these poems would seem adequate to their own design. But they seem predictable, argued rather than experienced, and lack the powerful and tragic contingency that fuels the best poems in Darker and Reasons for Moving.

Visionary power never entirely eludes Strand, however. With Dark Harbor he abandons his commitment to a limited vocabulary and body of imagery and opens himself to “many other things.” As he remarks in his Paris Review interview, “You have Marsyas and the Mafia, the muzhiks being slaughtered, Russian women at a dinner party….” This wider sweep re-energizes his poetry and renews his visionary impulse:

The ship has been held in the harbor.

The promise of departure has begun to dim.

The radiance of the sea, the shining abundance

Of its blue, are nevertheless undiminished.

The will of the passengers struggles to release

The creaking ship. All they want

Is one last voyage beyond the papery palms

And the shoals of melancholy, beyond the glass

And alabaster mansions strung along

The shores, beyond the siren sounds

And the grinding gears of big trucks climbing the hills.

Out into the moonlit bareness of waves….                                       (XIV)

Strand studied with Josef Albers, and painted and made prints and collages for all of his adult life. In his last years he moved away from writing altogether in favor of the visual arts. In an interview in 2013 he indicated that he might never write again. Yet in that same interview he acknowledged the importance of aleatory effects in both his visual and his verbal arts: “I try to combine surprise and inevitability to make something unique, but one can’t do this rationally. The unexpected, the unanticipated must be the determining factor.” This renewed faith in contingency refreshes his most recent (and last) collection, Almost Invisible (2013). These odd and vivid prose poems display considerable wit and vitality. In November, 2014, shortly after the publication of this book, Strand died at the age of eighty. He has left us some disturbing and indelible poems.