“I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.”
~Jack Gilbert
Jack Gilbert lived a life of fierce tenderness, writing about love and loss with such raw clarity that it felt like he had truly lived a thousand lives in one.
Gilbert's poems are not showy. They do not beg for attention. They state plainly the murmurs of the heart and reflect the simple power of poetry rooted in lived experience, untouched by literary trends or the need for applause.
Gilbert spent a good amount of his creative life outside the mainstream literary community. He spent long intervals in Europe and Asia, avoiding most of the American poetry scene. His poems reflect this.
Gilbert’s reluctance to play the literary game made him a mythic figure. He was out of step with the poetry world, but deeply respected. A writer in The Paris Review had this to say about Gilbert:
”On the rare occasions when Jack Gilbert gives public readings—whether in New York, Pittsburgh, or San Francisco—it is not unusual for men and women in the audience to tell him how his poems have saved their lives. At these gatherings, one may also hear wild stories about Gilbert: he was a junkie, he was homeless, he was married numerous times. In reality, he has never been addicted to drugs, has been impoverished but never homeless, and was married only once. The fascination with Gilbert is a response, above all, to the power of his poetry, but it also reflects the mystique of a life lived utterly without regard for the conventions of literary fortune and fame.”
Jack Gilbert died in 2012, leaving behind volumes of poems that feel like intimate conversations with the eternal.
Below is a poem titled “Tear it Down.” It’s a poem that urges us to “tear down” the emotional and psychological walls we build to protect ourselves. These walls—whether built from pride, fear, grief, or ego—keep us from truly living, loving, and experiencing the raw fullness of life.
I hope you enjoy it.
We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body.
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