Jack Gilbert: R.I.P.

Searching For Pittsburgh - Jack Gilbert

The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night,
between the liver and the stomach. Comes to the heart
and hesitates. Considers and then goes around it.
Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world.
Goes deeper, searching for what remains of Pittsburgh
in me. The rusting mills sprawled gigantically
along three rivers. The authority of them.
The gritty alleys where we played every evening were
stained pink by the inferno always surging in the sky,
as though Christ and the Father were still fashioning the Earth.
Locomotives driving through the cold rain,
lordly and bestial in their strength. Massive water
flowing morning and night throughout a city
girded with ninety bridges. Sumptuous-shouldered,
sleek-thighed, obstinate and majestic, unquenchable.
All grip and flood, mighty sucking and deep-rooted grace.
A city of brick and tired wood. Ox and sovereign spirit.
Primitive Pittsburgh. Winter month after month telling
of death. The beauty forcing us as much as harshness.
Our spirits forged in that wilderness, our minds forged
by the heart. Making together a consequence of America.
The fox watched me build my Pittsburgh again and again.
In Paris afternoons on Buttes-Chaumont. On Greek islands
with their fields of stone. In beds with women, sometimes,
amid their gentleness. Now the fox will live in our ruined
house. My tomatoes grow ripe among weeds and the sound
of water. In this happy place my serious heart has made.



-----------------

the master being dead
just ordinary...
cherry blossoms

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

 

 

best,
Don 

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Lillie poem archive

Send a single haiku for the Wednesday Haiku feature. Here's how.

Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 143 songs

Found Items Friday ...

Found in a used copy of Carl Jacobi's Revelations in Black

Herein, some misc items, seen around the web and in print, for your perusal while I knuckle under, working on the 4 presentations I have to do in the next 8 or so weeks: they are specifically on haiku, Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, and, for work, customer service as a vocation or a way.

This first item, found in an old paperback copy of a horror novel I picked up probably 10 years ago, shows a shopper, on a meager (probably early 70's) budget, who has her priorities straight: Books, Drinks, Shop, and Food.  We can only hope that the remaining $45 was as wisely allotted.

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A Wallace Stevens quote found somewhere on the net:

"Poetry and surety claims aren't as unlikely a combination as they may seem," observed Wallace Stevens.

Ancedote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens

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Here is the short film, in three parts, on the magnificent Gerald Stern, entitled Still Burning.   He has a brand new volume, Early Collected Poems, 1965-1992, which contains the books, Rejoicings, Lucky Life, The Red Coal, Paradise Poems, Lovesick, and Bread Without Sugar, his first six.  It not only contains some of the best, most accessible, heartrending American poems of the 2nd half of the 20th century, but it is dedicated "To the Sorrowful."

You know who you are. 

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To complement the Stern film, an interview with his old pal, Jack Gilbert, another fine poet, from the Paris Review.

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In a very positive review (link is an excerpt) of the debut collection by Evgenia Citkowitz entitled Ether: Seven Stories and a Novella, Joyce Carol Oates pulls a great quote from W. H. Auden:

This [collection] is not elevated tragedy or even the more familiar fissures of domestic drama but the stoic-melancholy vision of W. H. Auden, for whom "the crack in the teacup opens / a lane to the land of the dead."

It is amazing, how a brief quote from a longer work can open up its world, ironically not unlike the little crack in the little teacup ...

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
"Love has no ending.

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

"I'll love till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

"The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world."

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
"O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

"In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

"In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
Tomorrow or today.

"Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

"O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

"The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

"Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

"O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

"O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With all your crooked heart."

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

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Here's a 49 second visualization of the haiku by Moritake, "drifting back to the branch:"

"drifting back to the branch" by Moritake from arjuno kecil

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This week's feature poem from the archive comes from Lilliput Review #132, July 2003.  Enjoy.

at the edge of the world

to ask
           why the wave drowns
           the fisherman
is to give
           the wave
           humanity
and to take
           away our own

Jeff Stumpo

And Issa, to wrap it up:


hey boatman
no pissing on the moon
in the waves!

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue 

best,
Don

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Tom Waits and Jack Gilbert: A Song and a Poem

Tom Waits

One song, one poem:

This popped up on the ipod on the way to work and, as it always does after I hear it, has been haunting me all week. No candidate for Issa's Sunday Service, still I thought it well worth posting the haunting "What's He Building in There," with the clichéd hope that I'd get rid of it that way.

It's all yours. Good luck passing it on ...

-------------------------------------




And here's a poem found last week on the Writer's Almanac site well worth passing on, from Jack Gilbert's excellent collection, Refusing Heaven:


Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Jack Gilbert

dragonfly--
flying two feet
then two feet more

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Sketchbook Call for Poems; Mr. Davis, Mr. Roethke, & Mr. Gilbert

Miles Davis

A call for poems opens things up today from the online publication Sketchbook. Carefully read the guidelines and I would suggest you go to their website to get a feel for what they use and an idea of all the many things they do.


*****************************


Sketchbook
A Journal of Eastern & Western Writing Forms

Announcing May / June "Sunflower(s)" 2009 Kukai

The May / June 2009 Kukai theme is "sunflower(s)" . Use the exact
words "sunflower(s)" in the haiku. No more than a total of three
haiku may be submitted. Haiku submitted to the kukai should
not be workshopped, appear on-line in forums, or in print.


Haiku

Author, Country

To: kukaieditor@poetrywriting.org
Subject:sunflower(s) kukai

Submissions: Friday, May 01, 2009 – Saturday, June 20, 2009
Midnight.

Voting: Sunday, June 21 - Sunday, June 28, 2009, Midnight.

The results will be published in the Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Sketchbook.

Recent letters to the Sketchbook editors and discussions on
various forums indicate that some assumptions about a kukai
must be spelled out. From now on (April 1, 2008), Haiku
entered in the Sketchbook kukai must be previously unpublished;
they must not be workshopped; they must not appear on any
ist, forum, group, blog, or in print. In short, if the haiku has
appeared on the internet or in print we consider it to have been
published. The voting in a kukai is anonymous and publication
anywhere voids anonymity. Any haiku found to be previously
published will be disqualified.


*****************************



Celebrate Theodore Roethke's birthday reading his poems here

In addition, Garrison Keillor gives an overview of Roethke and reads a great poem from Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven, entitled "Happily Planting the Beans Too Early" in today's Writer's Almanac. I tried embedding it without any luck, so here's the poem:

Happily Planting the Beans too Early

I waited until the sun was going down
to plant the bean seedlings. I was
beginning on the peas when the phone rang.
It was a long conversation about what
living this way in the woods might
be doing to me. It was dark by the time
I finished. Made tuna fish sandwiches
and read the second half of a novel.
Found myself out in the April moonlight
putting the rest of the pea shoots into
the soft earth. It was after midnight.
There was a bird calling intermittently
and I could hear the stream down below.
She was probably right about me getting
strange. After all, Basho and Tolstoy
at the end were at least going somewhere.

Jack Gilbert

It's also Miles Davis day and I'm unabashed fan, of all periods. So here's something newer, live in Munich in 1987, with apologies to classic fans; my feet are, however, moving now.

spring breeze--
where my feet are pointed
I'm on my way

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don

Jack Gilbert Tribute Reading

A report on the Jack Gilbert Tribute reading May 12th in NYC has just been posted at the Gilbert site on Facebook, courtesy of Jason Mashak and written by Boni Joi. For those of you as taken with Jack as I am, here it is:

The reading was great! Each reader was full of energy and anecdotes about knowing or being influenced by Jack's work. Jack sat right in the front row. The readers were introduced by Alice Quinn and they were supposed to go in alphabetical order but Alice introduced Linda Gregg first, which was a nice mistake. Each poet read their favorite poems and one or two from the new book "The Dance Most of All." Deb Garrison helped Jack pick the title, it is a fragment from one of the poems in the new collection (sorry I forgot which one). Linda asked Jack how he felt that morning and he said "Grateful." Jim called Jack a famous and great walker, who would walk two miles just for a loaf of bread and some cheese. Jack loves to walk. Henry Lyman said once a neighbor asked Jack "Are you a poet?" and Jack replied "On certain lucky days." Gerald told of days in Pittsburg and a trip they took once that Gerald wrote an essay about.

I will list the readers in order and what poems they read:

Linda Gregg
Angelus
A Description of Happiness in Kobenhavn
Going Wrong
We Are the Junction

Jim Finnegan
Crusoe on the Mountain Gathering Faggots
Me and Capablanca
The Secret

Mary Karr
The Abnormal is Not Courage
The Plundering of Circe
Don Giovanni on His Way to Hell
Don Giovanni in Trouble

Henry Lyman
In Views of Jeopardy
Hunger
Alone
Refusing Heaven
Ovid in Tears

Megan O'Rourke
Tear It Down
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
Married
Winter in the Night Fields

Gerald Stern
Love Poem
The Lives of Famous Men
Music is the Memory of What Never Happened
Hard Wired
Neglecting the Kids

The reading concluded with a taped recording of Jack reading
"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart."

Best,
Boni Joi

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Can't have a Jack Gilbert post without a poem. Here's a taste of the collection Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh:



Ruins and Wabi

To tell the truth, Storyville was brutal. The parlors
of even the fancy whorehouses crawling with roaches
and silverfish. The streets foul and the sex brawling.
But in the shabby clapboard buildings on Franklin
and Liberty and on Iberville was the invention.
Throughout the District, you could hear Tony Jackson
and King Oliver, Morton and Bechet, finding it night
after night. Like the dream Bellocq's photographs found
in the midst of Egypt Vanita and Mary Meathouse, Aunt Cora
and Gold Tooth Gussie. It takes a long time to get
the ruins right. The Japanese think it strange we paint
our old wooden houses when it takes so long to find
the wabi in them. They prefer the bonsai tree after
the valiant blossoming is over, the leaves fallen. When
bareness reveals a merit born in the vegetable struggling.

Jack Gilbert

Jack's given it all: heart, mind, and soul. Each collection soars higher than the last. You can get Tough Heaven directly from Pond Road Press. It's probably cheaper at amazon, but why not support the small press and go direct. And there is The Dance Most of All, the best new American poetry book I've read this year so far.

Do yourself a favor: get 'em at the library, get 'em at a bookstore, just get 'em.

spring's begun--
the sky over my house too
like old times

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don

Jack Gilbert: The Dance Most of All

Just as Jack Gilbert has a weakness for Greek landscape, women, Japanese culture, and memories of Western Pennsylvania, I have a weakness for Jack Gilbert. His new book, The Dance Most of All, is packed with top notch poetry. He just seems to get better and better and, though the timing may be a bit off, next year's Pulitzer folks should start paying attention now.

That's how very good this volume is. Here's a little sampling, to give you a taste. Buy it, check it out at the library, steal your friend's copy: whatever you have to do, just get it done. You won't regret it (though your friend will be mighty pissed).

After Love

He is watching the music with his eyes closed.
Hearing the piano like a man moving
through the woods thinking by feeling.
The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,
step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,
but always returning to quiet, like the man
remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,
mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure
in the loss. In the yearning. The pain
going this way and that. Never again.
Never bodied again. Again the never.
Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.
A humming beauty in the silence.
To having been. Having had. And the man
knowing all of him will come to the end.

Jack Gilbert

The Abundant Little

We have seen the population of Heaven
in frescoes. Dominions and unsmiling saints
crowded together as though the rooms were small.
We think of the grand forests of Pennsylvania,
oaks and maples, when we see the miniatures
of blue Krishna with farm girls awkwardly
beside a pond in a glade of scrub trees.
The Japanese scrolls show mostly Hell.
When we read about the Christian paradise,
it is made of gold and pearls, built on
a foundation of emeralds. Nothing soft
and rarely trees, except in the canvases
of Italians where they slip in bits of Tuscany
and Perugino's Umbria. All things
are taken away. Indeed, indeed.
But we secretly think of our bodies
in the heart's storm and just after.
And the sound of careless happiness.
We touch finally only a little.
Like the shy tongue that comes fleetingly
in the dark. The acute little that is there.

Jack Gilbert

Going Home

Mother was the daughter of sharecroppers.
And my father the black sheep of rich Virginia
merchants. She went barefoot until twelve.
He ran away with the circus at fourteen.
Neither one got through grammar school.
And here I am in the faculty toilet
trying to remember the dates of Emperor Vespasian.

Jack Gilbert

Tomorrow's Writer's Almanac will feature a poem by Paul Hostovsky, whose work has found its way into the pages of Lilliput Review on occasion. As a few of you know, I have a huge blind spot when it comes to poetry about baseball; these are two things I love which I sincerely believe shouldn't be in the same room together, ever. However, this poem, "Little League," is very enjoyable.

Congratulations to Paul.

Today is also the anniversary of the passing of Muddy Waters. Muddy, along with Willie Dixon, was my ticket to Chicago blues, which turned out to be good for a transfer all the way down to the Delta. A quiet wired punk-nosed white kid in the early 60's received it all in reverse, from the British invasion backwards, but better half-assed than no ass at all. I've lived with Muddy's music for over 40 years and it has never for a single moment ceased being vibrant, scintillating, and important. If it wasn't for music, there'd be no poetry. The 12 bar blues form is the haiku of American popular culture; for me, nothing is richer, resonates deeper, and challenges a staid world view better than some roadhouse blues or an Issa haiku. In the following laid-back version of the classic "Got My Mojo Workin," Muddy graciously gives lots of room to Sonny Boy Williamson II on the harp, resulting in a one-of-a-kind rendition of this signature tune. And, oh, yeah, that's Willie Dixon on bass and back up vocals.

Dig it.

billowing clouds--
have the pine trees
shrunk a bit?

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don

Miscellany: Jackley, Gilbert, Gregg, Merwin & the Lilliput Archive

Cover by Harland Ristau

Mark Jackley, who has contributed some great work to Lilliput Review, has a new collection of poems out, entitled Cracks and Slats, from Amsterdam Press, part of the pertly named Gob Pile Chapbook Series. Here's a neat little poem from that collection, one of the endless variations in poetry on immortalizing a loved one:

Poet and Daughter

I am my words,
ink and pixels,

you my link
to eternity,

the bright and vast
intensity

of the
empty page.

Mark Jackley

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I can't remember where I ran across this enjoyable reading from the 90's by a Lilliput favorite, Jack Gilbert, along with Linda Gregg:





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Just now, while reading over some of W. S. Merwin's latest from The Shadow of Sirius, have learned that he has won the Pulitzer Prize, much deserved I think. The following is from that collection, from which I've featured two other poems previously:

Lake Shore in Half Light

There is a question I want to ask
and I can't remember it
I keep trying to
I know it is the same question
it has always been
in fact I seem to know
almost everything about it
leading me to the lake shore
at daybreak or twilight
and to whatever is standing
next to the question
as a body stands next to its shadow
but the question is not a shadow
if I knew who discovered
zero I might ask
what there was before

W. S. Merwin

If you bought one book of poetry this year, you probably couldn't do much better than this fine collection continuing a remarkable poetic journey.


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2009 is the 20th anniversary of Lilliput Review and the archive countdown to issue #1 will, if it continues on its current one-posting-per-week pace, finish up sometime in early 2010. This week's feature issue is #38 from October 1992, with a cover by the late great Harland Ristau. Themed as duos and trios, each page contained poems related in groups of two or threes. Here's a couple of poems that grab me today, 17 years later:




chimney smoke
mingling with mist and snow
evening

Jonas Winet

Postcard

A light wet snow
waters the back yard.
I watch from the sofa.
I miss your small hands.

Bart Solarczyk

learn to love/ then learn to
lose what you love/ learn to
lose love/ learn to love/ to
lose/ learn/ love

Coral Hull

she comes home
still pissed
lets in a fly

William Hart

swatting a fly
looking at
a mountain

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don

Jack Gilbert Tribute

I just received notification that coming this May, Bloodaxe Books will be hosting a tribute for one of our best living poets, Jack Gilbert. Here's the notice via poets.org and via Facebook, which is how I received it.

The publication in recent years of the retrospective Great Fires and the excellent Refusing Heaven collection has brought Jack some long deserved recognition. Here in Pittsburgh we cherish a more modest selection of work, published by the small press publisher Pond Road Press, entitled Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh has always been a backdrop for the work of Jack Gilbert, a symbol of youth and the not-so-nostalgic past. The Pittsburgh he remembers, like his fellow compatriot and good friend Gerald Stern, is a Pittsburgh long gone, a Pittsburgh forward looking politicians and the nouveau rich, whose hands are today mired in a different kind of grime, would sooner forget. But the ghosts are here, they are everywhere; just as those of us who walk these streets and struggle for a livelihood see them in the corner of our eyes, fleeting and gone in the early morning fog, they followed Gilbert everywhere he went, woven through his work as a thick tangle of twigs in a long abandoned nest.

And that work is at once beautiful, sad, and immensely moving. Here's a taste of that Pittsburgh long gone, the ghost of yesteryear and, yet, somehow the true hope of tomorrow, a hope without which no desperate economic Renaissance pogrom can ever dream of succeeding. We've lived through a few of those here and still we persist, because or despite of any measured, concerted efforts, because, in truth, on the best of days, we stand hand-in-hand with the very ghosts Jack Gilbert evokes.

The ghosts of ourselves.

Searching for Pittsburgh

The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night,
between the liver and the stomach. Comes to the heart
and hesitates. Considers and then goes around it.
Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world.
Goes deeper, searching for what remains of Pittsburgh
in me. The rusting mills sprawled gigantically
along the three rivers. The authority of them.
The gritty alleys where we played every everning were
stained pink by the inferno always raging in the sky,
as though Christ and the Father were still fashioning
the Earth. Locomotives driving through the cold rain,
lordly and bestial in their strength. Massive water
flowing morning and night throughout a city
girded with ninety bridges. Sumptuous-shouldered,
sleek-thighed, obstinate and majestic, unquenchable.
All grip and flood, mighty sucking and deep-rooted grace.
A city of brick and tired wood. Ox and sovereign spirit.
Primitive Pittsburgh. Winter month after month telling
of death. The beauty forcing us as much as harshness.
Our spirits forged in that wilderness, our minds forged
by the heart. Making together a consequence of America.
The fox watched me build my Pittsburgh again and again.
In Paris afternoons on Buttes-Chaumont. On Greek islands
with their fields of stone. In beds with women, sometimes,
amid their gentleness. Now the fox will live in our ruined
house. My tomatoes grow ripe among weeds and the sound
of water. In this happy place my serious heart has made.

Jack Gilbert

best,
Don

Jack Gilbert's Chinese drum

There is a new poem by Jack Gilbert up at the New Yorker. For my money, he is one of our very best. Here he takes a memory from long ago and suddenly transmutes it into revelation.

Waiting and Finding

While he was in kindergarten, everybody wanted to play

the tomtoms when it came time for that. You had to

run in order to get there first, and he would not.

So he always had a triangle. He does not remember

how they played the tomtoms, but he sees clearly

their Chinese look. Red with dragons front and back

and gold studs around that held the drumhead tight.

If you had a triangle, you didn’t really make music.

You mostly waited while the tambourines and tomtoms

went on a long time. Until there was a signal for all

triangle people to hit them the right way. Usually once.

Then it was tomtoms and waiting some more. But what

he remembers is the sound of the triangle. A perfect,

shimmering sound that has lasted all his long life.

Fading out and coming again after a while. Getting lost

and the waiting for it to come again. Waiting meaning

without things. Meaning love sometimes dying out,

sometimes being taken away. Meaning that often he lives

silent in the middle of the world’s music. Waiting

for the best to come again. Beginning to hear the silence

as he waits. Beginning to like the silence maybe too much.

Jack Gilbert

best,

Don

Jack Gilbert, Risking Delight

Jack Gilbert is one of America's finest living poets. Mary Karr highlights his work in her Poet's Choice column this week, which is laudable.

However, though the excerpt from "A Brief for the Defense" she chose is salient if brief (in part the same excerpt that appears on the Gilbert page at poets.org), overall it really does not do proud an under-appreciated poet like Gilbert. Here is the poem in its entirety:




A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our loves because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The -----Bengal tiger-would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit that there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Jack Gilbert

One can empathize with Karr and her limited number of column inches, yet still ...

For those unfamiliar with Gilbert, here's a few more.


best,
Don