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

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