After high school, Jack held several mundane jobs, including steel mill worker, before enrolling at the University of Pittsburgh, where he met life-long friend and fellow poet, Gerald Stern. After graduating, he moved to San Francisco and became part of the beat scene, studying with Jack Spicer, befriending poets Allen Ginsberg and Laura Ulewicz. When his first book, Views of Jeopardy (1962) won the Yale Younger Poets Award, the handsome and accomplished Gilbert became something of a celebrity. Attempting to escape such fame and resume his solitary concentration on the writing of poems, he moved to Europe, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and lecturing for the U.S. State Department. For much of the next twenty years he lived in Europe and on various Greek islands, publishing little but writing continuously. His second book, Monolithos (1982) celebrated such a lifestyle and extended his reputation as a premier lyric poet; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Keeping true to his iconoclastic leaning, his third book, The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (1994), wasn’t published until a dozen years later. After another long absence, Refusing Heaven (2005) — which won the National Book Critics Circle Award — was published. Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh (2006) gathered poems from earlier collections. The Dance Most of All, his new book, followed only five years later, a rare event in Jack’s publishing history.

The Red Coal
BY Gerald Stern
(Carnegie Mellon
University Press, 1999)

Gerald Stern wrote in his poem, “The Red Coal,” “how strange / his great fame was and my obscurity,” which shows how two talented young poets diverged, Stern taking the typical career path of American poets (teaching and writing), while Jack obscurely wandered the world, reappearing every now and then with his poems. The complexities of his “great fame,” in the wake of winning the Yale Younger Prize, threatened to consume Jack’s being and his writing, so he simplified his life and escaped fame by living humbly on Greek islands. When I asked Jack in this interview if he had seen the new edition of Stern’s The Red Coal (Houghton Mifflin, 1981, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1999), he said he hadn’t. I showed it to him. Its cover shows split photographs of Stern and Gilbert walking in Paris in 1950 (from the original book) and the two of them head to head thirty-two years later in New York City. Jack’s face lit up briefly as he said, “Yes. Those were good times.” But he wouldn’t elaborate on those times or the friendship. Moments contain their own identities and those photographs had their moments, while now was a new moment. Jack’s poems are like this: he digs into the past to find the things that illuminate a present moment. Jack’s life is like this: memories (of persons, places, loves) serve the present situation.

Many interviewers over the years have asked Jack why it took him that long to publish his second book, incredulous that a poet of his skill would not leap at the opportunities available to him. Most of these interviewers have been poets themselves, and many, if not all, concerned at least as much about their own careers as about regard for Jack’s poetry, or for Poetry (with the capital P). They seem to believe that Jack’s publishing only five books in fifty years as some sort of failure of his particular gifts, as if poetry could be quantified. Henry Lyman, Jack’s friend, tells me that Jack has boxes and boxes of unpublished poems, that Jack was always writing. Always. Apparently for Jack, being a poet means writing poems, not necessarily publishing, giving readings, being reviewed, or receiving prizes. He has done all of that but cares more for the current poem in process than the aftermath.

…for Jack, being a poet means writing poems, not necessarily publishing, giving readings, being reviewed, or receiving prizes. Jack has done all of that but cares more for the current poem in process than the aftermath.

Readers of Jack’s poetry will know how thematic love is, how the grace, beauty, and sensuality of women are central to many of the poems. Two women appear and reappear in the poetry: Linda Gregg and Michiko Nogami. Both are dedicatees, individually and together, to the books. Both are former wives of the poet. We readers must thank them for inspiring Jack just as we ought to be thankful to Jack for returning these themes to the contemporary scene.

Jack acknowledges in this interview the writing of the poem, any one of them, was always a struggle, and that the struggle almost killed him many times. He leaves it at that. A mystery that consumes the poet in various ways so that only he can truly understand how a specific poem came to be. The process doesn’t matter. The poem matters. The reader, the scholar, and the critic must accept this as it is and, hopefully, be thankful that the poem is there for us to ponder, tinker with, and let fill our hearts with sadness or joy. For the curious reader, the faithful reader, there will always be more we want to know about a poem that moves us. Thus, this interview, which took place on April 23, 2009 in Northampton, Massachusetts at the home of Henry Lyman, and which I initiated after reading Jack’s newest book.