A Luxury of Primes

A Luxury of Primes: Jack Gilbert

 

Why is Jack Gilbert’s book Monolithos only available used, starting at the royal price of $75.00?

 

Because it is out of print and because it is one of the most moving and brilliant books of poetry of the 20th century. No one ever sells their copy, they only look to buy a new one for a friend. I was given mine by a dear old friend John Fousek, who had seen Gilbert read at Columbia. He compared his line to Keith Richards’ guitar solo on Sympathy for the Devil. It is an apt comparison.

 

Monolithos is comprised of a selection of poems he published in 1962, when his first book, Views of Jeopardy, won The Yale Younger Poets prize. The rest are poems he wrote over the next 20 years. It is an extremely slim volume. It partly tells of his marriage to Linda Gregg and its collapse, on the Greek Island of Santorini. Santorini is famous for being the epicenter of a volcanic explosion that brought an end to the Minoan world. But you won’t find the sensual and beguiling frescoes of the Minoan palaces here, just the wild sage and stones of a rugged, arid island in the Aegean and two unhappy people working out the end game alone.

 

John gave me the book in the summer of 1990. He wouldn’t have paid 75 bucks for it so I assume it was still available. It was the summer of the end of my first marriage. I read a number books right around that time. A collected edition of Raymond Carver’s stories (I believe it was Cathedrals), Light in August, and Monolithos. Carver and Gilbert have in common a chiseled, reticent line and an unflinching eye for the center of emotional pain. There is considerable self-indictment for failed relationships.

 

WALKING HOME ACROSS THE ISLAND

 

Walking home across the plain in the dark.

And Linda crying. Again we have come

to a place where I rail and she suffers and the moon

does not rise. We have only each other,

but I am shouting inside the rain

and she is crying like a wounded animal,

knowing there is no place to turn. It is hard

to understand how we could be brought here by love.

 

John and his wife were spending the summer of 1990 elsewhere, so they very generously allowed me to live in their house. I loaded up a van with all my furniture and boxes and drove it the quarter mile to their place only to discover that he wasn’t at home. So I emptied the contents of my life onto his lawn and waited for him. When he arrived we both started to laugh because I had just read the Carver story Dancing. In that story a divorced man has all of his possessions out on his yard and a young couple comes by. He gives them all of his furniture and they end up dancing on the lawn to music played on the phonograph.

 

Once I got all my stuff moved in John gave me Monolithos. For the next year I read it over and over again, living out my own domestic collapse through his poems. I went even farther and adopted his method, if not his tone, as my own. I had very little to go on. I wanted simply to look at things and describe them in as few words as possible. No more flow of language, no more divine music. It would be the hard poetry of the eye. I think it was good training. I was 30 years old and had been writing poetry the same way for over a decade. I have since explored many other ways of writing, but I’ve always returned to my original style, because that is my voice and it will yield to no resistance. But struggling against that voice develops all that it leaves dark, or at least exposes it to light. I count Jack Gilbert to be among my poetic teachers, and he is the only one still alive.

 

Gilbert’s line is hard to account for. He writes what in any other hand would appear to be prose. And it is interesting, given how close to prose he strays, to compare one of his poems to a poem by Raymond Carver. Raymond Carver’s wife, the poet Tess Gallagher, encouraged him to write poetry. His poems never seem like poems to me. Other than Gravy, a powerful one-off, and a perfect non-poet’s poem, Carver’s poems are lineated prose and lack all of the qualities his actual prose has. Gilbert is on the poet’s side of this divide. Here is one of his 1962 poems, one of his best known:

 

DON GIOVANNI ON HIS WAY TO HELL

 

How could they think women a recreation?

Or the repetition of bodies of steady interest?

Only the ignorant or busy could. That elm

of flesh must prove a luxury of primes;

be perilous and dear with rain of an alternate earth.

Which is not to damn the forested China of touching.

I am neither priestly nor tired, and the great knowledge

of breasts with their loud nipples congregates in me.

The sudden nakedness, the small ribs, the mouth.

Splendid. Splendid. Splendid. Like Rome. Like Loins.

A glamour sufficient to our long marvelous dying.

I say sufficient and speak with earned privilege,

for my life has been eaten in that foliate city.

To ambergris. But not for recreation.

I would not have lost so much for recreation.

 

Nor for love as the sweet pretend: the children’s game

of deliberate ignorance of each to allow the dreaming.

Not for the impersonal belly or the heart’s drunkenness

have I come this far, stubborn, disastrous way.

But for relish of those archipelagoes of person.

To hold her in hand, closed as any sparrow,

and call and call forever till she turn from bird

to blowing woods. From woods to jungle. Persimmon.

To light. From light to princess. From princess to woman

in all her fresh particularity of difference.

Then oh, through the underwater time of night,

Indecent and still, to speak to her without habit.

This I have done with my life and am content.

I wish I could tell you how it is in that dark,

Standing in the huge singing and the alien world.

 

The 1962 poems are like this, slightly surreal, with a longer line. Gilbert began in the Jack Spicer workshop and it shows in these earlier poems. Eventually he would turn towards Imagism and abandon what had become a successful poetic career. The story of his disillusionment is well known, and invoked to account for the change style. Certainly he eliminated a huge number of poems from the 1962 volume, implying that he had little patience for the products of his youthful matings with the muse. Here is a poem from Views of Jeopardy that anticipates the change:

 

THE WHITENESS, THE SOUND, AND ALCIBIADES

 

So I come on this birthday at last

here in the house of strangers.

With a broken pair of shoes,

no profession, and a few poems.

After all that promise.

Not by addiction or play, by choices.

By concern for whales and love,

for elephants and Alcibiades.

But to arrive at so little product.

A few corners done,

an arcade up but unfaced,

and everywhere the ambitious

unfinished monuments to Myshkin

and magnitude Like persisting

on the arrogant steeple of Beauvais.

 

I wake in Trastavere

in the house of city-peasants,

and lie in the noise dreaming

of the wealth of summer nights

from my childhood when the dark

was sixty feet deep in luxury,

of elm and maple and sycamore.

I wandered hour by hour

with my gentle, bewildered need,

following the faint sound

of women in the moving leaves.

 

In Latium, years ago,

I sat by the road watching

an ox come through the day.

Stark-white in the distance.

Occasionally under a tree.

Colorless in the heavy sun.

Suave in the bright shadows.

Starch-white near in the glare.

Petal-white near in the shade.

Linen, stone-white, and milk.

Ox-white before me, and past

into the thunder of light.

 

For ten years I have tried

to understand about the ox.

About the sound. The whales.

Of love. And arrived here

to give thanks for the profit.

I wake to the wanton freshness.

To the arriving and leaving. To the journey.

I wake to the freshness. And do reverence.