Jack Gilbert: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)
Jack Gilbert
Poetry and the adult dream:
Jack Gilbert: A couple of decades ago, I finished going all the way around the world. And after that I suddenly realized I had lived all of my dreams. I had lots of them and I've fulfilled them all. Now it's time to live the adult dreams, if I can find them. The others were dreams from childhood -- first love and such, which is wonderful. It's interesting to discover that we don't have adult dreams -- pleasure and pride, but not really adult dreams.
Let me try to explain. I have a poem, "Trying to Have Something Left Over," in which I've been unfaithful to my wife and she knows it and she's mad. It's the last night and I'm going to say good-bye to Anna, the other woman. She's had a baby -- not by me -- and her husband has left her because he couldn't take all that muck of a baby being born. This is the last night I'll ever see her and I feel incredibly tender and grateful and loving toward her. And we're not in bed -- previously we had a wild relationship. Anyway, here's the last night to say good-bye. She's cleaning house quietly and sadly, and I'm entertaining her boy, her baby, throwing him up in the air and catching him. It's a poem about that. Sad and tender. A truly adult dream. Profound tenderness.
That's what I like to write as poems. Not because it's sad, but because it matters. So much poetry that's written today doesn't need to be written. I don't understand the need for trickery or some new way of arranging words on a page. You're allowed to do that. You're allowed to write all kinds of poetry, but there's a whole world out there.
Jack Gilbert's volumes of poetry include Views of Jeopardy (1962), Monolithos (1984), Kochan (1984), Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburg (2006), and The Dance Most of All (2009). He is also the author of My Mother Taught Me, an erotic novel.
The Paris Review interview took place in 2005.
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