Jack Gilbert was an American poet. Gilbert was acquainted with Jack Spicer and Allen Ginsberg, both prominent figureheads of the Beat Movement, but is not considered a Beat Poet; he described himself as a “serious romantic.” Over his five-decade-long career, he published five full collections of poetry.
Much of Gilbert’s work is about his relationships with women. While in Italy, he met Gianna Gelmetti, a romantic partner who appears frequently in his work. The relationship ended after a year. Gilbert was a close friend of the poet Linda Gregg, whom he met when she was nineteen and his student in San Francisco, and with whom he was in a relationship for six years. Of the poet, Gregg once said,
“All Jack ever wanted to know was that he was awake—that the trees in bloom were almond trees—and to walk down the road to get breakfast. He never cared if he was poor or had to sleep on a park bench”. (via Wikipedia)
The following are the few great quotes by Jack:
On Love:
Love is eaten away by appetite.
(From: The Great Fires)
Love is one of many great fires.
(From: The Great Fires)
My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey.
(From: The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart)
You will love again, people say. Give it time. Me with time
running out. Day after day of the everyday.
What they call real life, made of eighth-inch gauge.
Newness strutting around as if it were significant.
Irony, neatness and rhyme pretending to be poetry.
I want to go back to that time after Michiko’s death
when I cried every day among the trees. To the real.
To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive.
On Life:
She knows
her life is over.
(From: Recovering Amid The Farms)
On Courage:
But I say courage is not the abnormal.
(From: The Abnormal Is Not Courage)
On Nature:
I have been easy with trees
Too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
Suddenly
This rain.
The blue river is grey at morning
and evening. There is twilight
at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark
wondering if this quiet in me now
is a beginning or an end.
We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day.
What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.
On Hapiness:
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.