The Ghost Inside

The Ghost Inside

A profile of Jack Gilbert.

by Sarah Manguso

“I don’t want to be at peace,” Jack Gilbert
pronounced shortly after his 80th birthday.
Yet he has spent much of his life on remote
Greek islands, on a houseboat in Kashmir,
on a western Massachusetts farm, and in the
remote outskirts of Sausalito, California,
either alone or in the company of one other.
He has never owned a home and has driven a
car only twice. A sensible person might even
say he’s sought a peace separate from the
arena of the “career poets”—and maybe even
separate from that of the career adult. But
the unique kernel of Gilbert’s poetry is its
fearless exploration of the adult heart. It
takes a moment to have a fling or write one
good line, but sustaining authentic emotional
participation, as Gilbert has in his life as
a poet, is terrifying and hard, and is
practically a lost art.

A word about the women in Gilbert’s love poems
before I go on. More than a few readers bristle
at Gilbert’s apparently “antifeminist” poems.
Women appear as totem creatures of mystery and
beauty in poems like “Dante Dancing,” “Finding
Eurydice,” and “Gift Horses,” but I am convinced
that conventional feminism is the wrong filter
through which to read these works. In response
to a question about his elegiac poems written
for his lost wife, Gilbert explained: “It was
about grief, not about me.” Despite relationships
that had all the signs of intimacy—with Gianna,
Linda Gregg, and Michiko Nogami—Gilbert found
the women he “knew” unknowable. And so he may
write: “We are allowed / women so we can get
into bed with the Lord, / however partial and
momentary that is.” In the introduction to his
own poems in the 1983 volume Nineteen New
American Poets of the Golden Gate, Gilbert wrote:
“I relish the physical surface of a woman, but
I am importantly haunted by the ghost inside.”

Last year Gilbert turned 80 and published his
fourth book, Refusing Heaven. Form appears
incidental to content in the new poems, as
ever in Gilbert’s work. In an interview in
the 1990s Gilbert said, “Mechanical form doesn’t
really matter to me. . . . Some poets [write
within a form] with extraordinary deftness. But
I don’t understand why. . . . It’s like treating
poetry as though it’s learning how to balance
brooms on your head. . . . It’s like people who
think sexuality is fun. Sure, it’s fun, but it’s
a way of getting someplace, not just running to
the corner for a little spasm.”

There are no little spasms in Gilbert’s poems—
just giant ones, the immeasurable subjects of love
and death, quiet but also somehow deafening.
Gilbert’s is an aesthetic of exclusion. “There is
usually a minimum of decoration in the best,” he
has said. “Both the Chinese and the Greeks were in
love with what mathematicians mean by elegance:
not the heaping up of language, but the use of a
few words with utmost effect.” Despite their
streamlined appearance, Gilbert’s poems are not
sentimental, obvious, or thin.

In a recent interview in The Paris Review,
Gilbert asked, “Why do so many poets settle
for so little? I don’t understand why they’re
not greedy for what’s inside them. . . . When
I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me
how much the presence of the heart—in all its
forms—is endlessly available there.”

What is the most important thing a poet must seek,
I asked him in February. His response:
“Depth and warmth.”