Past Poet Laureates
Jack Gilbert
Poet Laureate of Northampton 2006-2008
Jack Gilbert arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s and attended Jack Spicer’s Magic Poetry Workshop, a seminal experience in his writing life. The poetry of the Beat Generation was in full flower all around him, but Gilbert and his work were no fit. He rebelled, not only against the Beats, but against the avant-garde language experiments and other endeavors in verse that were in vogue at the time. Chiefly, he stood against any poetry that he considered to be ephemeral or inconsequential.
“He wrote in very concrete terms, using what he called ‘real nouns,’ and avoided the abstract,” Lyman said, adding that he almost always wrote about people, places or experiences he had known. “The language he used was tangible and had a great intensity. It brought one down to the here and now and made one live through the experience being described.”
Gilbert’s first collection of poetry, “Views of Jeopardy,” was published as a result of his winning a contest, the 1961 Yale Younger Poets Prize, a prestigious honor that warranted notice in The New York Times. “Jeopardy” was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
“He achieved overnight that fame, he was reading to huge audiences and he was in Vogue and Variety magazines, but then he walked away from it,” Lyman said. “He wanted to be living life.”
He moved overseas, living mainly in the Greek islands, and was largely absent from the literary world until the publication of “Monolithos” in 1982 — his first collection since his debut 20 years before and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
A limited-edition chapbook, “Kochan,” appeared in 1984 and was dedicated to another lover, Michiko Nogami. The poems of grief were inspired by Nogami, who had died of cancer at age 36 two years earlier.
He published three more works, “The Great Fires” in 1994, “Refusing Heaven” in 2006 and “The Dance Most of All” in 2009.
In March 2012, Knopf published his “Collected Poems,” gathering his five original collections, along with a selection of uncollected poems, most of them never published before. The last collection spent 30 weeks on the Poetry Foundation’s list of bestselling new poetry books, reaching No. 1 and bringing Gilbert more widespread recognition.
Lyman said Gilbert considered life to be “a gift from the universe, to be cherished and lived as intensely as possible.”