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April 29: The Mistake by Jack Gilbert

April 29: The Mistake by Jack Gilbert

Jack Gilbert, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his last book, Refusing Heaven, is now in his mid-eighties, still celebrating and sorrowing to the fullest. He has returned with an elegiac collection in which he reconsiders, as the figure of Ovid says in one of the poems, “White stone in the sunlight…Both the melody / and the symphony. The imperfect dancing / in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.”

The Mistake

There is always the harrowing by mortality,
the strafing by age, he thinks. Always defeats.
Sorrows come like epidemics. But we are alive
in the difficult way adults want to be alive.
It is worth having the heart broken,
a blessing to hurt for eighteen years
because a woman is dead. He thinks of long
before that, the summer he was with Gianna
and her sister in Apulia. Having outwitted
the General, their father, and driven south
to the estate of the Contessa. Like an opera.
The fiefdom stretching away to the horizon.
Houses of the peasants burrowed into the walls
of the compound. A butler with white gloves
serving chicken in aspic. The pretty maid
in her uniform bringing his breakfast each
morning on a silver tray: toast both light
and dark, hot chocolate and tea both. A world
like Tosca. A feudal world crushed under
the weight of passion without feeling.
Gianna’s virgin body helplessly in love.
The young man wild with romance and appetite.
Wondering whether he would ruin her by mistake.

Listen to a 1991 recording of Jack Gilbert reading his poem “Meanwhile”

Audio

More about The Dance Most of All

More about Refusing Heaven

About Jack Gilbert


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5 Responses to “April 29: The Mistake by Jack Gilbert”

  1. richard rozen says:

    I carry Jack Gilbert’s poems on my body every day. He guides us through the spaces in our minds, and reminds us that the small can be eternal and the eternal small.

  2. Bill Mayer says:

    Just to hear his voice again, when he had it still, is deeply moving. As Ezra Pound said about Eliot: Read him.

  3. richard rozen says:

    may Mr. Gilbert know on his long walks that he is treasured

  4. Bill Mayer says:

    Alas, he’s not walking much these days, is living in a Skilled Nursing Facility in Berkeley, CA. I visit him frequently, and occasionally read him his own poems, and sometimes those of some of his friends in the poetry workshop we’ve worked in for many years.

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Knopf's Poem-A-Day 2010

April 1: Edward Hirsch’s “Self-portrait”
April 2: Marge Piercy’s “Seven Horses”
April 3: Dan Chiasson’s “Banquette” and “Next”
April 4: Marie Ponsot’s “Transport”
April 5: Alexander Neubauer’s Poetry in Person, featuring Derek Walcott
April 6: Mark Strand’s “Mirror”
April 7: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Spring”
April 8: Philip Levine’s “MY FATHERS, THE BALTIC”
April 9: Vera Pavlova’s “A Remedy for Insomnia”
April 10: Stan Rice’s “The Fragment of Statue”
April 11: Marina Tsvetayeva’s “Poems Grow”
April 12: Kevin Young’s “EYES + EGGS [1983]“
April 13: Janusz Szuber’s “About a Boy Stirring Jam”
April 14: Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died”
April 15: Franz Wright’s "My Pew"
April 16: Mary Jo Salter’s “Welcome to Hiroshima”
April 17: Yehuda Halevi’s “A man in your fifties—and you still would be young?”
April 18: Langston Hughes’s “Black Workers” and “Black Dancers”
April 19: W. S. Di Piero’s “In Our Room”
April 20: Robert Wrigley’s “Kissing a Horse”
April 21: Sharon Olds’s “When He Came for the Family” and “The Signal”
April 22: Irving Feldman’s “Stretched Out at Length”
April 23: W.S. Merwin’s “The Furrow”
April 24: David Lehman’s “Poem in the Manner of a Jazz Standard”
April 25: John Keats’s “This Living Hand”
April 26: Laurie Sheck’s A Monster’s Notes
April 27: Garrett Hongo’s “Volcano House”
April 28: Wallace Stevens’s “Large Red Man Reading”
April 29: Izumi Shikibu’s love poems
April 30: Deborah Digges's "Write a Book a Year"