By Insisting on Love We Spoil It

• I bought tickets months ago to see Bonnie Prince Billy at Rams Head in Annapolis next Thursday November 21, 2013. Unfortunately, Earthgirl has since been roped into an evening work function that night so we can't go. Anyone want the tickets? You can have them, not trying to recoup the money, just would be a shame for them to go to waste. I have them and can scan them into PDF and email them to you. Let me know.
• Chilling effects.
• The most banal man alive, the most banal man to have ever lived.
• The bigot's convention.
• Paypal as weapon of the powerful.
• Death to everyone.
• What did they do to education?
• Silliman's always generous lit-links.
• When he called scifi a field.
• Ashbery's "Coconut Milk."
• Jack Gilbert died a year ago today.
• Fortunately, Bonnie Prince Billy is playing the next night, Friday the 22nd, in a building less than 200 yards from where I type this sentence, going with Earthgirl and Hamster and Mr Alarum and Xtina. The woman at the box office also said Oldham is buds with a faculty member in the Music dept and will be giving free workshops on song-writing on campus open to all GU people, and like, holyfuck!

TEAR IT DOWN

Jack Gilbert

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within the body.

How Astonishing It Is that Language Can Almost Mean, and Frightening that It Does Not Quite

Jack Gilbert died a year ago today. If I played a Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game with poets, etc... Here's last year's post and all the poems that were posted in the following days:

Jack Gilbert has died. I posted four of his poems two days ago here. Below are four more. Here is an article on Gilbert posted just yesterday. Here is a profile. Here is a review of Gilbert's Collected Poems from earlier this year: make it your Giftmas present to yourself. Here's Harriet.  Here is the Paris Review interview. If you type Jack Gilbert into the search box top left many more of his poems will appear. UPDATE: three more poems for Wednesday here.

HARD WIRED

Jack Gilbert

He is shamelessly happy to feel the thing
inside him. He labors up through the pines
with firewood and goes back down again.
Winter on the way. Roses and blackberries
finished, and the iris gone before that.
The peas dead in the garden and the beans
almost done. His tomatoes are finally ripe.
The thing inside him is like that, and will
come back. An old thing, a dangerous one.
Precious to him. He meets the raccoon often
in the dark and ends up throwing stones.
The raccoon gets behind a tree. Comes again,
cautious and fierce. It stops halfway.
They stand glaring in the faint starlight.

RELATIVE PITCH

Jack Gilbert

I was carrying supplies back up the mountain
when I heard it, the laughter of children
so strange in that starkness.
Pushed past the brush and scrub willow
and saw a ruined farmhouse and girls
in ragged clothes. They had rigged a swing
and were playing as though they were happy,
as if they did not know any better.
Having no way to measure, I thought,
remembering the man in Virginia who found
a ruined octagonal mansion
and repaired it perfectly. For months
he walked through the grand empty rooms
wondering what they were like.
Until he found a broken chair in the attic
and re-created the colors and scale. Discovered
maybe the kind of life the house was.
Strangers leave us poems to tell of those
they loved, how the heart broke, to whisper
of the religion upstairs in the dark,
sometimes in the parlor amid blazing sunlight,
and under trees with rain coming down
in August on the bare, unaccustomed bodies.

TO SEE IF SOMETHING COMES NEXT

Jack Gilbert

There is nothing here at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally, and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something
comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.
Maybe, he thinks, it is like the No-: whenever
the script says dances, whatever the actor does next
is a dance. If he stands still he is dancing.

A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE

Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
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.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

THE ABNORMAL IS NOT COURAGE

Jack Gilbert

The Poles rode out from Warwaw against the German
tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers.
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
the bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn't that. Not at it's best.
It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight.
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not MacBeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, for the moment.
It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse,
and the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, not Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. and the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
that is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.

But Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Badly

They suck, I said to A and her partner E at a special Saturday Night BBQ edition of Thursday Night Pints at K's place when A asked me how United was doing this year. They're playing and losing right now, I said. A taught my favorite grad class, Performance and Ethics (what does it mean, for instance, to act counter to beliefs to keep a job?), she left Hilltop years ago - left teaching years ago - to run a theater in San Francisco, was in town for the first time in three years. Even if United didn't suck, I told her, I'd have come to the party. Lots of talk of Hilltop of course, none of which will be revealed here. Political talk, of course, it wasn't surprising that consensus within gradations of nuance was expressed. E told us about her work for __________________ and against ________________, asked me to write it just like that. Taunt the fucking bots, she said. I said, I only get scrubbed now and then, and she said, have you got a lot of hits out of Utah lately, and I said, yes, just in the past six months or so, and she smiled.

• UPDATE! Sorry, meant to tease: punch line tomorrow.
• Of course they are listening. 
• What metadata reveals.
• PRISM, partisanship, propaganda.
• Private property and surveillance.
• Encryption and you.
• Charles Pierce, load.
• The Secrecy Industrial Complex.
• The Imperial Presidency.
• The public is Public Enemy One.
• The real war of reality.
• Just give up.
• Villager Court Jester laughs at American liberals.
• Obama's relentless creation of second-class citizens.

• Gnod's Chandelande is one of my favorites of 2013.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Anthony's weekly lit-links.
• As I type this sentence at 9:23 AM EDT 6/16/13 motherfucking Blooger just ate all the sites in blogroll Because Right.
• The secret lives of cats.
• The Hawaiian life of Jim.
• Safe for Now (temporary respite).
• Jack Gilbert interview 1996.
• Yes, I've posted the Gilbert poem below many times. I like it.
• Your David Thomas Song of the Day:

FAILING AND FLYING

Jack Gilbert 

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights
that anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Feeling the Cold, Sinfully Unshriven

 
OK, I admit I'd never heard that song until yesterday on Irwin's show, what, it was wowee, I wasn't going to post it? I swear, blessed serendipity, I woke up this morning with the song below the Jack Gilbert poem in my head and then when link-fishing this morning I saw this, posted while I was asleep. Holyfucking weird. As for the Gilbert poem, I was surprised when I saw this obit/appreciation of Gilbert last night and realized I hadn't posted it during the Gilbert blizzard:


TRANSGRESSIONS

He thinks about how important the sinning was,
how much his equity was in just being alive.
Like the sloth. The days and nights wasted,
doing nothing important adding up to
the favorite years. Long hot afternoons
watching ants while the cicadas railed
in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.
Indolence so often while no one was watching.
Wasting June mornings with the earth singing
all around. Autumn afternoons doing nothing
but listening to the siren voices of streams
and clouds coaxing him into the sweet happiness
of leaving it all alone. Using up what
little time we have, relishing our mortality,
waltzing slowly without purpose. Neglecting
the future. Content to let the garden fail
and the house continue on in its usual disorder.
Yes, and coveting the neighbors' wives.
Their clean hair and soft voices. The seraphim
he was sure were in one of the upstairs rooms.
Hesitant occasions of pride, feeling himself feeling.
Waking in the night and lying there. Discovering
the past in wonderful stillness. The other,
older pride. Watching the ambulance take away
the man whose throat he had crushed. Above all,
his greed. Greed of time, of being. This world,
the pinewoods stretching all brown or bare
on either side of the railroad tracks in winter
twilight. Him feeling the cold, sinfully unshriven.

• On the suckage of presidents. I don't know what Spielberg's motives were when he made Lincoln, though the combination of his full-throated support of Obama and my wild and profound distrust of Obama lead me to think Spielberg's making a comparison between Lincoln and Obama re: the noble sacrifices and hard choices each made and make in the face of racist opposition by enemies and rank political opportunism by friends. Forgive me if I can't equate ordering the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans for the emancipation of slaves with the impoverishing of millions for the saving of bankers' summer cottages in the Alps.
• Plus, as the great (I think so, the guy at the link above thinks so) Duane Ellison ( I took this guy's class years ago. I can tell you that this is hands-down the WORST teacher I have EVER had - so bad I never forgot his name. Rude and just plain creepy as all get out. Impossible tests. Over half the class dropped out before the semester ended. This man made me hate history. DO NOT take his class - you have been warned) taught, the Civil War was about (1) National Bank (2) sale and distribution of western lands (3) protective tariffs and (4) internal capital improvements and only became about slavery when the Union citizens collectively gave up the fuck about the top four.
• Devastation in meatspace.
• Obama calls on citizens to cut their own throats.
• Whistling past graveyard.
• The new, freed from running for reelection, free to be himself, progressive Obama!
• Progressive heroine. 
• Who has a conflict of interest.
• One evil motherfucker.
• Because killing raises less pesky legal logistical issues than taking prisoners.
• Reviewing United's roster.
• Even if United was hosting the MLS Cup title game this Saturday and I was there and would scream for a victory I would still shout that MLS playoffs suck. Cause they do.
• Zombie Doug Duncan!
• No no no, it's Ningland v Chivas.
• On the psychoanalysis of ruins.
• The greatest American artist you've never heard of? I hadn't.
• Two hours of Uncle Tupelo taking requests. Yes, this is a Wilco-free zone, but Uncle Tupelo played often (if not in a while).
• The rise and fall of the obscure music download blog.

Our Slow Crop Is Used Up within an Hour

RIP Dick Whittington, my step-father-in-law. He was a good guy. We weren't close, we were tangents, tertiaries by obligation, but he was a good guy. I hope he thought me a good guy, I'm told he did, but what else are people going to say. He made it to his wife's memorial service two months ago (he was on a train to see her before she died when she died), summoned lucidity out of his alzheimered mind, movement out of his atrophied legs, was as much his old self in handling the necessities and services as he had been in years. In between their deaths a composer and poet who are touchstones died. I created a tag Death, wish I hadn't need use it so much since Death's tag's birth.

• On the both-sides-suck dismissal.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• American diplomacy.
• Definitions and distinctions part one, part two.
• Kiss of death.
• Who's your daddy?
• Terry Fucking McAuliffe? Fucking Democratic Party zombies.
• A few minutes with Ben Olsen.
• A few minutes with Dave Kasper.
• A few minutes with Kevin Payne.
• UPDATE! Goodbye, Branko, we hardly knew you.
• I, for one, mourn the loss of Maryland's traditional rivalries with Syracuse and Pitt.
• Your Fucking Washington Post: Stupid or disingenuous? Let me rephrase that: more stupid than disingenuous or visa versa?
• Silliman's always awesome litlinks.
• Ross' music links.
• Ammons and Hass.
• UPDATE! My formative years.
• Houses of the Holy.
• The only two things missing in Bach are randomness and sex. 

TEMPLATE

Jack Gilbert

Our slow crop is used up within an hour. So I live
effortlessly by the ocean, where the sun bestows
and bestows and I return nothing. Go cross-grain through
the fire and call my style lust. But the night forces me.
I get so quiet lying under the stars I can't regulate
the sound of owls altering me. In that dark in front
of the house, I often think of an old man at Sadler's Wells.
The only one left who had seen the famous dances.
When they did them again, despite the bad notation,
he would watch patiently, saying, No, no that's not the way
it was somehow. Until they got it right. But he died.

He Meets the Raccoon Often in the Dark and Ends Up Throwing Stones

We left extra early to get to BWI to pick up Planet, fearful of Friday evening rush hour traffic on the Beltway to 95 and then north all the way on 95, but traffic was fine, we got to the airport with an hour and a half to spare. I tried to read a novel in the airport but couldn't for the noise and distractions (plane-load after plane-load of teen lacrosse players each in their club sweatshirts, there must be a club tournament this weekend in or near Baltimore) so I surfed web so here, have some links today. Above are Planet's 100 Goats, below an up-close of one goat. As for the never-ending reading slump re:novels (I don't need an airport full of screaming teenagers to be distracted), yes, this still applies but there's more: having unwanted but inevitable and machine-like narratives shoved down my throat elsewhere, I can't stand considering a novel's narrative in my mind on my free time even if it's a narrative that challenges the machine's narrative.

• Social media and Gaza.
• What's going on.
• My brother's keeper: What I and probably most thoughtful critics of Israel favor is not an Israeli defeat. What we favor is that Israel should stop its terrorist violence against the Palestinians and others. (A good parallel would be the US "defeat" in Vietnam, which only meant that the US had to withdraw its forces; it did not mean US surrender to the Vietnamese people, who did not then occupy Washington and take over the US government.)  The Israelis need not surrender, contrary to what the commenter and others assume. All they need to do is stop their abuse of human rights, their violation of every humane concern that arose after the obscenity of World War II and the Nazi crimes. There are more alternatives than the status quo and the obliteration of Israel.
• Essays on Israeli-American relationship. 
• Shortsighted? This is the long view.
• Repression.
• The new disorder.
• Tech nerds who won for Obama.
• Hurricanes, capitalism, democracy.
• Trafficking and civil liberties.
• Maps before maps.
• Maps. Yes, every chance I get.
• Yes, the irony of narrative and format and this blog's narrative and format has occurred to me.
• Yes, again, second day in a row, new Yo La Tengo:

• Easy to assemble.
• The flowers she sent and the flowers she said she sent.
• Or maybe just good luck.
• I think I need a new heart.
• Why atheism?
• When I cry.
• Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?
• You must be out of your mind.
• Re: comments - having looked around Disqus, fuck that. Regulars, the spam bombardment continues, the few of you who've told me how much capcha sucks (and I agree), the only alternative is to enable comment moderation, of the two sucks, capcha is preferable, yes?
• Please stop dancing.
• Guide to Arvo Part.
• Famous.
• Hey, look who the three of us are seeing tonight!

HARD WIRED

Jack Gilbert

He is shamelessly happy to feel the thing
inside him. He labors up through the pines
with firewood and goes back down again.
Winter on the way. Roses and blackberries
finished, and the iris gone before that.
The peas dead in the garden and the beans
almost done. His tomatoes are finally ripe.
The thing inside him is like that, and will
come back. An old thing, a dangerous one.
Precious to him. He meets the raccoon often
in the dark and ends up throwing stones.
The raccoon gets behind a tree. Comes again,
cautious and fierce. It stops halfway.
They stand glaring in the faint starlight.

They Had Rigged a Swing and Were Playing as Though They Were Happy, as If They Did Not Know Any Better

Tamaryn's great. Here's a live set. Hey! Planet gets home tonight, the three of us see Magnetic Fields tomorrow night, I'm going to throw plastic at metal in the daylight Saturday, I'm going to throw plastic at metal Sunday early then meet loved ones for a United playoff game @ RFK @ four, tell you what, music and poems and photos but maybe - maybe - no links and no aargh and no bleggalgazing after today until Monday, maybe Tuesday when we'll be squarely in the slowest week of the year in Blegsylvania anyway. I wasn't going to post another of these, but since a friend offered Kind words:

• Let us now speak plainly. 
• A pillar built on sand.
• It's 2009 all over again. 
• Refresher course.
• This week in war. 
• Dancing with dictators.
• Mr Alarum requests you throw the coins in your pocket at Rolling Jubilee.
• I don't believe a word Erskine Bowles says. Also, I saw a tweet saying Tom Daschle will be next Chief of Staff.
• The woes of Fiscal Cliff. 
• I never said Romney isn't an asshole.
• Dangerous and inane or dangerous and useful or D2E/O? 
• On the shoulders of giants.
• Mother Nature never really loved me.

 

• I've read some Levi Bryant (recommended by Frances), but my mind doesn't subject object object subject object subject subject object very well, I get some of Bryant's gist then go dumb.
• In defense of photography.
• I was bitching to a blogfriend about blooger's comment functionality, specifically not being able to edit my comments for typos, and Disqus was recommended to me. Disqus?
• Christ, the new blooger interface sucks. Really sucks.
• MOCO builds anti-BRT roads as it plans for BRT! 
• Boonsboro!
• St Benny of Olsen: "Listen, we had two days off in between two playoff games. It’s ridiculous….I have no problem if we have the same as the team we’re playing against, but if they have an extra day….And don’t get me wrong, [Houston has] had a lot of games too, they’re banged up and they’ve had some injuries. But I think the league does need to rethink the playoff format. Because everybody wants to see Chris Pontius, everybody wants to see the big guys on the field, especially during the playoffs. Those are the guys that got us here. They take their time throughout the season, slow cook the season,and then the playoffs seems like this big rush. I think they need to reevaluate it." Hey, someone else said that.
• A conversation about stories.
• What's that? There's a new Yo La Tengo album coming in January? What, wanna see a video of a new Yo La Tengo song?

RELATIVE PITCH

Jack Gilbert

I was carrying supplies back up the mountain
when I heard it, the laughter of children
so strange in that starkness.
Pushed past the brush and scrub willow
and saw a ruined farmhouse and girls
in ragged clothes. They had rigged a swing
and were playing as though they were happy,
as if they did not know any better.
Having no way to measure, I thought,
remembering the man in Virginia who found
a ruined octagonal mansion
and repaired it perfectly. For months
he walked through the grand empty rooms
wondering what they were like.
Until he found a broken chair in the attic
and re-created the colors and scale. Discovered
maybe the kind of life the house was.
Strangers leave us poems to tell of those
they loved, how the heart broke, to whisper
of the religion upstairs in the dark,
sometimes in the parlor amid blazing sunlight,
and under trees with rain coming down
in August on the bare, unaccustomed bodies.

If He Stands Still He Is Dancing

• Yes, still monologueless since all that's appeared in tablet (see above) is bleggalgaze and bleggalgaze is less popular than Jack Gilbert and Elliott Carter and DC United and Andy Partridge and Neil Young. No, writing monologues on the return to quotidian motherfuckeringness (did you know the United States had a presidential election just nine days ago? feels three decades?) not only doesn't appeal (though it's far more popular than Jack Gilbert and Elliott Carter and DC United and Andy Partridge and Neil Young), it's inconceivable (see the Gilbert poem below) at least through today (prompting the bleggalgazing), especially when I all I need to is add a link and point, See? They're all still motherfuckers and will always be.
• Second time as tragedy.
• His generation's greatest academic fraud (I say that admiringly).
• Jeebusfuck.
• In the land of the free.
• Lessons in surveillance.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• Motherfucking police, same in any language.
• I didn't vote for this motherfucker who lives in the same town I do.
• Humphries. Fred Humphries. Yes, I recycle my fourteen hour old twooter bits here if I still giggle like a six year old at it.
• George Will drops acid, Fred Hiatt publishes. See?
• Riding the general staff.
• So the thumbsucking starts.

• Eternal recurrence.
• Still life.
• Wretchedness.
• Salvation.
• Rewards.
• Ramifications.
• Anthony's links of the week.
• Bleggalgazing.
• Myersville council member not happy with his iPad!
• BRT! 
• I can't do that. 
• My old friends at Agitprop! 
• Jokes toddlers make! 
• Remembering Gilbert. 
• UPDATE! Gilbert's NYT obituary.
• Henry James, for those of you who do.
• An evening in memory of Dragomoshchenko.
• Stream Robert Wyatt's remastered first solo album.
• Brother from another planet.

TO SEE IF SOMETHING COMES NEXT

Jack Gilbert

There is nothing here at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally, and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something
comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.
Maybe, he thinks, it is like the No-: whenever
the script says dances, whatever the actor does next
is a dance. If he stands still he is dancing.

We Must Have the Stubbornness to Accept Our Gladness in the Ruthless Furnace of This World

A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE

Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
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.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.







THE ABNORMAL IS NOT COURAGE

Jack Gilbert

The Poles rode out from Warwaw against the German
tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers.
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
the bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn't that. Not at it's best.
It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight.
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not MacBeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, for the moment.
It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse,
and the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, not Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. and the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
that is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.

How Astonishing It Is that Language Can Almost Mean, and Frightening that It Does Not Quite

Jack Gilbert has died. I posted four of his poems two days ago here. Below are four more. Here is an article on Gilbert posted just yesterday. Here is a profile. Here is a review of Gilbert's Collected Poems from earlier this year: make it your Giftmas present to yourself. Here's Harriet.  Here is the Paris Review interview. If you type Jack Gilbert into the search box top left many more of his poems will appear. UPDATE: three more poems for Wednesday here.

Unlearn the Constellations to See the Stars

Earthgirl and I took motherfucking Metro (and O! Metro motherfuckers) yesterday to see the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at the East Wing, that's the video of our trip, where were you? Some really good images of permanent East Wing art, but East Wing allows you to take photos of permanent exhibitions while forbidding photos of visiting exhibitions, I was only able to sneak one shot of a Lichtenstein, this one, taken totally at random:

And got HEY!ed by the guard, annoyed I made him look up from his iPhone. Lichtenstein's cartoon-themed paintings he's renowned for never ever oomphed me (despite the above), but up those stairs to the left of that painting, up the stairs past Lichtenstein's cartoon phase, Holyfuck. Holyfuck. I had never seen his sculpture in person, Holyfuck, the dot paintings, Holyfuck, the Japanese paintings, Holyfuck. HEY!, here start the Mekon requests I promised, below the fold more Mekon requests lotsa links, Jack Gilbert poems!

• The end of capitalism?
• For the death-worshippers.
• Hold that football, Lucy.
• Personal thoughts on anger.
• Rivers of Santorum.
• A victory over suppression?
• What Romney lost.
• He didn't get rich being a generous motherfucker.
• He didn't get rich being a generous motherfucker.
• Powerful wishful thinking.
• When assholes clash.
• Scandals and Veteran's Day.
• Most startling photos of 2012?
• So, Metro was single-tracking Red Line for maintenance like they do every fucking weekend, forty-five minute wait there, forty-five minute wait back, they motherfuckers were charging Rush Hour fares. Fuckers.
• Hey! Did you know that Washington DC has a professional soccer team? It's true, they play at four this afternoon in Summer in Houston, where they never win, where Houston plays on a cheater's field, where if they come out only a goal down I'll consider it a victory.
• Dusk & Dawn.
• Julian Cope compendium. This is one of my five favorite songs.
• Fuzzbox.
• Music w/roots in the aether.

FAILING AND FLYING

Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It's the same when love comes to an end,

or the marriage fails and people say

they knew it was a mistake, that everybody

said it would never work. That she was

old enough to know better. But anything

worth doing is worth doing badly.

Like being there by that summer ocean

on the other side of the island while

love was fading out of her, the stars

burning so extravagantly those nights that

anyone could tell you they would never last.

Every morning she was asleep in my bed

like a visitation, the gentleness in her

like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

Each afternoon I watched her coming back

through the hot stony field after swimming,

the sea light behind her and the huge sky

on the other side of that. Listened to her

while we ate lunch. How can they say

the marriage failed? Like the people who

came back from Provence (when it was Provence)

and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.






SOUTH

Jack Gilbert

In the small towns along the river

nothing happens day after long day.

Summer weeks stalled forever,

and long marriages always the same.

Lives with only emergencies, births,

and fishing for excitement. Then a ship

comes out of the mist. Or comes around

the bend carefully one morning

in the rain, past the pines and shrubs.

Arrives on a hot fragrant night,

grandly, all lit up. Gone two days

later, leaving fury in its wake.

FIDELITY

Jack Gilbert

He's absurd about the fountain.
Obsessed.

That the verse be pure
And the letters cut with grace.

For this sorry square,
The brutality of this sun.

Proportions,
Where there isn't even a library.

Or he speaks of the girls
Coming for water.

How that one arranges the light,
Is this year's accomplishment.

What if she does take the morning
On her? And those breasts?

Already there is gossip
That only leaves her peasants.

To celebrate so a village girl
Soon to be broken.







TEAR IT DOWN

Jack Gilbert

We find out the heart only by dismantling what

the heart knows. By redefining the morning,

we find a morning that comes just after darkness.

We can break through marriage into marriage.

By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond

affection and wade mouth-deep into love.

We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

But going back toward childhood will not help.

The village is not better than Pittsburgh.

Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.

Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound

of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls

of the garbage tub is more than the stir

of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not

enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.

We should insist while there is still time. We must

eat through the wildness of her sweet body already

in our bed to reach the body within the body.