APPLE, WORD, KISS: some Jack Gilbert poems

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

some Jack Gilbert poems

Clearly I need to read more Jack Gilbert, because his poems say what I need to hear, and those messages keep rolling around in my head. Read these two:

"Failing and Flying"

"A Brief for the Defense"

And then read more. The Academy of American Poets has more of his work, which you can access by clicking his name from the page that has "Failing and Flying."

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QUOTES

"Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,

be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings."

--Rilke

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I exist as I am, that is enough,

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

And if each and all be aware I sit content.

One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself,

And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,

I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.” ― Walt Whitman

"There are a thousand ways to love a poem." --Donald Hall

Good. Now here's what poetry can do.

Imagine yourself a caterpillar.

There's an awful shrug and, suddenly,

You're beautiful for as long as you live.

—Stephen Dunn

“I believe poetry can be...a constant reminder to ourselves and to our fellow citizens that being alert, both inwardly and outwardly, rewards each person with more life…I say let the poems move in all ways; at least, then, we'll have a chance to reach the bridge—and if we do lose our minds let it be because we believed too much in the heart's voice.” —Tim Seibles, from the intro to Buffalo Head Solos

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” ―Walt Whitman

“The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.” ―Wallace Stevens