Jack Gilbert & Michiko Nogami
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Jack Gilbert is my favorite poet. Perhaps he’s yours, too.
Alice Quinn, former poetry editor of The New Yorker, wrote that his were “poems that stood tall, making one step back and slow down.” I’m inclined to agree.
Here are two of my favorites.
In over 50 years of writing, Jack Gilbert published just four collections. He reflected on this by saying: “It’s not a business with me . . . . I’m not a professional of poetry, I’m a farmer of poetry.”1
Jack Gilbert treated his discipline with supreme reverence, calling poetry “a witnessing to magnitude”:
“[Poetry] is the art of making urgent values manifest, and of imposing them on the reader. It is the housing of these values in poems so they will exist with maximum pressure, and for the longest time. It is the craft of doing so in structures that are a delight in themselves. And it is the mystery of fashioning poems in such a way that the form and the content are one.”
If you’ve read Jack Gilbert’s poems, you know that he wasn’t exaggerating by describing himself as a “serious romantic.” He returned regularly to love and its implications in his writing. Fellow poet Dan Albergotti said that Jack Gilbert’s poems about love, loss, and grief “defy all expectations of sentimentality.”
And if you’ve read Jack Gilbert’s poems, you’ll recognize the name Michiko. Michiko Nogami was a sculptor and Jack’s former student. They met in San Francisco, and Jack followed her to Japan. They lived and traveled together until she died from cancer at age 36. I could only find one photo of her.
Jack Gilbert didn't publish for most of their 11-year relationship. When he was asked why, he said that he had spent that time “falling in love.”
As Michiko was dying, he published again.
In the years to follow, Jack left us with many poems memorializing her and reflecting on loss.
Three of the poems above were first published in Kochan, a chapbook collection of elegiac poems written for and with Michiko. (Four of Michiko’s own poems are included in the chapbook.2 )
Kochan was published two years after her death in a limited run of 300, which are hand sewn in Mulberry rice paper. After Kochan, Jack Gilbert wouldn’t publish again for a decade. His next collection, The Great Fires, is a meditation on the ten years after Michiko’s death.
On the final page of Kochan, Jack chose to etch a poem from the Man’yōshū, the oldest anthology of Classical Japanese poetry.3
If I had known the size of this longing
I would have watched you every day
like looking in a clear mirror
If anyone had the wisdom to see a loved one clearly in the present moment, as this poem prescribes, it was Jack Gilbert. His poems demonstrate that capacity, and they are his and Michiko’s lasting gift to us.
“[Poetry] is the art of making urgent values manifest, and of imposing them on the reader. It is the housing of these values in poems so they will exist with maximum pressure, and for the longest time.” — Jack Gilbert
This newsletter is called Art Dogs, and, as always, I promise to deliver for you.
While I could find no evidence that Jack Gilbert and Michiko Nogami had pets, after reading his poems, I suspect a dog or two may have graced their lives.
One poem in particular makes me confident in this. It’s an apt poem to bring this edition to a close.
Bonus
Here’s another poem that Jack wrote for the Kochan collection: “Nights and Four Thousand Mornings.” I discovered it on an obscure Tumblr, where I found the rest of the Kochan poems.
“Nights and Four Thousand Mornings” is the longest poem Jack Gilbert ever wrote, and I had never seen it before researching this post. I hope you enjoy it.
If you are keen to read more about Jack Gilbert, the best resource out there is Sarah Fay’s interview with him in The Paris Review: Jack Gilbert, The Art of Poetry No. 91.
https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2014%252F02%252F17.html
Here are Michiko’s poems from the Kochan chapbook, which was printed after she died:
Kochan #2
Rabbit in the room
A brown rabbit jumps
in my heart.
Goes out through my back.
Leaving us trapped
looking
with his tender eyes.
Kochan #5
Song
A strange, nameless river
runs from my heart
into this world
while I go happily
trying to reach a country
inhabited by no one.
Kochan #7
Transformations
Is there no way
to stop the houses falling
within the bird’s body?
Why must life go on
testing the heart
against metal?
Such excess
pours a terrible glaze
over me.
I can feel myself thickened
by the unmoving sun
as the dove in me flies on,
shadowless as always.
Kochan #11
Being Ready
Being ready
I watch and listen to the silence
coming through the dark, narrow
path of the world
toward my small room.
Gilbert, Jack and Michiko Nogami. “4221.” Kochan, Tamarack, 1984.
Beautiful, Bailey.
thank you.🌱 thank you.🌱 thank you.🌱