12 Comments

Beautiful, Bailey.

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thank you.🌱 thank you.🌱 thank you.🌱

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Absolutely gorgeous. Thank you. 🌻

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One of my favorite poets of all time. Thanks for reminding me of that.

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I love Jack Gilbert and the poem about Icarus is my favorite poem.

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Wow! I didn’t even know about that chat book. Bailey, you’re amazing. As you know, yours is my favorite Substack.

Speaking of dogs, I don’t know if Jack ever had pets, but he definitely spent his life around animals.

When I interviewed him, he was already suffering from very severe dementia. As they mentioned in my interview, he lived in North Hampton, Massachusetts with a man named Henry Lyman. I always say that as pets go, Jack was the real deal. Being the real deal means he didn’t have any money when he was old. Henry really took care of him. I can’t remember if I mentioned this in the interview, butJack lived in an apartment above his garage.

Anyway, Henry did indeed have a dog. And Jack did indeed love that dog.

I think Jack was so absorbed in his own world, a beautiful place, made up solely of poetry, that taking pet care of a pet might have been beyond his capabilities.

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I was hoping you might share some intel like this! Thank you. And yes, he positively was the real deal — and well after his passing we are still reaping the benefits of his focus and commitment.

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What a joy to encounter the “farmer of poetry” here, by way of a longtime favorite poem and some others new to me. You probably know the poem in which he compares living with grief for Michiko to carrying a box forever. Although the interview with Sarah Fay is paywalled, I was heartened to see that life in a rented room, with the same lunch every day, suited the old poet who in his youth slept on park benches.

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Oh, my heart. My heart aches having read this in its beautiful, tragic, and precious entirety. I didn’t cry until the Dalmatian, but that nearly broke me. To read of his loss is crushing, but to know the depth of his love is magnificent.

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His writing is very romantic. It makes it rather clear that he did not feel whole when she was gone.

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Lovely. sharply beautiful and heartbreaking.

Unbearable loss which we all face evolving into an uneasy peace.

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