Why not go out on a limb? Isn't that where the fruit is?

- Frank Scully

i loved you only a little, because it is much easier to manage smaller quantities of things. i loved you in parts, because it is less risky to do anything in parts rather than all at once. the wholeness is too much to gamble, too much to lose.

i risked some things, and hedged with others. i crept out and made small fires when i could, but poured water everywhere before the fire could spread. i ran inside caves for warmth instead.

when i discovered chances to stay, i looked for escape. i ran in the directions that took me farthest away from you. this touching, in the air. i waited, breathless, for your hands to follow mine.

we both watched each other, circling, waiting.

when watching a mirror, no one makes the first move.

"It was like being alive twice."

and

"While there's still time, let's go out and feel everything."

This perspective, it makes it all seem worthwhile, and the nonsensical seems to make sense. 

Well, here we go:

Meeting Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg

I met Jack Gilbert in Linda Gregg’s kitchen in the summer of 2009. I had met Linda months before at Sarah Lawrence College where I was finishing my MFA in poetry and directing the student-run poetry festival that year. We had invited Linda to read, which I was incredibly happy about, and so she came on a strange, chilly evening in April and I picked her up from the train station. I was very familiar with her poems, they meant (and still mean) a lot to me—she was a lyric poet I’d studied carefully.

I don’t remember what we talked about on the way to the auditorium or what I was thinking, but what I do remember is that there was a moment before she went on stage when we were alone in the green room and I said to her, “what are you reading tonight?” Her selected poems, All of It Singing, had just been published by Graywolf Press and she said she was reading from that book. There was a long silence after that. She didn’t seem eager to talk. Someone came in the room and told us we had 5 minutes before Linda had to go on stage. She took a bottle of water, looked at me, and said, “which way?” I walked in front of her and on the way to the auditorium I shyly looked back and said, “would you read your poem ‘Asking for Directions’?” There was another silence. We were walking. “Oh,” she said. “That one?” And we arrived.

Victoria Redel introduced her, Linda went up and began to read, and poem after poem I was impressed by her in an entirely new way. I hadn’t heard her read. I remember I wasn’t in the audience, I was standing in the corner, to the left, near the podium, in case she needed something during her reading or there were any technical difficulties. After a while I looked at my watch and knew there was about 5 minutes left. I gave her a signal. She read another poem and after she finished she briefly looked at me, then back to her book, and said, “this last one is for my new friend over there,”—I’m sure we’d exchanged names but she didn’t say my name—“it’s called ‘Asking for Directions,’ it’s a poem I almost never read. It’s a,” she paused, “difficult, deeply personal poem for me.” I knew then that we had understood something about each other, even if she had forgotten my name.

That night we rode the train back to New York together. I was living on Allen Street (where I still live) and she was living on St. Mark’s (where she still lives), and so we commuted home, being more or less neighbors. I really liked Linda because like most of the people I’m instantly drawn to, she got right to the point (which is also my style). We talked about our love affairs, our families, her poems, death, and pop music—all on the Metro North, on the 40 minute train ride. She gave me her phone number, a land line, and told me to call her up sometime.

Two weeks after that reading I graduated from graduate school and had free time (for the first time in what felt like forever), during which I was, of course, looking for jobs. One afternoon, feeling deeply discouraged after a long search, I came across the piece of paper on which Linda had written down her number. It was in the pocket of the jeans I’d worn the night we met. I called her. She invited me over. I walked the eight blocks and stayed for four hours. We talked about everything. We talked about poetry. We drank. I watched her smoke cigarettes. A month later, the same thing: I called her, came over, another four hours.

The third time I called her she picked up the phone and said, “Jack Gilbert is here, do you know his poems?” “Oh wow,” I said. “Do you know his poems?” she repeated. I think I must have said “oh wow” again because she asked the question a third time, in a more impatient tone, and I immediately blurted out, “I love his poems, can I please come over and meet him!” She said yes. I walked the eight blocks. She opened the door.

I went in, sat at my usual chair at the round, wooden table, and I saw Jack Gilbert in the other room. He was sitting down on a sofa. “Let’s talk for a bit,” she said, “he’ll come out if he wants.” And so we talked, like usual, and after a while I forgot he was there, until he got up from the sofa and slowly began walking toward the kitchen. In our conversation Linda had said that they were about to fly out to California where Jack was going to live. He was sick, but she hadn’t yet told me that he had Alzheimer’s.

As soon as he walked in Linda said, in a very loud voice, “Hi Jack, this is my friend Alex.” Jack was looking down at his feet, walking, but he heard her. He came over to my side of the table and said, “Hi. I’m Jack.” He held out his hand, I held out mine, ready for a handshake, and he put his other hand over mine. I was incredibly nervous and felt slightly embarrassed to be there. I looked over at Linda, Jack still holding my hand, and she said, in a lower voice, “tell him you’re a poet.” I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to do. He was looking at me now and I looked back, then down, and again at Linda, who said, in her loud voice, “Jack, he’s a poet.” Jack finally let go of my hand and once again looked at me in his intense, slow way—it was a common look for him, Linda would tell me later—and he said, “Me too. I’m a poet too.” And then he filled a cup with water and went back to the sofa in the living room.

I don’t remember anything Linda and I talked about after that. What comes to mind, as I type this now, is a moment months later (I would continue to go over to Linda’s apartment every two to three months and we’d do the usual thing: talk, drink, smoke for hours) when she said to me, “that day when you met Jack, that’s probably going to be the only time you see him. He’s not coming back to the East Coast.” But I also knew that what she meant was, he was dying.

I found Jack Gilbert’s poems before I read Linda Gregg’s. I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and I picked up The Great Fires. I found out about Linda’s poems from reading Jack’s, and I went through phases when I liked his more than hers and hers more than his, but it wasn’t about that. They were poets who had written poems that I admired with an intensity that was almost devotional. Their poems were naked, heartbreaking, ruthless, and contained. Once I’d read them, I couldn’t forget them. I re-read them often or…all the time. My interest in their poems continued through college, graduate school, and is still strong today.

So when Jack Gilbert died earlier this month, I thought about that moment in Linda’s kitchen and I also thought about our meetings, Linda and I. The last time I saw her was in December of 2010 when I went over to her apartment again. After that we both got busy—I was writing my first book of poems, running Wilde Boys, working full time at the Academy of American Poets, and she was visiting Jack on the West Coast very regularly and trying to write as well. She never read my poems because I didn’t really want her to—though she did keep asking. Our connection was one I still can’t entirely describe. It was deeply personal. Like her poems and like my poems. I told her things about my family and boys I’d dated, things I was trying to figure out how to write about. She told me endless stories from her life—San Francisco and studying with Robert Duncan, her time in Greece with Jack, and many other things.

One of the times I was over I brought my copy of All of It Singing and asked her to sign it. We knew each other pretty well by then so she wrote a really nice, personal note in the book. I asked her about the dedication—it was for Jack, with an epigraph that read—“It was like being alive twice.” She didn’t say anything about it. “It was like being alive twice”—she read it to me, just once, deliberately, out loud. It came from a poet she loved, I forget who, and I suppose I could look it up but it’s more honest to tell you that it didn’t matter to me because that line felt entirely written by her, for Jack. And then she showed me these incredible little thumb size books of poems (yes, thumb size) that Jack had made by hand, and written love poems in, in the tiniest of handwriting. She let me take a photo of one of them in my palm. I still have that photo on my phone and I would post it but it feels too personal, so I’ll let you imagine.

Those meetings with Linda, over that year and a half period, were an emotional education for me—like reading her poems, like reading Jack’s poems. Their poems have taught me many things, among them, the depths of feeling that all of us have access to, and how difficult it is to feel, and to be a feeling person in the world. We all know that, but it’s important for me to write it here because it’s another way to say: Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg’s poems have instructed me not to turn off, to stay on, to feel things, as they really are.

That last time I saw Linda I told her about one of Paul Thek’s paintings that I was obsessed with at the time. Paul Thek had a deep friendship with Susan Sontag. She dedicated Against Interpretation and AIDS and Its Metaphors to him. He painted things like this for her. I had been looking at his paintings in catalogues while I was reading Sontag and I told Linda about this one that had made a great impression on me. It was called “While there’s still time, let’s go out and feel everything.” We both loved the title. Linda said, “Jack would too.”

Alex Dimitrov / November, 2012 / NYC

love is like complicated knots
or deep wells
or labyrinths

it's much easier to wander into them than to find your way out

Put a few words together prettily and it’s possible
to fall in love.
Move your hand slightly and I’m yours. Or gone.
And think of what can be done with flowers
or paint. I take back
what I said in my message yesterday,
the one saying I had printed and folded each message from you
into a boat, and now had a fleet of origami ships on my desk,
all of them sinking, none of them, I said,
seaworthy. That was mean.
If I think of them differently—not as vessels,
not as anything that might save a life—
but as smooth stones or carved chess pieces,
something I might hold to comfort me,
something I might put in my mouth,
then perhaps I can continue to pass the time this way.
The way I want you
just a detail, just a thing that can be carried.

-Missy-Marie Montgomery, Arrangement

things i know how to do in theory but probably would fail at if i tried:
- change a flat tire
- only eat half of a cookie (and not the whole thing)
- cut my bangs
- braid my hair




--


The Romans put skulls into their love poems.
Skeletons and dry bones along with love.
As if violet was only beautiful against
something black. We also talked of death,
I perhaps more than you. It made me happy
to think of the newly dead body being lowered
into the coffin of the other. You found
this idea impressive but terrible.
I longed for your agreement and approval.
Wanted you to understand the hugeness of love.
You whispered that our bones would be mixed
together, but probably it was your way
to get me to stop crying and go to sleep.
Which I did, contentedly. I wanted something
to be done, some enactment to prove this secret,
this illicit love. Something too large.
I wanted it made of actual things. Dirt
and corpses even. As real as the table you
said your love was, that I could sit down to
and eat from if I wanted something permanent.
I wanted absoluteness to be made of my heart.

“A Bracelet of Bright Hair About the Bone,” Linda Gregg

while everyone was looking at something else,
and you were looking to see what they were looking at,
i was looking for you.

s. sent this to me, a clip from Scandal. I can't decide with whom I agree with more- while my head sides with he who believes that love shouldn't hurt, my heart uneasily realizes I'm probably more inclined towards the sort of love Olivia craves.

“I don’t want normal and easy and simple. I want painful, difficult, devastating, life-changing, extraordinary love.” - Olivia Pope

A Pyrrhic victory is a victory with such a devastating cost that it carries the implication that another such victory will ultimately lead to defeat. Someone who wins a Pyrrhic victory has been victorious in some way; however, the heavy toll negates any sense of achievement or profit. Nevertheless, a Pyrrhic victory is seen as a superior result to an outright loss, at least when the battle is over a strategically valuable resource.

Today, the windows sleep nestled upon the greyness of the raining skies.

In another one of my restless searches for meaning, I circled back to Jack Gilbert. Last weekend, I told someone that he saves my life when it needs saving. The day after that, I had a brief conversation with someone who owned volumes of poetry. I only briefly was able to ask him why, though he is as entrenched as I am in the corporate world, would he be moved by poetry. He answered, all the more reason for it. And I thought of the line "They should've sent a poet" in the movie Contact (which I have never seen) relating to the general idea that the things encountered during space exploration are best suited to poetic description... although discovered by scientists...

Two people  on consecutive days decided that the cure for whatever ails me is fortune telling.

Here, again, the late and great Jack Gilbert breaks apart life and writing and love and what it means to be human.

CD: Jack, your poems have so much human presence and pressure in them. Do you achieve this by working on the poems or by living your life? Or both?
JG: I don't write poems as a way of writing a poem. I think I'm more prone to writing a poem on something I think I see or know or understand that is new. It's like what I've I said about having an illicit relationship. It's not a question of cheating on somebody or wanting to get laid, or seeking physical pleasure. But for whatever reason there is this illicit relationship. If you've ever experienced that, caring about a man or woman in an illicit way, there's an emotional quality in that apartment that doesn't exist any other place in the world. I'm not saying it's good or bad. That sadness, that knowledge that this can't last, that you're hurting someone too much, the poem tries to capture this, this great tenderness. Maybe I'm playing with somebody else's baby so she can do the cooking. There's an intimacy in that illegitimacy that I think is unique, if the people are serious with each other. I want to confront death in my poetry. Like in the lines I read last night from my poem "A Brief for the Defense." "Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies / aren't starving someplace, they are starving / someplace else. With flies in their nostrils. / But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants." We must not let misery take away our happiness. It's a crazy thing to say because life can be horrifying. We live in a world that has death in it, and injustice and all these things. But it's important to go on being capable of happiness or delight in the world, not to ignore these other things, but to recognize that we have to build our poems within a bad terrain. It's just how life is.

CD: Well this student deciding to stay here in this program instead of going to law school, that's a very physical, real change.

JG: Well it's wonderful and so flattering. It's great to hear. I went to a reading several years ago and after it was over—this is going to sound pompous—several people who knew I was in the audience came over to me and formed a circle, which was good for my vanity. I'm saying this ironically. Then suddenly a man in his early forties, maybe his late thirties, just an ordinary guy, came pushing through this group that had formed around me, and without saying hello or introducing himself, said, "I want you to know that you've been keeping me alive with your poetry since 1982." Without giving me time to respond, he pushed his way to the other side and disappeared. I never could find him. But that was deeply moving. 

CD: Why did grow so wary of your talent for reading so well?
JG: I would like to think I was really smart at seeing my weaknesses.
CD: Which were?
JG: My pride and my strength.
CD: Why do feel your pride and strength were also your weaknesses?
JG: I came to see what performance does to someone. It rots you. You become so vain. This is why I refuse to give readings. Because I am weak, it's hard to resist the power. You're like an actor who can capture the audience with your words, your style, your appearance.
CD: Then where does your real power come from?
JG: I don't trust myself. I love the effect so much. It's like if you have the power to make women fall in love with you. I don't want to become that person, that performer, that figure who can intoxicate his audience. If  I wanted to I could make a lot of money. But then I wouldn't want to give it up.
CD: What is the power in you to resist the power?
JG: I would like to think it's the strength of real pride.
CD: How do you distinguish real pride from false pride?
JG: Real pride gives up, false pride keeps performing.

CD: I remember you once telling me when you lived with my wife and me in Iowa for a few months that many poets of your reputation and prestige enjoy flying on planes and going places, but that you're content just to stare out the window of the Greyhound bus.
JG: Yes. I like my memories of being hungry and lost. I relish all those things. The experience of being myself. To be privileged to have been there, in my life.
CD: Like a guest of yourself?
JG: Not a guest, but to have had it.

--
His poem, "Divorce"

Woke up suddenly thinking I heard crying.
Rushed through the dark house.
Stopped, remembering. Stood looking
out at bright moonlight on concrete.

I think about how the things that drive us crazy at the present moment can be what we regret or reflect on most as time separates us from that moment... how this is the eternal human condition, remorse and regret and the ability for reflection rather than gratitude for all we have learned and moving forward always... that we miss things from the past for the sheer vivacity of feeling, because it reminded us we were human... that it takes the battles to remind us of the value of peace... to remind us even what peace is.

Kevin Spacey on NPR's Fresh Air:

um, look, i think for whatever reason there are people who come together at certain points in their lives who provide something that no one else has ever provided. i imagine a great amount of that is freedom, and a great amount of that is clarity about "i believe in you and i'm better with you than i am on my own"

but i think what's interesting about this type of relationship is that it seems that these are not two people who view their life through the prism of their relationship. these are two people who have very strong lives outside of each other and have their own interests outside of each other and perhaps even their own friends. [...] and that strength, individualism, that ability to be so concrete in their own lives then when they come together they are even stronger. but they are allowed to operate in their own worlds and give each other that kind of freedom.