Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg - Part 1

Jack Gilbert 1925-2012
Jack Gilbert was the great American writer who turned his back on fame and insisted on life and work on his own terms absolutely. In 1962, his first book was awarded the prestigious Yale Younger Poets award and he became a kind of media celebrity (including a photo spread in Vogue of the handsome young poet). He rejected conventional notions of success in the world and, when he was younger, railed against those who did not reject it. This story is a good example: Jack was hired as poetry editor of a fledgling literary magazine out of San Francisco-Genesis West-whose founder went on to become fiction editor of Esquire Magazine before the end of its heyday. As poetry editor, he famously rejected hundreds of poems submitted from many very well thought of contemporary poets (like Richard Wilbur and perhaps even Robert Lowell) with caustic rejection letters suggesting they should take up pottery making or some other innocuous hobby.) He lived quietly in San Francisco, or Amherst Mass or on a Greek Island with different women whom he loved and refrained from publishing -sometimes for years. Linda Gregg, the poet who reads after him on the same evening, once his wife, wrote about him: , "All Jack ever wanted to know was that he was awake-that the trees in bloom were almond trees-and to walk down the road to get breakfast. He never cared if he was poor or had to sleep on a park bench."The Pulitzer jury's citation read: "a half century of poems reflecting a creative author’s commitment to living fully and honestly and to producing straightforward work that illuminates everyday experience with startling clarity"