The Writer's Almanac from Monday, February 17, 2014

The Writer's Almanac from Monday, February 17, 2014

"Getting Old" by Jack Gilbert, from Collected Poems. © Knopf, 2012.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2014

It's the birthday of poet Jack Gilbert, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1925). He failed out of high school and found jobs as a pest exterminator and a steel worker. He was eventually admitted to the University of Pittsburgh without a high school degree — apparently on a clerical error. One of his classmates was Gerald Stern, who wrote poetry; after they became friends, Gilbert decided to try writing some poems of his own.

When he published his first book, Views of Jeopardy (1962), he won the Yale Younger Poets prize and became an instant celebrity. He had photo spreads in Glamour, Vogue, and Esquire; famous poets praised him publicly; and Views of Jeopardy was so popular that it became the most stolen book from American libraries. He said: "I enjoyed those six months of being famous. Fame is a lot of fun, but it's not interesting. I loved being noticed and praised, even the banquets. But they didn't have anything that I wanted. After about six months, I found it boring. There were so many things to do, to live."

So he left the country. He had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which meant $5,000 and the chance to travel in Europe, and for the next two decades, he rarely returned to the United States. He lived in Greece, Denmark, and England with his partner, the poet Linda Gregg. She said: "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." After they broke up, Gilbert fell in love with a sculptor named Michiko Nogami, and he moved with her to Japan. During all those years, he didn't publish another book — when he was asked why, he said that he was spending his time falling in love with those two women.

In 1982, he published his second book, Monolithos. That same year, Nogami died of cancer; she was just 36 years old. Gilbert wrote a chapbook dedicated to her, Kochan (1984), and then once again didn't publish for a decade. He continued to travel; he never owned a home, and drove a car only twice. He managed to annoy a lot of his contemporaries because he was so critical — in 1962, he announced: "If 99 percent of the poets writing today stopped publishing, it would not be a loss." He didn't like poets who had nice comfortable jobs at universities, and who wrote impressive-sounding poems about things that didn't matter much. He said that most American poets didn't even actually want to write poems, but had to in order to keep getting grants and positions. He said: "If he's a man teaching at a university, as he probably is, and married to a wife he courted years ago, and has several quite healthy children [...] what's he going to make his poems out of? [...] He's unlikely to be what the Elizabethans admired so much, an over-reacher. You aren't likely to get a big-boned poem straining its limits. [...] They reduce poetry to something toilet-trained and comfortable." He said that the only things really worth writing about were these: "Love, death, man, virtue, nature, magnitude, excellence, evil, suffering, courage, morality. What is the good life. What is honor. Who am I."

After Monolithos, he wrote just three more books of poetry: The Great Fires (1994), Refusing Heaven (2005), and The Dance Most of All (2010). When his Collected Poems was published in 2012, all of his work fit in its 400 pages. Gilbert died later that year.

Jack Gilbert said: "It's not a business with me. [...] I'm not a professional of poetry; I'm a farmer of poetry."

The International Red Cross was founded on this day in Geneva, Switzerland (1863). The initial committee had only five members, including a local man named Henry Dunant, who had recently published a pioneering book called A Souvenir of Solferino (1862). The book documented fighting in Northern Italy in 1859, and pushed for improving and advancing the care for wounded soldiers during times of war. Dunant would later go on to be awarded the very first Nobel Peace Prize, in 1901.

It was on this day in 1913 that the Armory Show opened in New York City, the first comprehensive exhibition of modern art in this country. At the time, American art was dominated by the ultra-conservative National Academy of Design, which had no interest in nonrepresentational or experimental work. In 1912, a group of artists had gotten together and formed the Association for American Painters and Sculptors. One of these artists was the painter Walt Kuhn, who wrote to his wife: "My idea about the new society is this: a big broad liberal organization embracing every kind of art, even those which I do not like, one that will interest the public ... the thing must be started so that it can grow and be as big or bigger than the academy within two or three years."

The group decided that the best way to compete with the Academy would be to have a well-publicized exhibition. Kuhn and fellow artist Arthur Bowen Davies traveled to Europe to collect art for the show. They brought home work by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Vincent Van Gogh, and many other artists.

It's the birthday of crime novelist Ruth Rendell, born in London, England (1930). Her parents had a terrible marriage and her mother was ill with multiple sclerosis that went undiagnosed for years, and so young Ruth began writing about her life as if it were a story happening to someone else.

While working as a reporter for a small, suburban London newspaper, she decided to write a detective novel for fun. It was titled From Doon with Death (1964), and it began an extremely popular series of detective stories starring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford.

Wexford, as Rendell puts it, is not a glamour figure. He's overweight, sloppy, slow-moving, and tempted at times to stray. But in the end, he's a faithful husband and a thoughtful, sensitive, articulate man, and readers love him. Inspector Wexford is still appearing in new mysteries; Rendell's latest is No Man's Nightingale (2013).

Rendell describes herself as a workaholic, follows the same routine every day, writing for about four hours every morning and then eating the exact same lunch: bread, cheese, salad and fruit. But she has said that, despite producing an average of two books per year for almost 50 years, she doesn't feel as if she's churning anything out. "If I did," Rendell explains, "I would stop. I am quite happy to go on doing what I am doing now for the rest of my life. I don't see why I should stop."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

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