by David Young

Jack Gilbert, The Dance Most of All
Philip Levine, News of the World

from FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Spring 2010

I don't know if there is really any such thing as the poetry of old age. Probably not. Some poets are lucky, like Stevens and Yeats, to continue being productive in their late years and even sometimes to improve on early or middle work. Others, like Wordsworth, just drone on, and we learn to ignore their late poems. That there is something unique or distinctive about a poem produced by a 75- or 80-year-old is one of those assertions that most likely won't bear close inspection. The imagination, after all, can produce aged wisdom while speaking through youth, and may display youthful vigor while inhabiting an oldster. It won't accept limits or categories.

That said, it's intriguing to read a couple of older poets side by side, speculating on how they got to where they are and what they are up to at present. There are certainly some features of aging—diminishing sense perception, layer upon layer of memory, rueful awareness of mortality—that might be expected to show up more regularly in such work. And there may also be a kind of freedom—from possessions and commitments that tie us down, from relationships that have dissolved through time and loss, from sensual preoccupations and ego-driven behaviors—a freedom that gives the "elderly" poet a new lease on creativity and poem-making. Remember Yeats' beggar-hermit who, "giddy with his hundredth year, / Sang unnoticed like a bird"? Both "sang" and "unnoticed" are key aspects of that insight, while "like a bird" is something any and all of us aspire to, a naturalness of expression that links us to "great creating Nature."

Here is the opening poem of Jack Gilbert's new book, The Dance Most of All:

EVERYWHERE AND FOREVER

It pleases him that the villa is on a mountain
flayed bare by the great sun. All around
are a thousand stone walls in ruin. He likes knowing
the house was built by the king's telegrapher.
"To write at a distance." He keeps the gate closed
with a massive hasp and chain. The weeds inside
are breast-high around the overgrown rosebushes
and two plum trees. Beyond that, broad stairs
rise to a handsome terrace and the fine house
with its tall windows. He has excavated most
of the courtyard in back. It's there they
spent their perfect days under a diseased
grape arbor and the flowering jasmine. There is
a faint sound of water from the pool over by
the pomegranate tree with its exaggerated fruit.
The basin is no longer choked by the leaves
accumulated in the twelve years of vacancy.
He has come to the right place at the right time.
The blue Aegean is far down, and the slow ships
far out. Doves fly without meaning overhead.
He and the Japanese lady go out the back gate
and up the stream stone by stone, bushes on each side
heavy with moths. They come out under big plane trees.
There is a dirt path from there to a nunnery.
She says goodbye and he starts down to the village
at the bottom where he will get their food for a week.
The sky is vast overhead. Neither of them knows
she is dying. He thinks of their eleven years together.
Realizes they used up all that particular time
everywhere in the cosmos, and forever.

We may or may not know enough about Gilbert to know how autobiographical this is, but we recognize, in any case, that it is deliberately distanced. Imagine it with "I" and "we" instead of "he" and "they" and you see the difference immediately.

The poem wants to be, and in my view succeeds in being, both present and past at once. One verb, "spent," in line 12 with "perfect" and "diseased," takes us out of the present tense and the casual immediacy of the description. When we get to "He thinks," in the next-to-Iast line, we are ready to see how "used up" the memory is, how present to the protagonist even in its aching and irreparable absence.

I like the combination of leisure and economy in this poem. The adjectives feel casual and unforced, and there is no straining toward the figurative or toward cosmic significance. When details surprise us slightly, like the bushes "heavy with moths," or the "exaggerated fruit" of the pomegranate tree, it is mostly a matter of adjusting promptly to their rightness. When the poem refuses to pursue predictable signifiers, as in "Doves fly without meaning overhead," we rejoice in its confidence about particulars. Gilbert almost has to fight off the extra meanings that crowd in around the villa, the landscape, the doomed and happy couple. Only at the end does he allow himself the grand gesture that echoes the title and reminds us, one final time, of the paradox of time: it is most meaningful when it most betrays us, truly eternal when it is clearly ephemeral. That may be an old man's insight, but it is not restricted to old age. Young readers will, I suspect, take to this poem too.

Here is the poem that follows, the second one in the collection:

PAINTING ON PLATO'S WALL

The shadows behind people walking
in the bright piazza are not merely
gaps in the sunlight. Just as goodness
is not the absence of badness.
Goodness is a triumph. And so it is
with love. Love is not the part
we are born with that flowers
a little and then wanes as we
grow up. We cobble love together
from this and those of our machinery
until there is suddenly an apparition
that never existed before. There it is,
unaccountable. The woman and our
desire are somehow turned into
brandy by Athena's tiny owl filling
the darkness around an old villa
on the mountain with its plaintive
mewing. As a man might be
turned into someone else while
living kind of happy up there
with the lady's gentle dying.

The poet is more willing to be aphoristic here, juggling generalizations about good and bad, love and loss, while whisking us in and out of Plato's cave and across the bright piazza. The mention of the villa and the dying lady connect this to the previous poem, with all its tangible particularities, and by doing so perhaps affords the brisker treatment. The middle of this poem seems less assured to me ("machinery"? really?), but when the owl appears I feel both oriented and at home. Of course it can be Athena's owl, among other things: a way of talking gently about wisdom and change, the growth of love and then, alas, its loss. Gilbert's long perspective, afforded mainly by his years, gives him a kind of offhand but magisterial tone (e.g. "kind of happy up there"), a tone we learn to trust and with which we readily affiliate. It's like sitting in the sun, up on that mountain, having occasional bursts of conversation that seem unrelated or unpredictable but that are ultimately, and deeply, connected.

Having shown how the first two poems act in concord, I must go on to cite the third poem, titled somewhat mysteriously:

ALYOSHA

The sound of women hidden
among the lemon trees. A sweetness
that can live with the mind, a family
that does not wear away. He will let
twenty lives pass and choose the twenty-
first. He longs to live married to
slowness. He lives now with the lambs
the minute they are being born,
lives with their perfection as they
blunder around right away in pure innocence.
He watches them go up the mountain
each morning with the twelve-year-old
nearly child. Living with his faith
as he watches them eaten at Easter
to celebrate Christ. He is not innocent.
He knows the shepherdess will be given
to the awful man who lives at the farm
closest to him. He blesses all of it
as he mourns and the white doves soar
silently in the perfect blue sky.

The "he" of this poem may be identified as a kind of Alyosha Karamazov so that we won't be tempted to connect him too closely with the "he" of the first poem and the "kind of happy" man in the second, despite the rhyming effect of the life lived, apparently, on the Aegean mountain. The problematic relation to time is reiterated here, in the marriage to slowness and the instant of birth for the lambs. With it, there's the question of innocence and experience, clarified perhaps by the glancing connection to Dostoevsky and his character.

I truly enjoy the way this poem both does and doesn't connect with the two that precede it, and I have cited it to remind myself, and my readers, that we owe it to a good book of poems to follow the sequence as the poet has designed it, letting one poem give rise to the next one in ways we may find illuminating. If you agree, the rest of Jack Gilbert's book awaits your pleasurable discoveries. Some of the poems will be longer, some will be very short; all will have this plain and unadorned manner, in touch with the classics and mythology but never insistent about their significance or their music. I had not really known Gilbert's work before; this has been a pleasurable encounter.

* * *

Philip Levine's new collection brings us the latest installment in a long and distinguished career, celebrated in these pages as recently as last fall. This twentieth collection, News of the World, is aptly titled. Levine has always been inspired to bring us the news, and what varied news it has been! This book is no exception: there's a sureness of manner and, often, a lightness of touch that testify to the poet's long experience of making good poems.

Here's one that caught my eye:

BEFORE THE WAR

Seeing his mother coming home
he kneels behind a parked car,
one hand over his mouth to still
his breathing. She passes, climbs
the stairs, and again the street is his.
We're in an American city, Toledo,
sometime in the last century, though
it could be Buffalo or Flint,
the places are the same except
for the names. At eight or nine,
even at eleven, kids are the same,
without an identity, without a soul,
things with bad teeth and bad clothes.
We could give them names, we could
name the mother Gertrude and give her
a small office job typing bills of lading
eight hours a day, five and a half
days a week. We could give her
dreams of marriage to the boss
who's already married, but we
don't because she loathes him.
It's her son, Sol, she loves,
the one still hiding with one knee
down on the concrete drawing
the day's last heat. He's got feelings.
Young as he is, he can feel heat,
cold, pain, just as a dog would
and like a dog he'll answer
to his name. Go ahead, call him,
"Hey, Solly, Solly boy, come here!"
He doesn't bark, he doesn't sit,
he doesn't beg or extend one paw
in a gesture of submission.
He accepts his whole name, even
as a kid he stands and faces us,
just as eleven years from now
he'll stand and face his death
flaming toward him on a bridge-
head at Remagen while Gertrude
goes on typing mechanically
into the falling winter night.

I am very moved by the end of this poem. And I marvel at how I arrived at my emotion. The poet asked me to collaborate on the design of the poem, to recognize the opening moment as both unique and typical. A boy of eleven or so kneels down to hide from his mother as she comes home, and then stands up to face us, we who have studied and created him, as he will also stand up and face his death in World War II.

The poem's speaker (we'll call him Levine) is very casual in his assembling and handling of young Sol. He says that kids lack souls, but then later he says they have feelings. But he withdraws to mere sensation as he makes Sol into a dog, almost. We may draw back in protest. We are meant to, I think. Sol's age is a matter of our choice, as are his city and even his name. The immediacy of his circumstances, the day's heat still in the sidewalk, is precisely as important as the things about him that are generic. By leaving the facts so open, making an anecdote that is both opaque and transparent, Levine somehow allows us to be inside history, and outside, beyond it, at the same time.

The death at the end is agonizing because it is an individual death, Sol's, and it is also all deaths of all young men in wars that take them away from their mothers. The mother, unaware of the moment, continues her typing of the stupid bills of lading while we sorrow silently to think of the news that will eventually reach her.

I think what's dazzling about Levine's current work is his confidence that he can jeopardize the consistency or integrity of his art by exposing its workings in this way. He has always had a playful side, has always been ready to help us suspect the value of artifice, and has always undermined any grandiosity that we might be tempted to attach to his poetry. That is a great part of what we value about him.

That was this book's fourth poem. Here's another, from the book's third section, which are all prose poems:

FIXING THE FOOT: ON RHYTHM

For Lejan Kwint

Yesterday I heard a Dutch doctor talking to a small girl who had cut her foot, not seriously, & was very frightened by the sight of her own blood. "Nay! Nay!" he said over & over. I could hear him quite distinctly through the wall that separated us, & his voice was strong & calm, he spoke very slowly & seemed never to stop speaking; almost as though he were chanting, never too loud or too soft. Her voice, which had been explosive and shrill at first, gradually softened until I could no longer make it out as he went on talking &, I suppose, working. Then a silence, & he said, "Ah" & some words I could not understand. I imagined him stepping spryly back to survey his work. And then another voice, silent before, the girl's father, thanking him, & then the girl thanking him, now in a child's voice. A door opening & closing. And it was over.

The choice of prose for this anecdote helps highlight the rhythms of the experience. The prose movement is of a piece with the circumstances, where the speaker, overhearing and not knowing the language, must intuit the circumstances from the rhythms of the speech rather than its content. The deprivation—he is unable to see the doctor, child, or parent—is what makes his imagination lively and attentive. Having less to go on, he understands more, and he must remind us from time to time of his speculative position—"I imagined him stepping spryly back"—just as we were made to cooperate with the creative process in the previous poem. It's a lovely moment, handled with a sureness of touch that testifies not only to Levine's deep human sympathies but to his expertise in poem-making.

* * *

I began by refusing to generalize about poetry and old age, but I see that my pair of poets have shown me some interesting features that their late work shares. For one thing, there's the combination of the relaxed and the brisk, what I called leisure and economy in Gilbert. The poems seem casually put together and at the same time tightly inevitable. It's a feature we might find in younger poets, of course, but it seems here to be associated with the habits of making that have shaped these poets' manners over the years.

I also found myself, quite frequently, in the neighborhood of paradox. Not just the relaxed/firm poetic designs, but a tone that manages to be both close-up and rather distanced. The handling of subject that is clearly quite passionate while also feeling detached. Put it another way: there's an enlarging of emotional force that somehow also preserves a distance from emotion. In the case of Levine I mentioned the ability to be both inside and outside of history at the same time. The memory poems in both collections have this dual sense as well.

These instances of contradictory possibilities, held in tension and producing central insights, are of course always present in the best poems. But it looks as though old guys like Gilbert and Levine demonstrate an exceptional ability to handle them with ease and consistency. We can rejoice in their continuing productivity and integrity.
 

About the Author
David Young has published ten books of poetry since 1968, when his first collection, Sweating Out the Winter, won the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum. His most recent collection is Black Lab (Knopf, 2006). In September Knopf will publish his Field of Light and Shadow, Selected and New Poems. In 1969 Young, along with four Oberlin colleagues, helped found FIELD, a twice-yearly journal devoted to contemporary poetry and poetics. David Young is still active as an editor of FIELD.

FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Oberlin College

Editors: David Young, David Walker
Associate Editors: Pamela Alexander, DeSales Harrison
Editor-at-Large: Martha Collins
Managing Editor: Linda Slocum