maybe fame is, after all is said and done, boring

This is the tree that lives just outside my window, and this is yesterday.  I've done nothing to amplify or affect the color of the leaves.  They are just like this, for now.

Sometimes I think about how my life could be bigger, my reach broader, my impact more lasting.  Sometimes I wish.  Sometimes I measure myself against impossible standards, or against something somebody said.  And then the light will change, and I'm reminded of how empty and meaningless that kind of questing is.

Today that light was these words about fame from Jack Gilbert, quoted in the New York Times obituary written by Bruce Weber. 

In 1962, Mr. Gilbert was a poetry star. He had won the Yale prize, and the editor Gordon Lish had devoted an entire issue of the literary journal Genesis West to him. Theodore Roethke, Stephen Spender and Stanley Kunitz praised him in print. He was in demand as a reader. But it didn’t take. 

“I enjoyed those six months of being famous,” he recalled in the Paris Review interview. “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. I didn’t want to be praised all the time — I liked the idea, but I didn’t invest much in it.”

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Remembering the great poet Jack Gilbert

It is with such a heavy heart that I learned today of the passing of Jack Gilbert, a man whose words made me feel infinitely alive.  Tangled, declarative, beastly, gentle, raging, wanting—Gilbert's poems were everything.  I would teach them to the boy who would come to my house seeking solace and proof that the world was worth surviving.  I would read them to myself.  They sit before me now, across the room, the Jack Gilbert poems.

I wrote Jack Gilbert into The Heart is Not a Size, my fourth novel for young adults.  In the novel, I send my Georgia into Juarez, Mexico, with her best friend Riley.  Georgia is anxious, trying to prove courage to herself, trying to find it.  Just before Georgia leaves for this life-changing trip she remembers learning a Jack Gilbert poem in sophomore year and is steadied by the memory.

Later that night I woke up sweating from a dream, those black wings inside my ribcage beating, my mother’s words, Apply your intelligence to every living thing, snaking through my blood.  Because again my heart knew what my mind had avoided:  Juarez was probably a hare-brained scheme; what were the chances—really—that I’d fly all the way there and come home stronger?  I fought with the dark to free myself from my bed, struggled to wrest the weight from my chest.  It was after two, and the house was quiet, and I headed for the stairs, my right fist against my heart to quiet the fury, to survive it.  I needed the night beyond, which finally I reached, stumbling out onto the porch and into the streets and heading for the fairgrounds, which were empty now, the horses long since talked back into their trailers and driven off, Riley’s stories floating somewhere in the caverns of their heads.  I hadn’t had a panic attack in two months.  Each one was bigger than the last.

            We find the heart only by dismantling what/the heart knows.  The words are from a poem Jack Gilbert wrote and Mr. Buzzby read toward the end of my sophomore year, when I finally stopped minding the class so much and settled in to learn.  I walked the streets last night with that line in my head—walked until I could breathe again and stand up straight without collapsing.  I was going to Juarez because I needed some perspective, some place where I could let the big bird free.  My head knew things that my heart didn’t yet.  I was privileged.  I was smart.  I had a future.  It was time to believe in myself.

Peace, Jack Gilbert.

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Learning as I Teach

It was a movie weekend—"Slumdog Millionaire" at ten on Friday night, "Frost/Nixon" at 4:15 Sunday, "Mongol," courtesy of Netflix, in between, late Saturday afternoon. And then the Oscars, a tradition strong as Christmas here—a semi-glamorous meal delivered picnic style while the "barely mint" dresses float by. The Oscars always make me cry. Call me a sentimental fool (you won't be the first), but I like seeing dreams fulfilled. I like the idea that it's possible.

In between, I was walking about my humble abode feeling knocked-down grateful for all the book recommendations that came my way via Looking for Book Love, for all the passion that is out there, still, for stories that cling to the page. While I considered the titles that came in, I read essays on writing and craft—re-read them, I should say, in preparation for Tuesday, when I'll spend a chunk of the day in a coffee shop with aspiring young writers. Sven Birkerts, Natalia Ginzburg, Mary Oliver, Jack Gilbert, Gerald Stern, Stanley Kunitz, Forrest Gander, and of course Pablo Neruda will keep me and the girls company throughout a day that will also be spent collecting and sorting the details we hunt down with our cameras.

We'll yield to six exercises, which I've named the following way. I plan to write right alongside the girls, for I am not the sort of writer who believes she definitively knows. I'm the sort who keeps trying to find out. Who learns as she teaches, and as she goes.

The class in brief (should you wish to write along...):

Leveraging Involuntary Memory
The Perceiving I
The Hunt for Character
The Fair Release of Story
The Act of Autobiography
Vulnerable Fictions

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Jack Gilbert (again)

"If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world."

"A Brief for the Defense"
Jack Gilbert
REFUSING HEAVEN

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Having the Having

"I tie knots in the strings of my spirit
to remember."

Jack Gilbert
Refusing Heaven

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