We're very happy and privileged to have Jack Gilbert with us
this evening.
Jack's Views of Jeopardy won the Yale Younger Poet
Series in 1962, both that book and Monolithos was
published by Knopf in 1982 were nominated for Pulitzer Prizes.
In 1984, he published Kochan with Tamarack Editions.
And his most recent collection, The Great Fires:
Poems 1982- 1992 was published by Knopf in 1994.
He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship,
a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts,
and a Lannan Foundation Award.
Having said all that, it is amazing
how little I have said about Jack Gilbert,
a man so modest that he says his photographs always flatter him.
For more than four decades, he has
been living at the heart of poetry
while remaining apart from the poetry scene.
He writes about loving women, not making love to women.
He writes about things that are themselves,
about bleak but magnificent landscapes
both internal and external.
And in recent years, he writes about aging
and about learning to flower by tightening.
This poet is-- and these are his words--
alone with the heart, howling.
His work is a constant series of beautiful inevitable surprises,
just at the edge of silence.
He always challenges the reader and listener not
to understand what he is saying.
He's always clear, but to open the door
into an inner world, another world,
that promises to be disturbing.
That door will open tonight.
I'm honored to present Jack Gilbert.
[APPLAUSE]