Going There by Jack Gilbert
Going There
Jack GilbertOf course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.
MARGINALIA
Playing the guitar. Staring at the sky.
KEEP READING
SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“Gathered in this volume readers will find more than fifty years of poems by the incomparable Jack Gilbert, from his Yale Younger Poets prize-winning volume to glorious late poems, including a section of previously uncollected work.” (Source)
ABOUT JACK GILBERT
Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh on February 18, 1925. He was educated in both Pittsburgh and San Francisco, where he later participated in Jack Spicer’s famous “Poetry as Magic” workshop at San Francisco State College in 1957. Gilbert’s first book, Views of Jeopardy (Yale University Press, 1962), won the Yale Younger Poets Series and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Soon after publishing his first book, Gilbert received a Guggenheim Fellowship and subsequently moved… (more)
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ENDNOTES
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