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Monolithos: Poems, 1962 and 1982
This is Jack Gilbert's first book since the now-legendary Views of Jeopardy appeared as the 1962 entry in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Beat poetry was much in vogue at the time, a discursive poetry that rages against things as they are. Perhaps it was for this reason the strict compression of Jack Gilbert's work and its celebration of an ideal of romantic love caused such a sensation. The Times declared him "one of the most exciting voices of the second half of our centruy." Standley Kunitz called him "a civilization and an artist." There was praise from other notable poets—Stephen Spender, Muriel Rukeyser, and Theodore Roethke among them—such considerable praise that a nationwide tour was arranged. Gilbert set aside his solitary life abroad and returned to the United States to speak to the audience that now awaited him, so arousing those who came to hear him that only the readings offered by Dylan Thomas a decade earlier might be seen in the same exceptional light. But at the conclusion of that tour, Gilbert vanished—back to Italy, Greece, Japan—entering a silence that lasted twenty years and which now ends with the oublication of Monolithos , a selection of new work and of some of the poems first seen in Views of Jeopardy . These are poems about lust, how it succeeds, how it fails—not as the succumbing to desire, nor the getting of flesh, but as the honoring of the impulse to know, to possess "the great knowledge of breasts with their loud nipples," to know everything that a man might know of a woman "in all her fresh particularity of difference." Often harsh in their expression, and always rigorous in their displeasure with what is ornamental and easy, Gilbert's poems speak with the stern syntax of the mind, and yet their text is the ways of the heart, the effort to master a passion too great to be encompassed, to subdue it with the instrument of language, to claim the primacy of "what abounds, what times there are, my fine house that love is." What issues from this concern is a poetry of the severest modulation and of an obsessive will for the exact—a poetry that is astringent, illuminated, and of the first importance.
- GenresPoetry20th Century
93 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1982
13 people are currently reading
281 people want to read
About the author
Jack Gilbert
28 books309 followersBorn and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.'s neighborhood of East Liberty, he attended Peabody High School then worked as a door-to-door salesman, an exterminator, and a steelworker. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, where he and his classmate Gerald Stern developed a serious interest in poetry and writing.
His work is distinguished by simple lyricism and straightforward clarity of tone. Though his first book of poetry (Views of Jeopardy, 1962) was quickly recognized and Gilbert himself made into something of a media darling, he retreated from his earlier activity in the San Francisco poetry scene (where he participated in Jack Spicer's Poetry as Magic workshop) and moved to Europe, touring from country to country while living on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Nearly the whole of his career after the publication of his first book of poetry is marked by what he has described in interviews as a self-imposed isolation—which some have considered to be a spiritual quest to describe his alienation from mainstream American culture, and others have dismissed as little more than an extended period as a "professional houseguest" living off of wealthy American literary admirers. Subsequent books of poetry have been few and far between. He continued to write, however, and between books has occasionally contributed to The American Poetry Review, Genesis West, The Quarterly, Poetry, Ironwood, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker.
He was a close friend of the poet Linda Gregg who was once his student and to whom he was married for six years. He was also married to Michiko Nogami (a language instructor based in San Francisco, now deceased, about whom he has written many of his poems). He was also in a significant long term relationship with the Beat poet Laura Ulewicz during the fifties in San Francisco.
His work is distinguished by simple lyricism and straightforward clarity of tone. Though his first book of poetry (Views of Jeopardy, 1962) was quickly recognized and Gilbert himself made into something of a media darling, he retreated from his earlier activity in the San Francisco poetry scene (where he participated in Jack Spicer's Poetry as Magic workshop) and moved to Europe, touring from country to country while living on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Nearly the whole of his career after the publication of his first book of poetry is marked by what he has described in interviews as a self-imposed isolation—which some have considered to be a spiritual quest to describe his alienation from mainstream American culture, and others have dismissed as little more than an extended period as a "professional houseguest" living off of wealthy American literary admirers. Subsequent books of poetry have been few and far between. He continued to write, however, and between books has occasionally contributed to The American Poetry Review, Genesis West, The Quarterly, Poetry, Ironwood, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker.
He was a close friend of the poet Linda Gregg who was once his student and to whom he was married for six years. He was also married to Michiko Nogami (a language instructor based in San Francisco, now deceased, about whom he has written many of his poems). He was also in a significant long term relationship with the Beat poet Laura Ulewicz during the fifties in San Francisco.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
July 17, 2021
Monolithos by Jack Gilbert
Monolithos was a finalist in 1983 for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and is quite lucid and contextual.
But overall I found this collection to be a little too much in the moment and not so reflective or rich with imagery like that found in Refusing Heaven.
3.5 stars
Monolithos was a finalist in 1983 for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and is quite lucid and contextual.
But overall I found this collection to be a little too much in the moment and not so reflective or rich with imagery like that found in Refusing Heaven.
3.5 stars
July 17, 2015
I was first told about Jack Gilbert by the boyfriend of a girl a dear friend of mine was hopelessly in love with. I think the boyfriend in question was named Quentin. Or Ulysses. Or something. I found a copy of The Great Fires (poems, 1982-1992 a few years later, and have dipped into it many times. Perhaps because it is a volume of selected poems, I can never maintain focus or get very far into the collection per sitting. The eponymous poem is heart wrenching and there are many poems that focus on personal loss and aging and are all of them are great, but this much thinner, early and earlier collection was much more direct and immediate.
Comprised of poems from Gilbert's Yale Younger Poets winning first collection and new poems written twenty years later, Monolithos is obsessed with the environment's resistance to time. One of the descriptions of this collection call Gilbert's verse classical. I agree with this description. There is a directness and concreteness that is very unique, and reminds me of epigraphs. Of lacunae. There are hardly any adjectives. The language is littered with the Mediterranean. Greece, the Greek Isles, Rome, randomly Japan, and Pittsburgh. All of the landscapes are ancient and barren, timeworn. The affects of time are the defining action in Gilbert's work, memory leading to the more distant past. The hopefulness and beginners luck of the 1962 poems are complimented by the wisdom and good humor of the latter poems, dealing largely with the authors divorce and his travels.
Many of these poems barely take up a third of the page, but they resonate there in all that blank space. This solidity is most impressive. It isn't minimal in the way I usually thing of it. I don't hear imagists when I read these poems. It is a much more personal, essentially timeless, and in some fashion ancient narrator who speaks through these tremendous fragments.
Comprised of poems from Gilbert's Yale Younger Poets winning first collection and new poems written twenty years later, Monolithos is obsessed with the environment's resistance to time. One of the descriptions of this collection call Gilbert's verse classical. I agree with this description. There is a directness and concreteness that is very unique, and reminds me of epigraphs. Of lacunae. There are hardly any adjectives. The language is littered with the Mediterranean. Greece, the Greek Isles, Rome, randomly Japan, and Pittsburgh. All of the landscapes are ancient and barren, timeworn. The affects of time are the defining action in Gilbert's work, memory leading to the more distant past. The hopefulness and beginners luck of the 1962 poems are complimented by the wisdom and good humor of the latter poems, dealing largely with the authors divorce and his travels.
Many of these poems barely take up a third of the page, but they resonate there in all that blank space. This solidity is most impressive. It isn't minimal in the way I usually thing of it. I don't hear imagists when I read these poems. It is a much more personal, essentially timeless, and in some fashion ancient narrator who speaks through these tremendous fragments.
September 19, 2011
4 Stars for the 1982 portion of the book. 3 Stars for the context of 1962. 1962 was to me, a lot of searching in vague, philosophical and sometimes superfluous ways. 1982 was funny and raw, drawing more vividly from everyday, yet unordinary experiences. There is more beauty and simplicity in those observations than the ponderings. In either section, Gilbert has a great command of syntax and a very Tao flow to his writing. I definitely appreciate that in his 1962 poems, even though it wasn't as engaging for me as 1982.
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July 31, 2012"Right, he thought, remembering about love. Not wanting the responsibility."
Hard to beat that. Gilbert is brilliant and he does beat that and I think I could write nearly the same review for all his books. One of the greatest American poets.
(Read as part of his collected works.)
Hard to beat that. Gilbert is brilliant and he does beat that and I think I could write nearly the same review for all his books. One of the greatest American poets.
(Read as part of his collected works.)
June 16, 2022
He uses more short lines in his younger work, and the enjambments are more definite. The opening 1962 poem is almost anaphorically end-stopped, which feels so unusual for Gilbert. There are timeless proverbs here too though. “Imagine if suffering were real” is a line from the most depressing poem I’ve ever read (83). I like how “In Dispraise of Poetry” is just a short parable made poetic by its title, the King of Siam punishing a courtier with a miraculous gift and obligation. Poetry of proverbial transcription. “Poetry is a Kind of Lying” gets closer to a cliche but paraphrases Degas, who “said he didn’t paint / what he saw, but what / would enable them to see / the thing he had” (15). Seems like that would apply more to poetry than to visual art. “Masturbating in the moonlight” is also one way of carrying out poetic metareference (43); it is the vulgar flip side of “stopped, remembering,” a line from a poem titled “Divorce” (47). Neither of these is emotion recollected in tranquility, and yet.
October 21, 2021
My favorite collection of Gilbert's remains The Great Fires, but this collection, his second and the first in 20 years after his initial collection, is still really strong. What I love about his writing is the spare style -- everything is stripped away except for the absolute essentials. You can tell that each line and each word in the line has been carefully considered and crafted, thoroughly scrubbed and re-scrubbed. Yet the music remains.
At times, some of his references are so direct and specific, and so little other context is provided that unless you are familiar with the oblique city/movie/song/building/etc that he is referring to, it can have little-to-no impact. But those are more the exception than the rule, and also, you know, Google.
Some of my favorite passages from the last 20-25 pages:
MEANING WELL
Marrying is like somebody
throwing the baby up.
It happy and them throwing it
higher. To the ceiling.
Which jars the loose bulb
and it goes out
as the baby starts down.
from LOSING
[...] Everything means a choice,
she had said, getting one thing and losing one. The love still
held me, but all at once I could, despite the rain, admit
to myself what I really wanted was this clarity.
PAVANE
I thought it said on the girl's red purse
A kind of sad dance and all day
wondered what was being defined.
Wisdom? The history of Poland?
All the ways of growing old?
No, I decided (walking back
to the hotel this morning), it must be love.
The real love that follows
early delight and ignorance.
A wonderful sad dance that comes after.
GETTING READY
What if the heart does not pale as the body wanes,
but is like the sun that blazes hotter each day
on these immense, perishing fields? What then?
(Desire is not the problem. This far south,
we are careful not to mistake seizures for love.)
He sits there bewildered in a clamp of light.
In the stillness, the sun grinds him clean.
MY GRAVEYARD IN TOKYO
It was hard to see the moonlight
on the gravestones
because of the neon
in the parking lot.
I said I did in my letters.
But thinking back on it now,
I don't feel sure.
At times, some of his references are so direct and specific, and so little other context is provided that unless you are familiar with the oblique city/movie/song/building/etc that he is referring to, it can have little-to-no impact. But those are more the exception than the rule, and also, you know, Google.
Some of my favorite passages from the last 20-25 pages:
MEANING WELL
Marrying is like somebody
throwing the baby up.
It happy and them throwing it
higher. To the ceiling.
Which jars the loose bulb
and it goes out
as the baby starts down.
from LOSING
[...] Everything means a choice,
she had said, getting one thing and losing one. The love still
held me, but all at once I could, despite the rain, admit
to myself what I really wanted was this clarity.
PAVANE
I thought it said on the girl's red purse
A kind of sad dance and all day
wondered what was being defined.
Wisdom? The history of Poland?
All the ways of growing old?
No, I decided (walking back
to the hotel this morning), it must be love.
The real love that follows
early delight and ignorance.
A wonderful sad dance that comes after.
GETTING READY
What if the heart does not pale as the body wanes,
but is like the sun that blazes hotter each day
on these immense, perishing fields? What then?
(Desire is not the problem. This far south,
we are careful not to mistake seizures for love.)
He sits there bewildered in a clamp of light.
In the stillness, the sun grinds him clean.
MY GRAVEYARD IN TOKYO
It was hard to see the moonlight
on the gravestones
because of the neon
in the parking lot.
I said I did in my letters.
But thinking back on it now,
I don't feel sure.
September 18, 2017
The selections from 1962 were mostly from Views of Jeopardy, and thus I had a similar reaction to them -- that is to say, not as strong an attachment. 1982's Monolithos had more of the Jack Gilbert I had come to love when I first picked up The Great Fires. I still found the balance skewed towards poems I wasn't as interested in compared to number of poems I was, but there were a few gems in the second half of the book.
September 17, 2022
The father of self imposed isolationism, poet Jack Gilbert has wrought an intangible otherness that may slip through your deliberations. Thoughtful and thoughtless, Monolithos is beady and allows the mind of readers a vantage point into due perusal. Leafing and prying. In this almost simplistic set of poems, a collection that dismisses the eschew of life’s tawny twilight. We seek further explanation o’ wry finch. Let us read this quandary of art.
March 24, 2025
I appreciate the entries in [to him] & also the detours & leaps.
November 17, 2020
The poet seems to be singing to himself—often under the influence of illusion, alcohol, or delusion—mumbled songs of indistinguishable love and lust in these “archipelagos of person,” the repeated plundering of Circe stand-ins making him sound like “a resort darling. Untouchable.”
July 25, 2012
It's hard to write a brief poem, especially in a simple-language, narrative style, without it seeming cursory or shallow. I was impressed by the circles of thought some of the early poems in this book took me on, as well as the way the speaker's experiences in Greece and California are layered with Greek mythology (sometimes a title referring to one with a poem about the other). But near the second half of the book, I stopped trusting the voice: it comes off as insensitive toward its subjects, especially, oh how familiar, the women the speaker has been unsatisfied by. It was a disappointing move, then, from the touching, tragic portrait of Orpheus in the moment of losing Eurydice ("County Musician") to the poems at the end which almost all say "love" but don't make you feel it.
September 25, 2011
4 Stars for the 1982 portion of the book. 3 Stars for the context of 1962. 1962 was to me, a lot of searching in vague, philosophical and sometimes superfluous ways. 1982 was funny and raw, drawing more vividly from everyday, yet unordinary experiences. There is more beauty and simplicity in those observations than the ponderings. In either section, Gilbert has a great command of syntax and a very Tao flow to his writing. I definitely appreciate that in his 1962 poems, even though it wasn't as engaging for me as 1982.
December 20, 2013
these poems are spare and compact. some are beautiful, some are not that great, but overall a very enjoyable book. as one reviewer pointed out, here is another male poet bitchin about oh the woman that wronged him and the relationships that went bad. yet there's also a lot going on here in other ways.
one gets a sense of something tinged with sadness but also shades of beauty without being too sentimentalizing and overly cliche. the turns of phrase here are also great and that's why we read poetry? isn't it?
one gets a sense of something tinged with sadness but also shades of beauty without being too sentimentalizing and overly cliche. the turns of phrase here are also great and that's why we read poetry? isn't it?
May 6, 2016
These hauntingly beautiful poems are like little love stories at their deepest primal level...sparse, eloquent, fleeting. Some notable favourites of mine were: Leaving Monolithos, Divorce (four spare lines that speak volumes), Night after Night and Losing. Unfortunately this book is out of print but I found a copy at my local library. Highly recommended, this material has as much relevance now as it did when first written.
November 13, 2008
Out of print, but available through most good libraries. This book is one of the finest by a consistently underrated American poet. Written mostly in and much inspired by his time living in Greece, you can almost feel his contradictory sense of peace and relaxation amongst his poems that condemn much of society and offer a frustrated view of the world. Very beautiful poetry.
July 9, 2016
I liked this one:
Alone on Christmas Eve in Japan
Not wanting to lose it all for poetry.
Wanting to live the living. All this year
looking on the graveyard below my apartment.
Holding myself tenderly in this marred body.
Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness
wise people speak of, or the modulation
that is acquiescence to death beginning.
Alone on Christmas Eve in Japan
Not wanting to lose it all for poetry.
Wanting to live the living. All this year
looking on the graveyard below my apartment.
Holding myself tenderly in this marred body.
Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness
wise people speak of, or the modulation
that is acquiescence to death beginning.
January 19, 2009
I thought I had not read this when i came across a list of favorite poems from this book. They are as follows:
island and figs
They call it attempted suicide
Games
Heart skidding
Alba
Pavane
Meaning well
Divorce
Trying to be married
island and figs
They call it attempted suicide
Games
Heart skidding
Alba
Pavane
Meaning well
Divorce
Trying to be married
October 25, 2013
I'm not a fan of Gilbert's use of sentence fragments; there are far too many for me to feel a rhythm to the verse. But I appreciate the way he weaves in repeated images in the second section of the collection (Linda, nipples, marble, Greece, Pittsburgh). Maybe I'll revisit it some time.
October 29, 2008
Inspired by Jeff Hardin's practice to read a poem every day to his students, I started doing the same a few years ago. Gilbert's poem "The Revolution" is almost always my first choice.
July 20, 2013
Oh, this was gorgeous. I loved so many things in this collection: Gilbert's frank and genuine love of women; the Yeats Byzantium references; the Orpheus mythology... so many things.
March 27, 2016
Haunting and beautiful poems.
October 30, 2012
Fantastic.
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June 23, 2017811.54 G465m 1982
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews