Jack Gilbert

Jack Gilbert (February 18, 1925 – November 13, 2012) was an American poet.

Born and raised in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania neighborhood of East Liberty, he attended Peabody High School before failing out. Gilbert then worked as a door-to-door salesman, an exterminator, and a steelworker. Due to a clerical error, he was admitted to the University of Pittsburgh and graduated in 1954. During these college years he and his classmate Gerald Stern developed a serious interest in poetry and writing. Later, he received his master's degree from San Francisco State University in 1963.

After college, Gilbert went to Paris and worked briefly at the Herald Tribune before moving to Italy. Gilbert spent several years there before moving to San Francisco and then to New York, where his life as a poet began. His work has been distinguished by simple lyricism and straightforward clarity of tone, as well as a resonating control over his emotions: “We look up at the stars and they are / not there. We see memory / of when they were, once upon a time. / And that too is more than enough.” His first book of poetry, Views of Jeopardy, (1962) won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, while Gilbert was quickly recognized and made into something of a media darling. He then retreated from his earlier activity in the San Francisco poetry scene, where he had participated in Jack Spicer's Poetry as Magic workshop, and moved to Europe. Living on a Guggenheim Fellowship he toured 15 countries as a lecturer on American Literature for the U.S. State Department and lived in England, Denmark, and Greece. Nearly the whole of his career after the publication of his first book of poetry was marked by what he described as "a self-imposed isolation." His books of poetry were few and far between; however he continuously maintained his writing and contributed to The American Poetry Review, Genesis West, The Quarterly, Poetry, Ironwood, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. Gilbert was the 1999-2000 Grace Hazard Conkling writer-in-residence at Smith College. Gilbert was also a visiting professor and writer-in-residence at the University of Tennessee in 2004. Author Elizabeth Gilbert, who discovered Jack Gilbert when she succeeded him in the same writing chair, declared, "He became the poet laureate of my life."

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