Jack Gilbert - Life and Career

Life and Career

Born and raised in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 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. His first book of poetry, Views of Jeopardy, (1962) won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and he was quickly recognized and Gilbert himself 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. Some have considered this to be a spiritual quest to describe his alienation from mainstream American culture, and others have dismissed it as little more than an extended period as a "professional houseguest" living off of wealthy American literary admirers. 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 a close friend of the poet Linda Gregg who was once his student and with whom he was in a relationship for six years. He was married to Michiko Nogami, another former student and a language instructor based in San Francisco, now deceased, about whom he wrote many of his poems. He was also in a significant long term relationship with the poet Laura Ulewicz during the late fifties and early sixties in San Francisco. Gilbert died on November 13, 2012 in Berkeley, California. He was 87.