When I asked him what was more important to him than poetry, he replied, “Love, access to my life, access to people.
Jack Gilbert, who has lived as a peripatetic poet his whole life, writing and teaching around the country and Europe, surprised me by saying that he felt poetry was about seventh on his list “of things [he] wanted.” When I asked him what was more important to him than poetry, he replied, “Love, access to my life, access to people. I love being myself, to experience what there was in my life. The thing that always frightened me was to miss the important things, not from the eyes of the world, but from my eyes, my heart, my experience . . . Sometimes I think I write poetry for vanity.”