INTERVIEWER
Do you think it’s important for American writers to live abroad?
GILBERT
At least at some point—so you have something to compare to what you think is normal, and you encounter things you aren’t used to. One of the great dangers is familiarity.
INTERVIEWER
Is that a danger overseas too? Last summer you went back to Greece.
GILBERT
Linda wanted to finish a book she had been writing; she asked me to go with her. So we went to Paros. Unfortunately, we found the Greece we knew was no longer there. Our Greece was wonderfully bucolic. Very quiet, peaceful, slow, friendly—farmers plowing, a couple of men in small boats, almost no electronics. A civilization that lasted four hundred years is gone now. Gone the way Paris is gone, the way Italy is gone. All gone. Everything that I dreamed of is gone. It was such a blessing to get over there when it still was. All of the things that I loved were on the brink of disappearing without my knowing it. You can’t go to Paris anymore; it’s not there. Greece and Japan aren’t there anymore. The places I’ve loved no longer exist.
INTERVIEWER
What’s there instead?
GILBERT
Mechanisms mostly. Europe is now rich, busy, and modern.
INTERVIEWER
When you were abroad, did you consider yourself an expatriate?
GILBERT
No. You have to understand I didn’t visit places; I lived places. It makes all the difference in the world.
INTERVIEWER
Was it a solitary existence?
GILBERT
Well, of course at times it was lonely, but I don’t think it bothered me much. I’ve been very lucky. A large part of my life I’ve been with someone—girlfriends, male friends. They’re very, very important to me. I’ve been blessed by knowing and being with them.
INTERVIEWER
How did your foreign settings—those places—figure into your poems?
GILBERT
It’s more how those places resonate in me. Rather than writing a poem about those places, they create something I write about.
[...]
INTERVIEWER
Do you think poetry should be performed?
GILBERT
No, God no. But it must be created so that you make something happen. You don’t just fool the audience—make them love you or something like that. It’s an art to make the audience experience what you’re talking about.
INTERVIEWER
When you write, do you read your poems out loud?
GILBERT
Sometimes. If my instincts register that something is wrong with the rhythm then I work on it, but it’s almost always unconscious.
The hard part for me is to find the poem—a poem that matters. To find what the poem knows that’s special. I may think of writing about the same thing that everyone does, but I really like to write a poem that hasn’t been written. And I don’t mean its shape. I want to experience or discover ways of feeling that are fresh. I love it when I have perceived something fresh about being human and being happy.
Ezra Pound said “make it new.” The great tragedy of that saying is he left out the essential word. It should be make it importantly new. So much of the time people are just aiming for novelty, surprise. I like to think that I’ve understood, that I’ve learned about something that matters—what the world should be, what life should be.
INTERVIEWER
Can you describe your life in Northampton in recent years?
GILBERT
Happiness. I’m in the midst of absolute beauty, quiet. A lot of being alone. I walk in the morning, then I listen to the news, then I eat something and start working.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve said before that you don’t miss being young.
GILBERT
Oh, of course I miss being young.
INTERVIEWER
How is that different from not minding growing old?
GILBERT
Growing old is a mistake. It seems natural that we die and grow old. It’s part of the bargain. You get to be young for a long time and then you start to get old. It’s also a wonderful time, but it’s a different kind of wonderful.
When I was young, I was very aware of death. I was determined not to die until I’d lived my life. So much so that I used to pray and make lists. I would say, I know you have to take me away. You have to kill me. But not yet. I’d make a sort of bargain—I accept that you will kill me, but don’t let me die before I’ve fallen in love. And then the second prayer was, Don’t let me die a virgin. I started making lists about what I wanted before I died. When I finally finished going around the world, I discovered that I’d lived every one of those lists.
INTERVIEWER
Are your writing habits the same today as they were when you were young?
GILBERT
I trust the poems more.
INTERVIEWER
When do you work best now?
GILBERT
In the morning. But for most of my life I wrote late at night. When you get old your brain doesn’t function as well after noon.
INTERVIEWER
Do you keep to a work schedule?
GILBERT
No, I have an approximate rhythm, but I don’t like the idea of anything creative being mechanical. That’ll kill you. On the other hand, if I was not satisfied with how much I’d written in a year, then I would set out to write a hundred poems in a hundred days. I force myself to write poems even though I don’t approve of it because it does keep something alive. So I guess I have a little bit of a pattern that I live by. For instance, the other day I woke up at one in the morning and worked until four in the afternoon. I do that a lot. I can do that because I don’t have to accommodate anybody but me.
INTERVIEWER
So discipline is important to you?
GILBERT
Yes, because I’m lazy. If you have it in you, you want to create, but I won’t force myself—because it’s dangerous. People who are organized are in danger of making a process out of it and doing it by the numbers.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever experience writer’s block?
GILBERT
It depends if you consider laziness writer’s block. I don’t know. I’ve always been able to write at least satisfactory poems, ones that weren’t mechanical.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel you have any flaw as a writer?
GILBERT
I can’t spell. I’m hopeless.
INTERVIEWER
What’s your relationship with the contemporary literary community now?
GILBERT
I don’t have one.
INTERVIEWER
Does that bother you?
GILBERT
No. Why? Why would it bother me? Those people are in business. They’re hardworking.
INTERVIEWER
Don’t you work hard?
GILBERT
Not in the same meaning of the word hard. I put in a lot of effort because it matters to me. Many of these people who teach would do anything not to teach. I don’t have any obligations. I don’t have a mortgage. These people are working hard at a great price.
INTERVIEWER
I’m struck by how rarely I see your poems in anthologies and how
often I see the same poems by other poets over and over again. Do you think there’s a disadvantage to spending most of your life abroad or outside of literary circles?
GILBERT
It’s fatal, which is all right with me.
-- Interview portion taken from 'the Paris Review' archived on: www.theparisreview.org
