The Birdman Wins in Everyday Ramblings

I believe I only went to one poetry workshop with Mr. Finch. Most often it was one or the other of us and then there was intensive sharing and debriefing afterwards. We went to readings together two or three times a week but not workshops. But there was one exception.

When the poet Jack Gilbert resurfaced from his self-made exile abroad and we discovered he was coming to Portland for a weekend and having a workshop (because he was broke) we jumped at the opportunity.

Jack Gilbert was one of the few living poets, (along with W.S. Merwin), which we agreed on was very very good. Mr. Finch thought I wrote like him and I hadn’t read his work until just a few years before so wasn’t being derivative because how could I be if I didn’t know the poems?

This weekend I was thinking about a conversation that went on in the morning in the kitchen of the house where the workshop was held between Jack and two relatively famous and well published poets (people in the community would know who they are right off the bat) about publishing and the absolute lack of money in the world of poetry.

Jack was a very unassuming man and they were star struck, we were skeptical but enjoying this glimpse of being “the real deal” with these huge famous prizewinners.

Jack had a long term girlfriend that was also a poet. He had managed to negotiate the rocky shoals of that fraught and intense relationship as Mr. Finch and me were attempting to do.

So with the image of that kitchen conversation (with cups of caffeinated beverages in hand firmly in mind) I opened Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert Saturday evening and the first line is… “Once upon a time, there was a man named Jack Gilbert, who was not related to me—unfortunately for me. Jack Gilbert was a great poet but if you have never heard of him, don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault. He never much cared about being known.”

Jack died two years after Mr. Finch in 2012. Elizabeth Gilbert never did meet him but she inherited the office he taught in for a time after he came to Portland to make a living.

It was disconcerting to read this after thinking about Jack and how he did very much encourage me to keep writing and honing my skills. We had to submit work to get into the workshop. This is a man that met Ezra Pound and all the famous (and contentious) poets of the time when he was younger.

I have been thinking about Mr. Finch intently because of the memoirs I have been reading and because of my disappointment and bafflement at the choice of poems that won the local contest.

Yesterday I stopped at the Central Library on my way to teach to drop off some books and I had a little extra time and I was over in the tight corner of shelves of new nonfiction doing a little dance to get out of the way of someone else who was also browsing. I was trying to decide if I had time to read a memoir by a fellow who was a friend of the artist Francis Bacon and then I actually looked at the person I was sharing the space with.

It was Mr. Finch’s best friend the last few years of his life. He was wearing a very nice suit (he is an attorney) and high top sneakers. I have not seen him since the funeral.

He had just been to another funeral of a man who was also in the community of coffee shop poets that Mr. Finch spent his evenings with long after I was tucked up in bed with Sammy every night.

He said he and Apollinaire (another poet we know) had been laughing after the funeral trying to imagine Mr. Finch’s take on our current crazy election situation and the absurdity of it. He clearly thinks of Mr. Finch often and he asked me about a project they had been working on together that I remember, as if it were yesterday.

Wow. Just wow.

After that it was quite the challenge to feel normal and teach but I did it. It was a good practice in equanimity and balance, which is what I was teaching.

I am choosing to believe that all this is Mr. Finch from the other side saying hey girl friend, Jack Gilbert thought your work was strong, Jack Gilbert, who the wildly famous Elizabeth Gilbert admires, admired your work.

Who carries more weight here, the young librarians at a dysfunctional institution of medical science or the man who eschewed fame to concentrate on the work.

Game over. The birdman wins. :)

Last updated May 25, 2016