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Thank you. Have a good AI evening.

IT IS CLEAR WHY THE ANGELS COME NO MORE

It is clear why the angels come no more.

Standing so large in their beautiful Latin, how could they accept being refracted so small in another grammar, or leave their perfect singing for this broken speech?

Why should they stumble this alien world?

Always I have envied the angels their grace.

But I left my hope of Byzantine size and came to this awkwardness, this stupidity.

Came finally to you washing my face as everyone laughed, and found a forest opening as marriage ran in me. All

the leaves in the world turned a little singing: the angels are wrong.

#JackGilbert

THE PLUNDERING OF CIRCE

Circe had no pleasure in pigs.

Pigs, wolves, nor fawning lions. She sang in our language and, beautiful, waited for quality.

Every month they came struggling up from the cove.

The great sea-light behind them.

Each time maybe a world.

Season after season.

Dinner after dinner.

And always at the first measures of lust became themselves.

Odysseus? A known liar.

A resort darling. Untouchable.

#JackGilbert

THE FIRST MORNING OF THE WORLD ON LONG ISLAND

For Doris

The provisional and awkward harp of me

makes nothing of you now.

I labor to constrain it but am unschooled and cannot.

One learns to play the harp, said Aristotle, by playing.

But I do not. Such a harp grows always more dear and I manage always less truly well. Each visitor offhand does better. While I with this year of loss can do nothing.

Can say nothing of the smell of rain in the desert

and the cottonwoods blowing above us. If it would tell even so little of Council Bluffs.

But it will not.

I can make it mourn but not celebrate the River nor my happiness in having been of you.

#JackGilbert

Here is the 2nd Page. Choose a poem:

The Four Perfectly Tangerines

The First Morning of the World on Long Island

I'll Try to Explain About the Fear

Poem for Laura

New York, Summer

The Bay Bridge from Potrero Hill

On Growing Old in San Francisco

Without Watteau, Without Burckhardt, Oklahoma Letter to Mr. John Keats Portolano

It Is Clear Why the Angels Come No More The Whiteness, the Sound, and Alcibiades

MONOLITHOS: Poems 1962 and 1982 [1982]

ONE -1962

Between Poems

The Plundering of Circe

Islands and Figs

Poetry Is a Kind of Lying

For Example

The Sirens Again

Alba

Ostinato rigore

A Bird Sings to Establish Frontiers

Bartleby at the Wall

TWO-[MONOLITHOS]-1982

All the Way from There to Here

Not Part of Literature Trying to Be Married

Registration

More Than Friends

Can you still read over our conversation in this Thread?

Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems. I will soon give you page 2 of the Table of Contents.

I wish I could help you, but I’m still learning myself. Ask #[2]

🔥🎶 Saw her perform in a Jazz Club recently #Pittsburgh https://music.apple.com/us/album/le-freak/1687821307?i=1687821308

Not bad. “Harold Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or J) writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake’s Milton, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations. This is criticism at its best.” https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674780286

🧐 A quote from the first page of another piece by Harold Bloom

King Lear:

Authority and Cosmological Disorder

Hannah ARENDT observed that authority was neither an ancient Greek nor a Hebrew concept but was Roman in origin. For the Romans it meant augmenting the foundations of their society and customs.

Though the drama of King Lear is set in pre-Roman Britain, it nevertheless relies upon the idea of order enshrined in Ciceronian and related sources.

When Kent, disguised as Caius, presents himself for service to Lear, he tells the King,

"You have that in your countenance which I would fain call master."

When Lear replies, "What's that?," Kent offers the one word: "authority." In the extraordinary confrontation with the blinded Gloucester in act 4, scene 6, Lear bitterly disavows authority:

LEAR What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar?

GLOUCESTER Ay, sir.

LEAR And the creature run from the cur there thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog's obeyed in office.

Thou, rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand;

Why dost thou lash that whore?

Strip thine own back,

Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind

For which thou whipp'st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.

Through tattered clothes great vices do appear; Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;

Here is a quote:

“To WHAT EXTENT do Shakespeare’s prime protagonists practice a more intense degree of self-otherseeing than most of us do in our daily lives? We, all of us, frequently are startled by what happens to us or by our apparently unintentional acts. Afterward we ask: Were these events or fantasies, or were they actions in the life of someone else?” ~Harold Bloom (Hamlet’s Questioning of Shakespeare)