to kill the self, then find it

Turning into Dwelling

Christopher Gilbert

Graywolf Press ($16.00)

Christopher Gilbert (1949-2007) published one book of poetry in his lifetime. That book of poetry happened to win the 1983 Walt Whitman Award. Gilbert’s name rang out briefly and then he slipped into semi-obscurity. Luckily, he continued to write. Even more luckily, the editors at Graywolf Press, Mark Doty and Jeffrey Shotts, did not forget about this most extraordinary poet. Turning into Dwelling collects Gilbert’s award winning book, Across the Mutual Landscape, and a posthumous manuscript, titled Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation (Music of the Striving That Was There); this posthumous manuscript was arranged and edited by the late poet’s friends, Fran Quinn and Mary Fell. The collection begins with a fine introduction by Terrance Hayes. As Hayes notes, “while Gilbert melds the poetics of an austere formalist, a radical jazzman, and a restless bluesman, his work is altogether original, indeterminate, and boundless.” Throughout the two books collected in this one volume, Gilbert’s poetry fluctuates between incantation and reverie, in a series of stutter step articulations of the self that recall the brilliant corners and the abrupt shifts of a Thelonious Monk composition.

Gilbert, who taught psychology for a living, takes the self, unfolding in time, as his greatest subject. Time, in this book, is only a backdrop the self improvises its shifting patterns upon. Moreover, poetry is a space of mythic representation where “the figure aimlessly wandering might be the mind.” In “Horizontal Cosmology,” Gilbert says: “I have decided to be the long black language that reaches way back…I leave myself for the many versions of light as the sun comes across the rippled spit of the Atlantic.” Utterance, here, implies an attempt at self-definition emboldened and burdened by the cultural legacies embodied by the Atlantic Ocean. Later, in the same poem, Gilbert reflects:

You find the self at these moments:

the collection of possible completions and real dreams

converging like streams into one mellifluous river

rushing forward toward itself.

Each of Gilbert’s poems provides similar moments of convergence, where possible completions and real dreams flow together. The hope, voiced time and again by Gilbert, is to know himself and pronounce himself transformed.

Gilbert turns to language to house the sometimes discordant, but always interesting, music of his many selves. In describing a basketball player in a pick-up game, Gilbert describes his own work as a poet:

The game is wherever there’s a chance.

It is nothing easy he’s after,

but the rapture gained with presence.

His catalogue of moves represents

his life. Recognize its stance.

So alive to be the steps

in whose mind the symbol forms,

miraculous to be the feeling

which threads these steps to dance.

Simply put, Christopher Gilbert’s aesthetic was “the rapture gained with presence.” Poems such as "Time with Stevie Wonder in It,” “Metaphor for Something That Plays Us: Remembering Eric Dolphy,” and, most especially, “Listening to Monk’s Mysterioso I Remember Braiding My Sisters’ Hair” are nothing short of miraculous. “Listening to Monk’s Mysterioso…” is one of the biggest-hearted American poems ever composed, and also one of the best. Gilbert’s collection ends with the challenging poem, “Into the Into,” which contains the lines: “Well. We can’t face history by looking at a model. At some point you have to sacrifice yourself. Coltrane’s quest was to kill the self, then find it.” Like John Coltrane, Christopher Gilbert pursued himself through innumerable choruses; both men loped toward the divine and soloed themselves into a supreme understanding of the multiplicity that dwelled within. Here, we have the history of a mind trying to apprehend itself and its place in a culture. Here, we have a dramatization of the sacrifice it takes to play even the wrong notes perfectly.

Dante Di Stefano's poetry and essays have appeared recently in The Writer's Chronicle, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, The Southern California Review, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, The Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, The Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, The Bea Gonzalez Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. He works as a high school English teacher in Endicott, New York.

For more work by Dante Di Stefano, check out his page at our Online Sundries site.