This past Monday, the venerated and venerable poet Jack Gilbert died. (His Wikipedia page will do an infinitely better job than me at providing the basics of his life or his bibliography.) I imagine he would ask us to celebrate life, and his life, rather than mourn his death. When a poet who writes consistently of his own pain and strange relationship to lost loved dies himself, our own words can sound lame, pathetic. Consequently, I turn to his own lines […]