A common poet

Poet Mark Gibbons: laughs with his mother, Fern, during a visit to her home near Alberton recently. Gibbons grew up in Alberton where his dad worked on the railroad.
Photo by Kurt Wilson

By MICHAEL MOORE of the Missoulian

Mark Gibbons has been many things.

A teacher. A furniture mover. A truck driver. A parent and husband. A son, a good friend.

Through it all, he has remained what he truly is, deep down in his gut - a poet.

"I guess my poetry is my life on display," the Missoula poet said recently. "It's deeply involved in my day-to-day life, my family, my work, my loves. I haven't gotten too far away from the things I know best."

Gibbons' fourth book of poetry, "Blue Horizon," is just out, and it is poetry distilled from a real, Western life, a life punctuated by death, by humor, by love, by bad luck. It is poetry real enough to make you cry, make you scream, make you scratch your head.

It is poetry, a great poet once told Gibbons, that isn't poetry at all.

Not long before Richard Hugo, the dean of Montana poetry, died, a much younger Gibbons took him a stack of poems.

"Well, he peered out over his glasses and asked me a few questions about the work," Gibbons recalled. "And then he said, 'They're just not poems.' "

That was good enough for Gibbons; he was instantly wedded to poetry.

What he doesn't know
is why he goes
down these roads
over and over,
why he wants to
drive more,
keep stumbling
out of bed,
breathe in, shout
about politics
poetry, his plan,
watch the minutes
fall before him
like larch needles...

That's from the title poem, where truth arrives as "the hour of snow," only to be shrugged off as the driver moves into the blue horizon. The poem is quintessential Gibbons, rhythmic and truthful.

Gibbons' work shows a man coming to terms with what binds him, both good and bad, blood, money, love.

"We learn to tolerate any pain, risk blood or breath, anything, if we believe we are loved, right now, forever."

Gibbons' good friend, the cowboy poet Paul Zarzyski, says Gibbons' work teaches us how the "blue-collar heart, punching in each day for a poetic triple shift, works up an honest sweat." Razorcake magazine, had this to say about Gibbons' poems:

"Opening up a Mark Gibbons book of poetry is like opening the door into a rowdy, wild pub. You never know if you'll get punched or kissed. Regardless, hang on to your glasses and get ready for a blast."

Gibbons is comfortable carrying the poetic flag of lived life.

I'm not impressed or entertained by poems
that hinge upon a studied knowledge of the classics.
That kind of cleverness usually bores me (or pisses me off)
like an inside joke I have to learn to get -
a goddamned research project -
when all I want is an honest song, bloody & lusty.

That's from "Great Apes and Monkey Business," which continues with a clarion call:

Poetry needs more beans, more bananas & more beer.
Gimme a Whitman, a Bukowski, or a Jim Harrison
poem, something earthy or dirty with guts -
like a foxy Jimi Hendrix tune. Let it swing & scream,
let it prance & wink, make every syllable count.
I want it to bury me like my father's death.

The last line says it all. All the cleverness mixed with all the earthiness in this world and the end is always the same.

"One of the things I tell kids when I teach in the schools is at some point, there's a commonality to our human experience," said Gibbons, who teaches in the schools for the Missoula Writers Collaborative and the Arts Council. "We're all afraid, we're all in love, we're all gonna die. They get that. We all oughta get that, I guess."

Mark Gibbons grew up in the little railroad town of Alberton, the son of Fern and Vincent, who worked for the railroad to raise his kids.

"He gave up his dreams to raise us, and he was pretty bitter at times," Gibbons said.

The son came to the University of Montana in the early 1970s, studying drama and psychology before eventually returning again to study English, which he taught in schools in Augusta and Ronan.

It was the writer Jim Welch, author of "Fools Crow" but also a respected poet, who told Gibbons "to go ahead and write."

"I've always felt like he gave me permission to write," Gibbons said.

What Gibbons found to write about was the life that surrounded him - his work, his family, his fears and hopes, both local and global. It's a broad enough canvas that Gibbons has room for a poem for President Bush on one page and another for his son, Cache, just a few pages away.

Although he now has four books of poetry, Gibbons has made his living as a blue-collar employee for much of his life, driving trucks and moving furniture. That's taken a physical toll over time - his back is a wreck - but it's also offered him poetic fodder he might not have encountered had he been, for instance, an academic.

"I do think that the life I've led has immersed me in the more common experience of humankind, and that is certainly reflected in what I've written about," Gibbons said. "And I find myself coming at the poems in a couple of ways. Sometimes, you have that moment, where the whole idea comes to you. But mostly, I feel like I've had lots of things happen, so I just sit down and start writing. Usually the thing I think I'm going to write about turns all the way around into something else. I guess the important thing for me is to start."

If all else fails, Gibbons just picks up one of the many scraps of paper where he's jotted down the random thought.

"They're everywhere, and it's usually a decent way to get started," he said.

Once the content starts to fall into place, Gibbons begins working on cadence and rhythm. He reads the work out loud, just to hear the way it sounds, knowing that for the poet, tone and rhythm matter.

"To me, that's the real work, imagining that you're going to be reading this out loud one day," he said. "You can have all the right words, but if it doesn't sound right, if it doesn't evoke something when it's read, it's still wrong."

Here's Gibbons in the poem "Fish Creek."

After I release a hooked fingerling
I wonder, will he survive,
rebuild the hoop
For cutthroat warriors? I'll be back
Around to help
Practice magic
Chants or steps or whatever it takes
For this water
To remember its name

No fancy language, no flashy adjectives or cryptic allusions. Just plainspoken nouns and verbs, making a magical point.

"When they come out like that, that's the magic happening," he said. "That's what makes it all worthwhile."

His fourth book is out, he's turning 53 later this year and the physical nature of his work has left his bad back in the hands of a chiropractor. Something's going to change for Mark Gibbons, and whatever that change turns into, you can expect to read about in his next book.

One thing that won't change, however, is Gibbons' connection to children and poetry. He has for years now worked in the schools teaching poetry for the Missoula Writers Collaborative. Watching the freedom that poetry offers well up in elementary school children gives him a hope that the trouble in the rest of the world sometimes belies.

"It immediately seems accessible to them because it starts out being about them," Gibbons said of poetry and kids. "You do whatever you want to do. It's freedom that other subjects don't offer."

As the kids start writing, though, they glimpse both their own uniqueness - why they chose this word over that - and the things they share with their classmates.

"All of a sudden, you can see it click for them, all the ways we're different, all the ways we're alike," he said. "There's a freedom in that, and you can see it in kids when they're suddenly ready to take a risk. They hang their heart out there on their sleeve and let everybody see it. Poetry lets you do that, lets your inner life come out. It frees up the emotional life that we probably keep bottled up too much."

Part of what is attractive about Gibbons' work is his willingness to reveal an inner life that is sometimes in turmoil, that acknowledges serious conflict about what's right, and that willingly accepts life as it comes, as flawed, as beautiful, as terrifying and touching as it can be.

"Blue Horizon" contains several poems that might be called anti-war or pro-peace poems. One, "High Noon," is even addressed to George Bush and imagines helicopters bearing down on Iraqi children.

Twenty thousand kick-ass fans, kickoff ready
to rumble. I know their missions; I've been in that
Stadium, but today I feel lucky to be here
At terror's pre-game show; wok-a, wok-a, woka.
If only our machines could save us.

Another, "The Fallen," uses words from John Lennon's "Imagine" as a simple, heartfelt cry for peace.

So tell me again why you died, why we keep trying
to mend broken hearts and minds with bullets?

Mixed in with all that, however, is Gibbon's own admission to the occasionally violent impulse, that moment when the blood runs hot and you want for all the world to get even with those who've wronged you. In "For Christ's Sake," he talks to his son, who wants to wreak vengeance on a group of homophobes who've beaten up a lesbian.

I tell my son to let it go.
I don't know
what a coward is. I do know
a cornered animal is dangerous -
I've been there, ready to kill. There's nothing
more volatile than the smoldering fire
inside a humiliated man.

And that is the voice of the same man who recently dreamed about President Bush, a man who saw him not as a warmonger, but as a decent man trying to do what's best in a world gone mad.

"I just imagine he's a guy mostly like the rest of us, and he can't really believe how all this has gotten away so badly," Gibbons recalled. "I think what the dream means, and I wrote a poem about this, is that we need to be careful when we point fingers. Most of us are doing the best we can, and sometimes that's not very good. But we keep trying. You have to keep trying."

To hear Mark Gibbons read three poems go to http://www.missoulian.com/123/gibbonspoems/

Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or by e-mail at mmoore@missoulian.com