To write about Gil Orlovitz's poetry is difficult for a number of reasons. For one thing, there doesn't exist a common or overriding generalized attitude, or perception, of the poetry. That is, there is not a critical or literary "posture" the way there is with, say, Cummings, or Lowell. It is not only a question of Cummings and Lowell being better known, or that there is a critical body of literature surrounding, and supporting, them. I think it has to do as well with Orlovitz's poetry itself, its complexity and diversity….

[Another] difficulty in writing about Orlovitz is that the position assumed in his poems, the posture, the moral stance, the mostly public communicable part of it, has to do to some degree with a nightmare and a loveliness that never truly surfaced because Orlovitz never truly surfaced. It's like the history of a country that is not on the map. It's not that the country doesn't exist, it's just not been admitted. Consider, for example, how Lowell's or Cummings' or Ginsberg's "country" would appear if the poetry were just being fully discovered. It's a delicate point, but I think it's a point. Portions of the country have been renamed; portions exist, as it were, without seacoast or mountain range or language. And because that space and that energy—that geography—have been taken up to a degree by other writers, Orlovitz could appear derivative just where he is most original and could look awkward in the lederhosen he himself invented. This is all only temporary, of course, and will be much less important twenty years from now than it is today. For poetry will endure its geography; and Orlovitz's poetry, in particular, not only endures his geography but transcends it.

[A further] difficulty, in writing about Orlovitz, is what to do with the strong feelings, the powerfully fixed attitudes, of those who already know his work. There are some poets, and not necessarily just bland ones, who don't seem to provoke the reader like others do. Orlovitz is a provoker. He is a provokateur! And the provocations, as far as I can make out, consist of the following: a. He wrote too much. b. He didn't use a red pencil. c. He published too much, his name was everywhere. d. He didn't have a unified sensibility, but combined comic, tragic and what have you. e. He punned mercilessly. f. He wrote too many sonnets. g. He was arrogant. h. He was unsympathetic to the reader. i. He was sloppy. j. He was unnecessarily difficult. k. He was sentimental. l. He refused to cooperate. m. His poetry is not readily available…. I think that the key to the strong feeling about Orlovitz was that he was a loner and that he refused to submit. This made people angry. It sounds silly, but it's true. Of course, in all fairness to those who might have reservations about Orlovitz's poetry on legitimate grounds—as they see it—it must be pointed out that their reasoning, too, might be confused or diluted or treated unfairly. I'm saying, in effect, that Orlovitz, for good or ill, (I think it's ill) was forced into what can only be called a political position that he didn't intend but which certainly had something to do with his poetry as well as the state of poetry at the time. And I'm saying that to treat his poetry fairly we must de-fuse the prejudices….

Orlovitz's poetry can be divided into three parts: lyrics, sonnets and satires. And he is very much like the olds and the ancients in putting on different moods for different modes. His lyrics, for example, which are Elizabethan and Joycean (Orlovitzian) are sweet, elegiac and beautiful, lacking the violence and the complexity of the sonnets. I don't mean that necessarily as a criticism though I must confess that I find some of the lyrics the least successful of his poems and lacking the most in the kind of power and imagination we see in many of the sonnets and satires. Actually, of course, there are poems of his which are lyrical and not pure lyrics and which, like many poems in the last fifty years, combine the meditative, the lyrical and the satirical, but I think of him, of Orlovitz, thinking of himself writing in each of these several modes and deliberately setting the tone, making the adjustments, for the particular occasion….

I guess Orlovitz is known mostly for his sonnets—say the name and you get the response. He wrote hundreds of sonnets and different groups of sonnet sequences. Maybe he concentrated so much on sonnets because they were a form particularly suited to his way of thinking, or maybe they offered a regularity, or system, that he could return to whenever he had the time and energy, the way some poets do with a long poem, and find his "voice" immediately in a familiar mode, or maybe, as a kind of endless series of tentative statements, partial explorations or sudden flashes, they offered a perfect chance to reach quickly into his soul, or mind, for the thought and feeling that would take care of that night's terror, or crazy joy. I think he also liked the sonnet because it presented an interesting limited field to infuse his genius in, because he could be playful, because he could be philosophical and intellectual and evasive and experimental and slyly shocking in a suit of tradition and a little shockingly traditional as well. (p. 27)

Here is sonnet number 8 (Art of the Sonnet,… 1961).

  there—who?—a man windocleans my eyes high
  high above the level of my feet.
  Done, how shall he get in and go down and get out?
  Nights my eyes black, mornings blue, now—gray.
  He leans far far out beyond my lids, high
  over the multitudes of toes—who pinch
  themselves only to look down, while I,
  child to man plus little man—I stretch
  laughter and terror to make both ends of his belt meet,
  hold—why?—for all I care he could fall like sleet,
  Haul my hands to tempt or topple him?
  Hands off, hands down to him who'd clear my balls of phlegm,
  who here stares me in the eye, his own a bubbling weld,
  safety aflame to plumb my shriek at man unknown dead at my feet

There is rhetoric, stemming from a narrative, or pseudo-narrative; there is passion; wit, punning, deep feeling; a strange sexual metaphor; music; devotion to form; mystery and intellect; but above all else a deeply serious statement. I think the key here, and perhaps the key in many, if not all, of his sonnets, is the ambivalence about form. He retains form, he experiments, but in critical instances he rebels against it. I am not only talking about rhyme, the iamb, the fourteen lines, the three types of division and the resolution. Over and over again he breaks (or doesn't break) the rules relating to these. I am talking about something even more basic in the sonnet, that turning back upon the self, that whimsy, that meditation, that deliberate incompleteness, that civility, the key convention. I think it could be called "circularity." Orlovitz, in one way or another, breaks the convention, or defies it. He may do it through "inappropriate subject matter," through outrageous language, or just through refusal to come full cycle. He breaks out of the circle; he rejects the sonnet in the act of embracing it. He becomes suddenly savage in the most civilized of all forms, but more than that, he becomes savage through that form, even because of that form…. (pp. 27-8)

Yet Orlovitz does not sacrifice feeling by going the way he does….

sonnet 90 (Art of the Sonnet).

   I'll give him a crack in the teeth,
   I've told him not
   to bite his own eyes for seeing things,
   I'm here, he's looked for seventysix years—
   does he have to blind white in his seventyseventh?
   teething in his age? Must I rattle love
   in my father's ear? In spite of my a-b-c's,
   he dies. A baby-grasp, a small gawk
   burp to settle his tinkle-belly,
   and he's
   dead.
   You'd never know the man had had
   a heart—and a heart—and a heart—that had struggled
   blindly for blood seventyseven times from God.

In this sonnet, as in dozens of others, the theme is anger and bewilderment at his father's death; his sense of loss, which is his instrument as much as his song; which he returns to over and over again; which he never escapes from and never exhausts. It is, of course, in essential ways, a sonnet in spite of the fact that it breaks the text book rules in six or seven ways. It is a sonnet even as it is a satire of a sonnet, just as it is a statement of extreme grief even as it is a mockery of that grief. But however ambiguous or ironic or complex his structure or his statement is, it does not—ever—become academic because the irony and the ambiguity and the complexity are always in the service of something greater—namely Orlovitz's passion—and that passion dominates everything. With other poets there is relief. There are little pools, quiet rooms. Nothing like this in Orlovitz. There is no let-up. The passion is complete and unremitting. There is humor, playfulness, idleness, irrelevance, but never instead of passion; never even as an interlude….

Generally speaking, Orlovitz was moving more and more in the direction of general satire in his later poems, so that no matter which direction he took there were strong elements of satire involved. His use of language—the very language he used—with its nervousness, complexity, wit and elusiveness—lent itself to satire. I think, in a way, that the satire grew inevitably out of the language, as opposed to his employing a "satirical" language as an embodiment of his ideas. As such, there was no satirical "mask"; there was instead the haunted satire-ridden face, or voice, of Gil Orlovitz himself, nothing now standing between him and his subject. I mean myths, yes, "poetic" masks, metaphors, echos, ditties—because he was a poet—between him and his reader, or among him and his readers, but nothing between him and his subject, no apology or cuteness. (p. 28)

The two best examples of his earlier satire are "The Rooster" and "Not," both written in the mid-fifties. They can be found in Selected Poems, 1960.

"The Rooster" is a consideration of the state of America during the age of the expanding economy, from the point of view of that wise insistent early riser:

           its already noon and I'm still expanding
           I'm a Paul Bunyan Giveaway
           schizophrenia for lonely dolts
           manic nuts for shy bolts …
 
           … hail to the farmers and their cows
           in swimmingpools of milk and honey
           hail to parity granaries of money
           the worker with his fake-home pay….

The language is still sweet, still steady. Change seems a possibility. Crowing makes sense. The poet identifies with the rational and reasonable who, as part of a long and dignified tradition, judged America and found it a little wanting.

"Not" is a lyrical, and almost loving, evoking of the negatives, of course with the implied positives. Again the language is "sweet," the voice is public, the calamity or sadness is shared. Whether it was Orlovitz himself, or the decade in which the poem was written, the tone is not yet bitter, let alone hopeless. The language is strong—here and there even a little outrageous—but reading it now, from the point of view of the years that have passed since then, and from the viewpoint of Orlovitz's late work and his own death, the poem seems almost elegiac. It's not dated—I don't mean that—certainly not as a poem, or even a piece of wisdom; but in connection with what will follow, what Orlovitz will produce, it is relatively idyllic.

  … not the children wading in the waters of their
  mothers and fathers,
  not my love my woman with the tiny blue trumpets in
    her eyes,
  not the people waiting in their stalls to be saddled with
           bright
  jockeys,….
  not the friends impacted wisdomteeth at grief and
    death,….

His ape poems, "The Letters of Great Ape," are the most classical and conventional. The primitive or subhuman seen as rational and morally superior—right out of a thousand science-fiction and anthropological safaris:

                      … I think it very
    possible no Ape will ever exhibit to Man
    again. I think it time you keep your basic
    drives quite secret, without the comic rationalizations
    from your cousins: it will be very hard
    to swing human laughter in a treeless world….
                  ("The Letters of Great Ape": 2)

If we compare these poems to some of the later satires, the difference is extreme; and the key to the difference is that, by the time of the later poems, he no longer seemed interested in making that reasonable contact with the reader, in having a decent communion; or he no longer believed that that sort of thing was important or even possible, given the shift his subject had taken, that is, given the difference in his vision. (pp. 28-9)

The lyrics have a restfulness, a stillness about them in spite of the language, which is still often involuted, intense, difficult. My earlier judgment about the lyrics is perhaps wrong. There is a loveliness to them. Sometimes they remind you a little of Hart Crane:

      … later white waters whistle through soft teeth
      a cool pulse follows the trail of my spine
      the swimmer the shape of the shoreline
      and the stroke of the wave.
                        ("Lyric," Selected Poems)

sometimes of Dylan Thomas:

              when I am gone and green
              who will winter the scene
              what shadows storm the sheen
              and who the icicle hear scold
              the spring for what I had seen
              when I am gone and green
                  ("Lyric," Selected Poems)

For Orlovitz (for others, too, of course) the lyric was an occasion for meditation on a single point, for opening up the heart and confronting something beautiful, sometimes wonderful, sometimes even good. There is a rhetoric involved; and it is a rhetoric deliberately used, not only obvious, but exaggerated. It is perhaps this quality about which I had reservations. It is as if the form existed prior to the poem; as if, sometimes, the form were creating the poem; and as if the poet were not attempting to break through, to violate, the form—certainly, of course, only because he didn't want to, because he was satisfied with the form, even because he loved it.

Yet he was capable of his strange subject in the lyric too (in spite of what I said earlier), and capable of maintaining a lyric tone (maybe a lyric pose) in spite of the subject:

                    The bowel outside,
                    and you within,
                    things excrete upon
                    your secrets …
              ("Lyric," Selected Poems)

Overall it was joy that moved him in these lyrics, or at least the temporary absence of that persistent pain. I think the lyrics are the only poems he writes that are not colored with satire, in some form….

For Orlovitz, the lyric was probably a restricted form, and a relief. Certainly it can be argued that the sonnet itself is a lyric, or can be, perhaps as much as any other form; and one might even want to call Orlovitz's sonnets "lyrics," but the point is that he didn't. What he called "lyrics" were certain non-dramatic and non-narrative efforts at expressing emotions, usually beneficent ones, about nature or a state or a person or animal, centering on their essential, or momentary, mystery. Furthermore these lyrics tended to be decorative; that is, they called attention to themselves. Finally, they were songs, or pseudo-songs, in the tradition of Johnson, Campion, Shakespeare; and Blake and Shelley. It is as if they are meant for musical settings. Sadly enough (I guess) the distorted language, the complex thought processes (even here) and the lack of reasonable coherence would make them formidable lyrics to put to melody or even to memory. (p. 29)

Gerald Stern, "Miss Pink at Last: An Appreciation of Gil Orlovitz" (copyright © 1978 by World Poetry, Inc.; reprinted by permission of Gerald Stern), in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 7, No. 6, November-December, 1978, pp. 27-31.