Tuesday: Poetry at the Albany Library Brings Sandra Gilbert

Sandra Gilbert may be best known by the general reading public, and certainly by anyone who has taken even a college survey course in literature, for the book she coauthored with Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. That book, a 1980 Pulitzer Prize finalist, brought literature by women and an understanding of the cultures, both of the writers and their readers, to the position of import that we almost take for granted today. 

This Tuesday evening, October 11, from 7-9 p.m., celebrates Sandra Gilbert's most recent contributions to feminist theory, literary criticism, and poetry with readings from her two most recent books, the essays of Rereading Women: Thirty Years of Exploring Our Literary Traditionsand her newest collection of poetry, Aftermath (both from W.W. Norton, 2011).

With Rereading Women, Gilbert combines literary criticism and memoir to examine afresh the evolution of feminist thought, from the influences of its “literary mothers” up through the 19th century, to women writing and reading in the 21st century. The generosity of self she brings to this project, both to material updated and revisited and to new, unpublished essays, makes for accessibly stimulating, pleasurable, most friendly reading. By sharing the personal experiences that helped define her own feminism, alongside her careful attention to the worlds and works of other authors, many familiar, some rediscovered, Gilbert persuasively demonstrates that “through literary study we can renew our lives.”

Commenting on the impact of these essays, literary scholar Harold Bloom writes, “I am moved to claim for these essays by the always incisive Sandra Gilbert a distinctive place in the critical canon of feminism. Her work is a comfort to me now, as it has been for some thirty years.”

In the poems of Aftermath, Gilbert describes the complexities of mourning as sharp grief unfolds to assume its place in a life moving forward. As her friend and colleague Susan Gubar writes in the online magazine Persimmon Tree, Gilbert, much admired for her poems of elegy, “never evolved into the ‘grief poet,‘ especially for readers attuned to Sandra’s buoyancy, zest, and curiosity, her willingness to be surprised by joyful new intelligence of children and grandchildren, Yiddish jokes and Italian ancestry, foreign travel . . .  grand meals and . . . intimate relationship.”

Marilyn Hacker, in her review of Aftermath, says calls Sandra Gilbert “. . . one of our finest poets of the sensual joys and physical/metaphysical tragedies of contemporary life. . . . [Gilbert’s superb elegies] . . . overflow with the brilliant detail of human survival.

Sandra Gilbert is, by her own description, “not just a poet-critic-modernist-Romanticist-author-editor and wife-mother but also a feminist-theorist-coauthor-coeditor.” She is also a professor emerita of English at the University of California, Davis.

Gilbert has published eight books of poetry, including Emily’s Bread; Blood Pressure; Ghost Volcano; Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems; and Belongings. Her prose writing includes the memoirWrongful Death; Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve; and On Burning Ground: Thirty Years of Thinking About Poetry. With Susan Gubar, Gilbert co-wrote the Pulitzer-Prize-nominatedThe Mad Woman in the Attic, which forever elevated the status of Women’s Studies, and No Man’s Land, a survey of women’s literature in the 20th century. Together they co-edited The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, bringing decades of writing by women into the mainstream literary canon.

Gilbert's wide-ranging curiosity and vivid powers of desciption, whether applied to her sonnets, her scholarly work, or her always-lively conversation, reflect the tremendous energy she gives and the pleasure she finds in most every aspect of life.  It is quite in character, then, that Sandra Gilbert's latest writing venture explores what she terms "the culinary imagination." 

Come join us for an evening of memoir, poetry, and literary adventure that will include time for discussion and the further exchange of poetry through our traditional open mic.