Commentaries - January 2017

Gil: Talk for launch of Gil Ott's 'arrive on wave'

Presented at Temple University on January 24, 2016

Photo courtesy Julia Blumreich

“We / take the form / of our uncertainty,” Gil Ott wrote in a 1984 poem. I take that as a motto of a poetics we shared, Gil and me, born the same year smack in the middle of the last century. Uncertainty remains now, as it was thirty years ago, as it was in 1950, a poetic vice for many. Gil expressed his searching uncertainty with an unflappable and genial defiance, living his fifty-four years with grace, courage, outrage, and élan.