Adjunct Associate Professor of Writing Alan Gilbert has published a new edition of his epic poem The Everyday Life of Design. The book was released in November by Winter Editions, an imprint founded by fellow Adjunct Associate Professor Matvei Yankelevich.
Gilbert’s epic poem is a sprawling and diverse collection of poems examining everything from the elegiac to the absurd, a growing and evolving magnum opus for our troubled times; with an eye out for a brighter future.
“I am trying to write an epic poem that creates a partial map—highly subjective, of course—of the early twenty-first-century United States,” said Gilbert. “At the same time, and like its title says, I am mostly focused on everyday life, very little of which is grand or heroic.”
The new edition is a revised and expanded iteration of a work Gilbert published under the same title in 2020 with Studio / SplitLevel Texts. This fluidity is an essential part of the process for Gilbert, who eschews the boundaries of conventional segmentation.
“I was more than five years into writing these poems before I realized that if I stopped thinking of poems as separate and isolated pieces and books as separate and isolated collections of these pieces, then a vast terrain opened up in front of me,” said Gilbert.
Gilbert’s peers were quick to praise the work. “The accuracy of these poems makes us their bull’s-eye,” said poet CAConrad. “I am always grateful for such a collection, a book to keep for life.”
Poet and alum Claudia Rankine ’93 noted Gilbert’s “brilliant bricolage of life’s endless repetitions,” and poet Juliana Spahr called the collection, “transformative, funny, and often heartbreaking.”
Gilbert’s body of work includes three books of poetry and a collection of essays, articles, and reviews. His poems have appeared in publications including The Baffler, The Believer, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, jubilat, and The Nation, and he’s been a contributor for Artforum, Bidoun, BOMB, Bookforum, Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, Modern Painters, and The Village Voice.
His advice for students looking to build their craft? Make it fun, and make it matter. “Find a way to make your creative practice bring you some joy,” he offered. “It’s very hard to sustain a writing life if it’s not something you look forward to doing.”
And importantly, “Don’t believe in yourself in some kind of vague, self-affirming way, but believe that what you are writing is important to you, other people, and the larger world.”
