This is Who We Are: Alan Gilbert

Adjunct Associate Professor Alan Gilbert grew up in a house without books. His first encounter with the power of language came not through literature, but through the lyrics of alternative music and early hip-hop. "I came to poetry mostly through song lyrics and rap," Gilbert recalled over coffee. 

His early encounters with poetic language began in the mid-1980s, when Gilbert was discovering bands like R.E.M. and U2. His tastes soon developed toward the alternative music of the era. "I had a goth rock stage where I was deeply into the lyrics of Christian Death, Sisters of Mercy, and also Joy Division," he says. "I thought they were using language in really interesting ways, and I hadn't encountered any books of poems to compare it with."  He had also begun exploring the emerging world of rap through the 12-inch singles available in the Washington, D.C., area.

It was a chance encounter with the writing of Charles Baudelaire that led Gilbert to a relationship with traditional poetry. "Once I encountered Baudelaire, I discovered other French Symbolist poets, and I went through a long phase of loving and writing imitations of French poetry. I still teach them—Baudelaire and Mallarmé–in my avant-garde poetry seminar."

This experience of following seemingly unrelated creative threads, of one discovery leading to another, shapes Gilbert's teaching philosophy. "I followed links, basically, before there was an internet," he says. "I had a couple of close friends, and we were all feeding each other material that we were interested in."

In his classroom at the School of the Arts, Gilbert works to recreate that spirit of organic discovery, deliberately stepping away from traditional positions of authority or prescriptive formulas. His intent is to disperse his authority around the classroom, emphasizing dialogue and unconventional methods.

Gilbert emphasizes that students are always welcome to redirect or reframe  his presentation of materials, maintaining that the point of the classroom is to create dialogue rather than enforce a top-down approach. He often uses humor to undermine his own sense of authority, creating an environment where students feel empowered to explore and discover their own voice. 

During classes, Gilbert avoids rigid conceptions of what poetry should be and tries to present work that young writers can engage with—or not—on their own terms. "I always tell students at the beginning of a semester that if they come away from the seminar or lecture with one or two great loves out of the twenty or more people that I teach and present, I will consider that successful."

Gilbert also believes that, as a teacher, he should focus on providing students with skills that will prove useful after graduation. "It's very difficult to continue one's practice in a sustained way as an artist in any discipline, from painting to poetry. You really need a firm foundation to leave Columbia with," he said. "There's a difference between doing really well for your classes in a way that fulfills requirements or impresses the professor, and having tools and basic foundations for what you're going to do when you're out there on your own.

"Behind the scenes, it's also about helping students get published, helping them find jobs, writing letters of recommendation for grad school," he said. "I would say those aspects are as central as any kind of small intervention in the classroom."

Gilbert approaches the challenge of empowering his students in two steps. First, he focuses on helping students discover their unique strengths, which are not always obvious and sometimes surprising. The second is to encourage students to expand their range and take on new challenges. "You're not here to just do one small thing really well over and over again. You're trying to figure out how to do that thing well while discovering the biggest range in which you can work."

In an era of shorter poems, one of his few concrete assignments involves writing a long one. "Students often think that's challenging and difficult—how do I sustain a poem for that long? What am I going to write about for three or four pages?" 

One student worked on the long poem throughout the entire semester, crafting a piece about her family's roots in Panama, exploring both personal history and environmental themes. That single assignment eventually led to a successful Fulbright fellowship application, allowing her to spend six months conducting research in Panama.

“Of course, she could have done that on her own," Gilbert said. “But I think that's a good example of how one small seed—just asking someone to move a bit out of their comfort zone and write a longer poem—ended up taking her to Panama for half a year." 

This expansion of range becomes particularly important when students face the inevitable evolution of their subject matter. "In poetry, sometimes people have certain difficult experiences or preoccupations that they want to write about. That's great, and we encourage that completely," he noted. "But then at a certain point, they might not want to write about those experiences anymore, or they've already covered them fully. They need something else to write about. We as teachers need to push the horizon a little bit and show that you can move to other domains once you've taken the resources from this one."

In key ways, Gilbert's teaching method mirrors his own artistic journey—one of following creative threads and discovering ever-expanding unexpected connections—without paying deference to the “proper,” canonical way of understanding what poetry is. His method is  therefore exploratory rather than prescriptive. "It's about paying attention to what someone does well in putting words together, rather than saying ‘this sentence should be structured differently or this stanza should be structured differently.’"

For Gilbert, teaching remains a dialogue—an ongoing conversation about possibilities, both on and off the page. His students are finding their own unique paths to artistic expression, one unexpected connection at a time.

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Alan Gilbert is the author of three books of poetry: The Everyday Life of Design (Winter Editions, 2024), The Treatment of Monuments (SplitLevel Texts, 2012), and Late in the Antenna Fields (Futurepoem, 2011), as well as a collection of essays, Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight (Wesleyan University Press, 2006). His work has appeared in numerous publications including The Baffler, The Believer, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, jubilat, and The Nation. His writings on poetry and art have been featured in Artforum, Bidoun, BOMB, Bookforum, Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, Modern Painters, and The Village Voice. He is the recipient of a 2019 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2006 Creative Capital Foundation Award for Innovative Literature.