STERN, Gerald

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Nationality: American. Born: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 22 February 1925. Education: University of Pittsburgh, B.A. 1947; Columbia University, New York, M.A. 1949. Military Service: U.S. Army Air Corps. Family: Married Patricia Miller in 1952 (divorced); one daughter and one son. Career: Instructor, Temple University, Philadelphia, 1957–63; professor, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, 1963–67, and Somerset County College, Somerville, New Jersey, 1968–82; faculty member, Writers' Workshop, University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1982–94. Visiting poet, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, 1977; visiting professor, University of Pittsburgh, 1978, Columbia University, 1980, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, spring 1988, and New York University, fall 1989; distinguished chair, University of Alabama, University, 1984; Fanny Hurst Professor, Washington University, St. Louis, fall 1985; Bain Swiggert Chair, Princeton University, New Jersey, fall 1989; poet-in-residence, Bucknell University, spring 1994. Since 1973 consultant in literature, Pennsylvania Arts Council, Harrisburg. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1976, 1981, 1987; Lamont Poetry Selection award, 1977; State of Pennsylvania creative writing grant, 1979; Pennsylvania Governor's award, 1980; Guggenheim fellowship, 1980; Bess Hokin award (Poetry, Chicago), 1980; Bernard F. Connor award, 1981; Melville Caine award, 1982; Jerome J. Shestack prize, 1984; fellowship, Academy of American Poets, 1993. Address: Creative Writing Program, Department of English, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

The Naming of Beasts and Other Poems. West Branch, lowa, Cummington Press, 1973.

Rejoicings. Fredericton, New Brunswick, Fiddlehead, 1973; Los Angeles, Metro, 1984.

Lucky Life. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

The Red Coal. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

Paradise Poems. New York, Random House, 1984.

Lovesick. New York, Harper, 1987.

Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems. New York, Harper, 1990.

Two Long Poems. Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University Press.1990.

Bread without Sugar. New York, Norton, 1992.

Odd Mercy. New York, Norton, 1995.

This Time: New and Selected Poems. New York, Norton, 1998.

Last Blue: Poems. New York, Norton, 2000.

Recording: Rotten Angel, Watershed, 1989.

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Critical Studies: Gerald Stern issue of Poetry East (Ripon, Wisconsin), fall 1988; Making the Light Come: The Poetry of Gerald Stern by Jane Somerville, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1990; "Explaining, Explaining: A Conversation with Gerald Stern, Parts I & II" by Leslie Kelen, in Boulevard, 7(2–3), spring 1992; "American Latitude" by Calvin Bedient, in Southern Review (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), 29(4), autumn 1993; "New Jerusalems: Contemporary Jewish American Poets and the Puritan Tradition" by Jonathan N. Barron, in The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era, edited by Aliki Barnstone, Michael Tomasek Manson, and Carol J. Singley, Hanover, New Hampshire, University Press of New England, 1997; "The Poetry of Gerald Stern" by Mark Hillringhouse, in Literary Review (Madison, New Jersey), 40(2), winter 1997; The Terror of Our Days: Sylvia Plath, William Heyen, Gerald Stern, and Jerome Rothenberg Poetically Respond to Holocaust (dissertation) by Harriet Abbey Leibowitz Parmet, Lehigh University, 1998; interview with Gary Pacernick, in American Poetry Review (Philadelphia), 27(4), July-August 1998.

Gerald Stern comments:

(1980) If I could choose one poem of mine to explain my stance, or my artistic position, it would be "The One Thing in Life," which appears in Lucky Life. In this poem I stake out a place for myself, so to speak, that was overlooked or ignored or disdained, a place no one else wanted. I mean this in a psychological and metaphorical and philosophical sense. The poem is short, so I will quote it:

Wherever I go now I lie down on my own bed of straw
and bury my face in my own pillow.
I can stop in any city I want to
and pull the stiff blanket up to my chin.
It's easy now, walking up a flight of carpeted stairs
and down a hall past the painted fire doors.
It's easy bumping my knees on a rickety table

and bending down to a tiny sink.
There is a sweetness buried in my mind;
there is water with a small cave behind it;
there's a mouth speaking Greek.
It is what I keep to myself; what I return to;
the one thing that no one else wanted.

When I think about the place "no one else wanted," I think of an abandoned or despised area. I think of weeds, a ruin, a desert, but I think of these things not as remote in time or place from that which is familiar and cherished and valuable—our civilization—but as things that lie just under the surface and just out of eyesight. And I think especially of the dynamic and ironic interpenetration of the two. Thus, my poetry is concerned a great deal with opposites—city-country, present-past, civilization-savagery, powerful-weak, well known-obscure—and is often dualistic in nature, though it is not informed in any formal sense by a philosophical or religious principle of dualism. (I clearly favor the "weaker" of the two, but I have affection for both.) Ultimately the "abandoned" place is a state of mind, or an energy state or a condition, that is within me, and I merely am reaching out for "examples" to approximate this state.

Another aspect of the poetry is that of rebirth or regeneration. A great many of my poems are concerned with rebirth, and I find that the spring season, the time of rebirth, and those holidays and celebrations, religious and otherwise, that relate to rebirth are important in my poems: "God of Rain, God of Water" and "The Sensitive Knife" from Lucky Life and "In Kovalchick's Garden" and "The Blessed" from Rejoicings.

I have been living for the last 10 years on the Delaware River, near Easton, Pennsylvania, less than two hours away from Philadelphia or New York City. I find myself spending a lot of time in the city and writing about it, as well as in the country, and I find that the relationship of these two is an embodiment of my underlying myth, so that I am living life symbolically even as I live it literally. Thus when I write of the literal, I am simultaneously writing symbolically, and the language, which is precise and descriptive, takes on overtones and layers. Several critics, confused by my exact and literal observations, insofar as what I was describing was not common knowledge, mistakenly described me as a surrealist poet.

I find, especially recently, that I am moved a great deal by Jewish mysticism and Chasidism, but I am not unaware that these are parts of huge historical systems that involve commitments and obligations and that I am in a sense "tasting" from the banquet of Judaism those delicacies that suit me. I do believe, though, that, even if I do not practice the ritual, I realize, whether I mention him specifically or not, the lot of the Jew in history and embody him and his spirit in my poems.

I have discovered that my poetry is prized because it comes so much to life orally, and I have discovered that I am a success as a reader. I put it this way because I did not start off intending my poems to be part of the oral revolution of recent American poetry. I believe my poems stand by themselves on the page, but I am delighted, also, to find how well they work out loud.

I am not sure who my precursors are, who has influenced me the most. I am delighted to live in an age without masters. Many commentators have remarked about the closeness to Whitman, particularly in the formal structure, but I ascribe that to our mutual reading in the Scriptures, and as regards anaphora and other poetic devices or strategies, they come more from my reading of the prophets and Psalms than from "Song of Myself." Indeed, though I love Whitman, I feel closer if anything to Dickinson, just as I feel as close to Elizabeth Bishop as I do to Theodore Roethke.

(1990) Since I have moved to Iowa in the early 1980s, there has been a shifting both in the music and the content of my poetry, though I do not know whether to ascribe it to the changed geographic locality or a change that results inevitably from the passing of time. I move around a lot. I am not fixed with family and location the way I formerly was, so the voyage is different. I think my poems now are more baroque, more afield, and sometimes less given to explication as they grow less rooted, and they may be more philosophical, even religious, in tone, even as they retain the same political base. They are, if anything, though, a modification, not a radical reversal. The loyalties are the same, the voice is the same, and, if anything, there is even more of an obsession with the past, with Jewish roots, with time, and a commitment to the world as it is, the beloved physical world that is our gift.

(1995) My most recent poems go into areas whose source, frankly, I am unsure of. I search for more and more freedom; I let the spirit take me. Yet I continue to love the concrete and the particular. In terms of form, I would put it that my language, and even my syntax, even as it reaches for new structures, is deeply grounded, and I am thinking joyously and deliberately about form in a stronger way than I have for years, as I try to re-create it.

But what is important to me in poetry is what I understand and what I say, and as I get ready to finish six decades of life on this beautiful earth, I find myself returning more and more to the idea of justice, even as I did in my second decade. And I see justice not only as reflecting moral states and systems but as that which is altogether and only and specifically human, thus the rarest and most original thing amongst our billions of stars. I see it, therefore, as having metaphysical and mystical overtones and as something not banal but hardly expressed as yet, that imagined state that the great early prophets, Isaiah and Amos and Jesus, already understood as they tried to drag us with them in their great love for us. My poetry is about this.

It is, therefore, a life-and-death matter. But it is always, and only, music. It is only music I am interested in. The music of poetry.

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Gerald Stern's deeply felt poetry is written in the confessional mode practiced by such other contemporary poets as Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, and in company with them he continues the American romantic tradition of Walt Whitman, with its emphasis on the writer himself as a contemporary everyman and its celebration of place. But Stern uses his narrative and emotional self-portraiture to create a uniquely detailed central figure or speaker, and his America is rendered with biblical intensity and a Judaic sense of time and loss.

Van Gogh ("Against the Whirling Lines, / Small and powerful in the hands of the Blue God," from "Self-Portrait") becomes a vivid counterpart figure for Stern himself as wanderer and artist. But as Stern travels in his own personal landscape, the journeys are usually return journeys and the places visited effaced by time. "Straus Park," with its specific references, is an especially vivid example:

If you know about the Babylonian Jews
coming back to their stone houses in Jerusalem …
then you must know how I felt when I saw Stanley's
  Cafeteria
boarded up and the sale sign out.

"On the Island," "Four Sad Poems on the Delaware," and "County Line Road" present similar metaphors of time in rural settings, and Stern brings both the rural and urban aspects of his world together in "One Foot in the River": "Going to New York I carry the river in my head / and match it with the flow on 72nd Street and the flow on Broadway."

Like Whitman and the poets of the beat generation, Stern makes considerable use of repetition for rhetorical effect. But the repetitions work in other ways as well. In the central poem "Lucky Life" they emphasize an ironic optimism and the importance of survival without illusion, but it is survival enhanced by tradition and by the recurring rituals of everyday life. The return journeys are, of course, also repetitions. The final lines of "Let Me Please Look into My Window" seem to summarize Stern's view of all such wanderings: "Let me wake up happy, let me know where I am, let me lie still, / as we turn left, as we cross the water, as we leave the light."

—Gaynor F. Bradish