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Gerald Stern

Visiting Poet

Gerald Stern

Gerald Stern is an American master. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1925, Stern himself had no mentors. He grew up in a home without books, a child of immigrant parents, and studied philosophy and political science in college. His first book was published in his 48th year, earning him instant critical acclaim. “I thought you read poetry,” he says, “and, like a spider, you did it from the threads of your own belly. So it made me wait for a long time before I got some success. Decades. But at the same time, it made my poetry, whatever came, me.” When he burst on the scene in the early seventies, The Chicago Tribune Book World anointed Stern “the most startling and tender poet to emerge in America in a decade.” From the start, his poems reflected a deep connection to the natural world and to places and things abandoned. Stanley Kunitz once told him, “You are the wilderness in American poetry.”

As William Matthews wrote, Stern is “a poet of ferocious heart and rasping sweetness.” By now, he has written eighteen books of poetry that ponder the weight of history and the buoyancy of memory, the casual miracles of relationships, and the endless possibilities for joy. They include Lucky Life, the 1977 Academy of American Poets Lamont Poetry Selection, This Time: New and Selected Poems, winner of the 1998 National Book Award, American Sonnets, short-listed for the International Griffin Poetry Prize and, most recently, Divine Nothingness. Like Walt Whitman’s, his work—a transformative celebration of the stuff of daily existence—is as gritty, lush, rageful, sticky, hilarious, and humbling as life itself. Stern is also the author of four works of prose, What I Can’t Bear Losing: Notes from a LifeSelected EssaysStealing History, and, forthcoming in 2017, Death Watch. At 91, rather than slowing down, he’s speeding up. As The San Francisco Chronicle put it, Stern’s work “crackles with his exuberance, impatience and apparently consuming need to get his stories down.”

Stern’s many accolades include a Guggenheim fellowship, a PEN award, the Paterson Prize, four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Wallace Stevens Award, a fellowship from the Academy of Arts and Lettersand the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement. In addition to many years on the faculty at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Stern has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of Pittsburgh. He served as the first Poet Laureate of New Jersey, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and, in recent years, as Distinguished Poet in Residence for the Drew University MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.

Select Poems

When I got there the dead opossum looked like

an enormous baby sleeping on the road.

it took me only a few seconds-just

seeing him there-with the hole in his back

and the wind blowing through his hair

to get back again into my animal sorrow.

I am sick of the country, the bloodstained

bumpers, the stiff hairs sticking out of the grilles,

the slimy highways, the heavy birds

refusing to move;

I am sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything,

that joy in death, that philosophical

understanding of carnage, that

concentration on the species.

–I am going to be unappeased at the opossum’s death.

I am going to behave like a Jew

and touch his face, and stare into his eyes,

and pull him off the road.

I am not going to stand in a wet ditch

with the Toyotas and the Chevies passing over me

at sixty miles an hour

and praise the beauty and the balance

and lose myself in the immortal lifestream

when my hands are still a little shaky

from his stiffness and his bulk

and my eyes are still weak and misty

from his round belly and his curved fingers

and his black whiskers and his little dancing feet.

From THIS TIME: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (W.W. Norton, 1998)

I’m eating breakfast even if it means standing

in front of the sink and tearing at the grapefruit,

even if I’m leaning over to keep the juices

away from my chest and stomach and even if a spider

is hanging from my ear and a wild flea

is crawling down my leg. My window is wavy

and dirty. There is a wavy tree outside

with pitiful leaves in front of the rusty fence

and there is a patch a useless rhubarb, the leaves

bent over, the stalks too large and bitter for eating,

and there is some lettuce and spinach too old for picking

beside the rhubarb. This is the way the saints

ate, only they dug for thistles, the feel

of thorns in the throat it was a blessing, my pity

it knows no bounds. There is a thin tomato plant

inside a rolled-up piece of wire, the worms

are already there, the birds are bored. In time

I’ll stand beside the rolled-up fence with tears

of gratitude in my eyes. I’ll hold a puny

pinched tomato in my open hand,

I’ll hold it to my lips. Blessed art Thou,

King of tomatoes, King of grapefruit. The thistle

must have juices, there must be a trick. I hate

to say it but I’m thinking if there is a saint

in our time what will he be, and what will he eat?

I hated rhubarb, all that stringy sweetness-

a fake applesauce-I hated spinach,

always with egg and vinegar, I hated

oranges when they were quartered, that was the signal

for castor oil-aside from the peeled navel

I love the Florida cut in two. I bend

my head forward, my chin is in the air,

I hold my right hand off to the side, the pinkie

is waving; I am back again at the sink;

oh loneliness, I stand at the sink, my garden

is dry and blooming, I love my lettuce, I love

my cornflowers, the sun is doing it all,

the sun and a little dirt and a little water.

I lie on the ground out there, there is one yard

between the house and the tree; I am more calm there

looking back at this window, looking up

a little at the sky, a blue passageway

with smears of white-and gray-a bird crossing

from berm to berm, from ditch to ditch, another one,

a wild highway, a wild skyway, a flock

of little ones to make me feel gay, the fly

down the thruway, I move my eyes back and forth

to see them appear and disappear, I stretch

my neck, a kind of exercise. Ah sky,

my breakfast is over, my lunch is over, the wind

has stopped, it is the hour of deepest thought.

Now I brood, I grimace, how quickly the day goes,

how full it is of sunshine, and wind, how many

smells there are, how gorgeous is the distant

sound of dogs, and engines-Blessed art Thou,

Lord of the falling leaf, Lord of the rhubarb,

Lord of the roving cat, Lord of the cloud.

Blessed art Thou oh grapefruit King of the universe,

Blessed art Thou my sink, oh Blessed art Thou

Thou milkweed Queen of the sky, burster of seeds,

Who bringeth forth juice from the earth.

From THIS TIME: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (W. W. Norton, 1998)

The geese have their heaven and I have mine,

though both are made of grass and water and both

have sudden and subtle bridges where the carved stone

changes color under the presumptive arches,

and it is microcosmic and symbolic

so I could be there lying under the stars,

if it is one of the hazy afternoons,

and even mistake the birdlime for the Milky Way

or one drop of water in the sunlight

for one of the late afternoons, though nothing I know

will save them even though their eggs are like steel,

even though their guards are wise; whereas I

still am struggling, I with the soft egg, I

with the infantile presidents. You should see me

explaining things to them, below the bridge

this side of the river, not for one good second

ridiculing them. I still am reading and thinking;

I still am comparing; and I am spending my time

like one or two others in understanding, that is

a type of heaven too, at least for me it is,

holding on to the stabbed uprooted sycamore.

From AMERICAN SONNETS (W.W. Norton, 2002)

About Gerald

Poetry Center Reading Dates: October 2003, October 2011, October 2016