Curated and introduced by L.J. Sysko with Special Contributors Ross Gay, David Stern, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Barbara Ras, Yesenia Montilla, Edward Hirsch, Michael Waters, Carey Salerno, Campbell McGrath, Toi Derricotte, and Anne Marie Macari
It is my fondest hope, alongside and in cooperation with Anne Marie Macari, Gerald Stern’s partner of many years, to pay both personal and poetic tribute to him in this space. Jerry died at 97 years of age in 2022, but this year marks his 100th birthday, and so we present just a few of Jerry’s many poet-friends writing about the man and his art.
According to official biographers, this was Gerald Stern: a canonical American poet and essayist who was the recipient of the Library of Congress’ Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Bernard F. Conners Award from the Paris Review, the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was Poet Laureate of New Jersey from 2000–2002 and a teacher to many at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; Temple University; New England College, where he co-founded the Master of Fine Arts in Poetry program; and Drew University. Lucky Life (1977), his second book, was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and nominated for a National Book Award. The Red Coal (1981) his third, received the Melville Caine Award from the Poetry Society of America. Bread Without Sugar (1992) was the winner of the Paterson Prize; This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998) won the National Book Award; and then came Last Blue (2002); American Sonnets (2002); Everything is Burning (2005); Save the Last Dance (2008); Early Collected Poems: 1965–1992 (2010); Galaxy Love (2017); and Blessed As We Were: Late Selected & New (2020). Stern also authored three essay collections, including What I Can’t Bear Losing: Notes from a Life (2003), Stealing History (2012), and Death Watch: A View from the Tenth Decade (2017).
According to us–among the lucky to have known him–this is who Jerry was, in life and on the page:
L.J. Sysko
Gerald Stern, Human Interrobang?!
Gerald Stern was a human interrobang. He boomed, bristled, sang, laughed, recited, growled, and wept. All before morning coffee. There was little in history–poetic and otherwise–that Jerry didn’t seem to know vociferously well, a fact that would’ve been intimidating if Jerry hadn’t so demonstrably grappled with the weight of his own perception and scrummed with the self-imposed responsibility for converting his curiosity into poetry.
Typical conversation with Jerry included stuff like The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, a litany of all other American pretexts for war, Aaron Copeland, and Hart Crane. He’d recite and regale and you’d hang on for dear life as he squirrel-leapt and spider-weaved, enacting his unbridled brand of sardonic generosity all the while. If he detected grief in you, he’d fall silent and hold your hand. That’s when you knew...that he knew...you were both in on it–the terrible, wonderful joke of human existence–and he’d help the heartache pass with a wisecrack or a whistled tune. There you’d be, sitting atop the broken fourth wall of a Gerald Stern poem waiting for justice or reason or mercy to happen by. And when it didn’t, he’d encourage you to look for grace in your own voice, which is where Jerry found it.
“I have always admired the relationship between younger artists and older ones,” wrote Jerry in the “Secrets” chapter of his memoir What I Can’t Bear Losing. He continued somewhat ruefully: “I am a little proud of my terrible isolation.”
“I had to wait like clumsy Caliban,
a sucker for every vagueness and degeneration.
I had to find my own way back, I had to
free myself, I had to find my own pleasure
in my own sweet cave, with my own sweet music.”
(“In Memory of W.H. Auden”)
Poets, who among us doesn’t know what he means? Notably, Gerald Stern did not publish a poem until he was 44, and my theory on his “late bloomer” status goes like this (and, yes, I agree that we could, and perhaps should, quibble with the underlying premise of “lateness” in this and every creative context): Jerry inhabited his full artistic power once his own memories had distilled enough into history, his favorite place. Of course, he enjoyed steady success thereafter, and by the time I met him, he was in his 70s, teaching, publishing, and speaking at a regular cadence. He’d become “an older one[],” the heroic mentor he’d never had. And although he served as stirring inspiration to a legion of students across his career, he would always see himself as (and bark like) an underdog. It’s this duality that says the most about him; he was both extremely popular (I can still hear Anne Marie jokingly grouse about Jerry’s residency “groupies”–for whom he’d exhaustively perform his extroverted schtick) and necessarily hermetic. Both Prospero and Caliban, he wielded a sorcerer’s wand and called it a humpback.
I was an undergrad when I met Gerald Stern. He was the judge of the 1997 H. MacKnight Black Poetry Contest at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania when I was a senior. A poem I’d written won and the result was a reading at which I served as Jerry’s opening act. My parents made the drive up to Easton from Yardley, my hometown, along the same River Road where Jerry’s poems in Lucky Life are set. To reassure my forklift salesman dad that he wouldn’t hate the proceedings, I said, “You’ll like Gerald Stern. He writes about Here.” Jerry held the audience rapt with acerbic wit and associative gymnastics. Opening with a wisecrack about Temple University–”an abysmal place”–Jerry jolted that theatre of people to attention. Nobody there had known a poet could be Like This. I heard my dad laugh helplessly at first and then with abandon.
I’ve revisited Lucky Life‘s familiar strange many times since, and within minutes, I’m weeping. I cry for those sepia-toned places, Jerry’s surprising imagery (oh, the animals!), lamentation wrapped up in a laugh, and Jerry’s trust in the reader’s capacity to both submit to and suspend irony. Take “Morning Harvest,” for example. The famous line, “Do not regret your little bout with life in the morning” serves as a timbre-shifting breather amidst the dazzling kinetics of this ars poetica. The conceit is this: the speaker has stopped traffic on a bridge to admire a spider’s web in the morning light. Witness trademark Stern associative accretion as he moves us from metaphor, builds steam to metonym, and just as we tuck and roll into transmogrification, Jerry surprises us. We’re stuck in the middle of the web–as neither the expected spider nor its prey but something more humble. We are “a rolled-up leaf or a piece of silent dirt,” suspended in existential abeyance, consigned and resigned to beautiful inconsequence.
“Morning Harvest” is a master class in subverted expectation. If one is to make a lifetime’s study of Gerald Stern’s virtuosic composition–and, “If you drive slowly you can have almost one minute,” quips the poem’s speaker–start here, with “Morning Harvest.” For its ingenious structural mimicry of a spider’s web, its gothic characterization of survival/creativity, and its resolution’s audacious hush. Don’t mistake the widening horizon for optimism or even philosophical concertedness; no, instead behold a Sternian existentialist quandary. For those who don’t know, Jerry studied philosophy as a student, and many of his poems thwart pat thematic resolution, often closing with our Guide quietly dropping us off unaccompanied at time’s edge. There, we ask whether there’ll ever be enough progress within the dark “design” to see us clear of provincial antiquity…in the meantime, Jerry’s flânered off. Around the corner. Reconnoitering for a chat and something decent to eat.
Oh, the stories about Jerry...I can tell the one in which he introduced Charles Simic, at a reading hosted by the John Jay Homestead, by savaging Jay for imperialist hegemony, a screed Simic seemed to enjoy while the ruffled Homestead docents did not...or a contrasting one about Jerry joining me in a buoyant duet (“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true...”) inside a New Hampshire ice cream parlor, but I’d mostly tell the one about the lifeline he threw me, if only by virtue of powerful example. When I was zeroed out by postpartum depression, I phoned my undergrad poetry teacher, the warm and wonderful Lee Upton, who replied with encouragement and pithy advice: “You should apply to the MFA Gerald Stern just started. He liked your poems.” And so I did. And there I found Jerry living his irrepressibly holistic creative life, worthy then and now of attempted emulation. For any student who knew him, the story’s identical. It’s the one about Jerry connecting us to our future poems.
At New England College, Jerry was joined by great poet-teachers like Anne Marie Macari, whose stoic and steady genius touchingly complemented Jerry’s antic genius; fellow masters like the venerable Maxine Kumin, also born in 1925, and F. D. “Frank” Reeve, a brilliant poet-scholar whose diplomatic trip to Khrushchev’s Soviet Union in the role of Robert Frost’s translator is one of 20th century poetry’s notable tales (recorded in Reeve’s memoir Frost in Russia). But nobody topped Jerry for brazen commitment to wielding his whole life to sharpen his poems’ questions.
Jerry said, “Unless it’s symbolic, it’s not art. Unless it’s metaphoric, it’s not art. Unless it’s ironic, it’s not art. It’s an enactment, a ritual and literal event because it’s confusing and delightful” (The Lafayette, 25 April 1997). After everything, and if all else fails–as it assuredly will–Jerry homes us Here: between “confusing and delightful,” sorcerer and fool, grief and gladness, history and hope. Exclamation and question. Both. “Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life. / Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life” (“Lucky Life”).
Thank you, Jerry.
*
MORNING HARVEST
by Gerald Stern
Pennsylvania spiders
not only stretch their silk between the limbs
of our great trees but hang between our houses
and pull their sheets across the frantic eyes
of cats and the soft chests of men.
Some are so huge they move around like mammals,
waddling slowly over the rough cement
and into the bushes to nurse their young or feed
on berries and crunch on bones.
But it is the ones that live on the iron bridge
going across to Riegelsville, New Jersey,
that are the most artistic and luxurious.
They make their webs between the iron uprights
and hang them out in the dew above the river
like a series of new designs on display,
waiting for you to choose the one most delicate,
waiting for you just to touch the sticky threads
as you look at their soft silk, as you love them.
If your mind is already on business,
even if your mind is still into your dream,
you will be shocked by their beauty and you will sit there
two minutes, two hours, a half century you will sit there
until the guards begin to shout, until they rush up in confusion
and bang on your window and look at you in fear.
You will point with your left finger at the sun
and draw a tracery in the cold air,
a dragline from door handle to door handle,
foundation lines inside the windows,
long radials from the panel to the headrest
and gluey spirals turning on the radials;
and you will sit in the center of your web
like a rolled-up leaf or a piece of silent dirt,
pulling gently on your loose trapline.
They will scream in your ear,
they will tear desperately at the sheets,
they will beg for air
before you finally relieve them by starting your engine
and moving reluctantly over the small bridge.
Do not regret your little bout with life in the morning.
If you drive slowly you can have almost one minute
to study drops of silver hanging in the sun
before you turn the corner past the gatehouse
and down the road beside the railroad cars
and finally over the tracks and up the hill
to the morning that lies in front of you like one more design.
It is the morning I live in and travel through,
the morning of children standing in the driveways,
of mothers wrapping their quilted coats around them
and yellow buses flashing their lights like berserk police cars.
It is lights that save us, lights that light the way,
blue lights rushing in to help the wretched,
red lights carrying twenty pounds of oxygen down the highway,
white lights entering the old Phoenician channels
bringing language and mathematics and religion into the darkness.
Excerpted from This Time: New and Selected Poems. Copyright (c) 1977 by Gerald Stern. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
*
Ross Gay
The Having Been Loved
I am trying to remember if it was the last bit of my own in-process writing I shared with Jerry. I think it probably was, and it would’ve been in December of 2016 or so, one of the days my partner Stephanie, Jerry’s assistant for years (that’s how we met), went into the city to do a little work with him. (It’s just not worth not noting that like most of us writers, Jerry might’ve sometimes been a little keener to share his new stuff than listen to others share theirs, but he was a teacher to about a million of us, so he was kinda stuck in this way.) I can’t remember if I brought grapes, red globes, which I often did (Jerry loved fruit), or if that was the day when I ran out to get us all lunch—Jerry pretty much always ate a ham and cheese—at a Jewish Deli I came across the next block over (another essay, another group of essays and remembrances please, about Jerry’s laugh, how it sometimes overtook him, his glasses almost falling off his scrunched-up gaspy face, his hand pressed against a table or countertop to hold himself up). Let us not discount the gift of having someone in your life who loves you to whom you’ll always be a kid. To whom your bumbles are dear. I was mid-stream on my first book of essays, The Book of Delights, and remember reading to him, and I remember him listening, intently, as he could (another set of essays, please, about Jerry’s intent listening), and after it was done he mentioned nothing of the content (it’s about having dreamt I had been fucking my mother), which I think was just kindergarten Freud to him, second grade Sophocles. But he got a big kick out of the way the essay arrived where it did, dropping his index finger on points weirdly arranged on an invisible graph in the air in front of him, smiling and kind of nodding. He was a little bit delighted at those weird points. (Yet another set of essays please; this one called Stern Delighted. Or Tickled Stern.) He was a little bit good job, kid.
I was so proud, I was so glad; because Jerry liked them (this one anyway, which felt representative I think), which, yeah, I wanted him to do; and because those essays felt like a bold new step in my writing life, they were literary and digressive and comic and political and diaristic and run-on and interruptive and interjectory and, almost, it felt to me anyway, kinda different, kinda new. Yo check out this new thing I’m doing, Jer, it was like. Months later, probably years, long after Delights was published, I realized (kindly it was not pointed out to me), re-re-re-reading Stern’s second book of essays, Stealing History (2012), and maybe while reading his third, Death Watch (2017), that though I was also stealing in various ways from Montaigne and Toi Derricotte and Sarah Ruhl and Brian Blanchfield and Rebecca Solnit and June Jordan and many others, I was stealing from no one, nor probably would I ever, more than I was stealing from Jerry. As I had done, wittingly and un-, since I started reading him twenty or so years prior to this episode. Whether or not anyone else knows it or sees it—for the record, usually it’s Stephanie who does: that’s a Jerry line, she says; or that’s a Jerry sentence; or, and maybe especially to the point, especially to the abiding, wonderful gift of the point: oh, there’s Jerry—the imprint, the influence, the having been shown, the having been given, the having been moved, the having been loved, is always there. Is always here.
*
David Stern
Notes on the River: A Remembrance
I want to speak about a brief but meaningful period in the life my father and I shared—starting when I emerged from the fog of adolescence and ending when my father left to teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This was the 1970’s and early 80’s; it was a pivotal time for my father—when he came into his own as a poet and sprang full on from obscurity. This period is reflected mostly in his 1977 book Lucky Life, as well as in Rejoicings and The Red Coal. When I read these early poems, I always feel a sense of belonging and a deep nostalgia for the places I know—the places that fueled his work. It was a gift, in a way, to have been part of it—to have been a witness.
During this time, we lived on the Delaware River in Raubsville, a small village in eastern Pennsylvania. Raubsville sits at the foot of a wide, rolling valley—a nearly intact 19th century landscape of small dairy farms and corn fields, separated with rough stone walls and slender lines of trees. The descendants of the original Germans, my friends, lived in small homes with neat yards and carefully tended gardens. My father lovingly called them fascists; they returned the favor. He was an enigma, an outsider, the professor—wearing his Brown’s Beach jacket, pipe in hand, maundering on the towpath toward Groundhog Locks or Raubs Island.
Our house was stone and rooted in the soft ground between the Delaware River and the Delaware Canal. This was before the craze and homes on the river were mostly unwanted. My father bought the house at a sheriff’s auction, in 1970, for next to nothing (he would tell you the exact amount). It was unlived in, and unlivable—its bull pine floors were rotting, the slate roof leaking, the yard overgrown with black locust saplings and tall weeds. The house had a bareness to it and a simplicity; stocky rooms were conjoined without hallways, there was nothing delicate, nothing unnecessary. I remember my father, after the house was renovated, working on poems in his upstairs room; he would write with his left hand cranked around his notebook, rolling words in his mouth, sitting in his blue chair looking out over the river.
My father connected with the simplicity, the abandon, and the realness of this place. One need only read “The Power of Maples,” “One Foot in the River,” or “Four Sad Poems on the Delaware” to understand the connection. In “The Sweetness of Life,” he writes, “It was the beginning of religion again—on the river— / all the battles and ecstasies and persecutions / taking place beside the hackberries and the fallen locust.” He closes by confessing: “I sat there letting the wild and domestic combine, finally accepting the sweetness of life, on my own mushy log, in the white and spotted moonlight.”
*
THE SWEETNESS OF LIFE
by Gerald Stern
After the heavy rain we were able to tell about the mushrooms,
which ones made us sick, which ones had the dry bitterness,
which ones caused stomach pains and dizziness and hallucinations.
It was the beginning of religion again–on the river–
all the battles and ecstasies and persecutions
taking place beside the hackberries and the fallen locust.
I sat there like a lunatic,
weeping, raving, standing on my head, living
in three and four and five places at once.
I sat there letting the wild and domestic combine,
finally accepting the sweetness of life,
on my own mushy log,
in the white and spotted moonlight.
Excerpted from This Time: New and Selected Poems. Copyright (c) 1977 by Gerald Stern. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
*
Mihaela Moscaliuc
Love and/as Rage
When drunk on beauty, I reach out to Stern for affirmation, for the ecstatic and the “divine nothings” that make it easier to “accept the sweetness of life” (“The Sweetness of Life”). When blinded by rage, I reach out to Stern, trusting I will be reminded how not to succumb to it, and some variant of this invariably comes to my aid: “I lost my rage while helping a beetle recover” (“Rage”).
It takes determination to love the world and to sustain belief in humankind. To some, it might come easy, but not when your eyes and ears are tuned to the abundance of cruelty and injustice. In Stern’s work, I seek not solutions, but patience and resolve: “It takes years to learn how to look at the destruction / of beautiful things; // to learn how to leave the place / of oppression; // and how to make your regeneration / out of nothing” (“When I Have Reached the Point of Suffocation”).
Raging is part of it, part of the determination to love, part of what affords us the right to beauty—not to the claiming of it, but to the beholding of it. Rage as emotion, stance, and action is taxing and necessary. “Hatred of vileness” and “anger at injustices,” Stern writes in “Slow to Learn,” “makes your voice hoarse” and “distorts your features;” then, with a signature turn, “but I already knew it.”
I reach for Stern’s work with all kinds of insane questions, sensing that in reading and rereading, something will be revealed, and it will be gnarly and not untrue, with bits of whisper and bits of rant, with irreverent grit and some song, just as his syntax is, and life is, common until it’s not, wild in every sense.
*
Barbara Ras
Six Things I Love About Jerry
On the way to a writer’s conference in the 1980’s, lost in Newark, Gerald Stern and Rosalind Pace had a harrowing experience while stopped at a red light. Two young kids with guns shot into their car, an encounter that Jerry relates in his unforgettable essay “Bullet in My Neck” from What I Can’t Bear Losing, one of three prose books I had the pleasure and honor to publish at Trinity University Press.
Though Rosalind isn’t hit, Jerry is shot in the neck. Our “hero”—because our beloved poet is undeterred—hits the floor and, by gunning the gas pedal with his hand, manages an escape from the attackers. What ensues after Rosalind takes the wheel is a madcap search for a hospital. Whoever they ask for directions seems drunk or high, and whenever Jerry jumps out of the car to ask a cabbie, they speed away on account of the blood. Eventually, the duo drives up on a lawn, which remarkably ends up being attached to a hospital.
As Jerry reflects on the experience, he writes: “There were angels watching over us and they had a hell of a time leaping from side to side of the car, deflecting and stopping the shots...keeping enough blood in my body...If anything, I am grateful, and I love and kiss everyone and everything involved.” Who could not marvel at Jerry’s magnanimous acceptance and lack of anger at a near death experience? Who else could get away with such melodrama? His extravagant prose is the first of the six things I love about Jerry.
While the doctors are examining him, Jerry enlightens them with stories of famous shootings. One is the failed attempt on the life of Henry Frick, a Pittsburgh industrialist and robber baron. Emma Goldman sent her lover, but he botched the job. Later after departing the ER, Jerry remembers the death of Bruno Schultz, grotesquely shot by the German officer in front of the home where Schultz had just painstakingly painted the children’s nursery. Another death—that of a frog stuffed in a jar and dropped from a window by a kid—infuriated our hero, who attended generously to animals in his writing. Two more of the six things that I love about Jerry: his capacity to tell stories from a nearly endless stock of knowledge rivaled by no one. And his devotion and tenderness to animals.
Rosalind, meanwhile, is left to her own devices, including trying to wash the blood out of their clothes in a tiny hospital sink. Jerry laments her treatment—no hospital bed, no sedative—just left to sleep on a couch with a blanket tossed over her. He’s outraged by the disparity between his care and hers. Jerry’s compassion is the fourth thing I love about him.
A day and a half after being shot, Jerry insists on attending the writer’s conference. He will not let the shooting defeat him. And thus, he takes the stage to talk about one of the lost poets, Gil Orlovitz, and then read some of his own poems. He writes: “I must have been a pretty sight...neck of three colors, rotten clothes, wild eyes...a blood-swollen ghost.” The fifth thing I love about Jerry is his indomitable spirit.
As the essay concludes, Jerry reminisces about the shooters, teenagers now probably in their thirties. If not dead or in prison, maybe they were car salesmen, computer geeks, studying law. Jerry says, “They weren’t pernicious,” which is surprising. Given how potentially deadly the shooting, Jerry thinks of them in an almost merciful mood while he imagines their crappy lot in life. Jerry’s enduring sense of justice is the sixth reason I love him.
*
Yesenia Montilla
Percentages
I don’t know what I was to Jerry exactly: student, mentee, girl with the red lipstick; nor what he was to me. If I had to guess, I could only break it down into these percentages: 20% grandfather, 30% compass, and 50% mentor. Grandfather in the sense that whenever he was around, the air transformed itself into mist. Near him I became a sponge. I would watch the way he would gaze into nothingness lost to nostalgia, same as my grandfather would disappear into a time he couldn’t make sense of or get back. I would memorize Jerry’s ticks and his smile, his stories and his songs. He’d call Lucille a prophet and would tell the best stories about Jack and Etheridge. I now know that what he was doing was less about getting lost in the past and more about re-remembering, so he could get it all down just right.
I would follow him everywhere. Once I pretended to be ill just so I could leave work early and grab the train from New York to Washington D.C. He was reading for the Library of Congress, receiving the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. I had to be there. He wore a gray tweed newsboy cap and a dark jacket with a white shirt and a blue tie. He was on fire that night; I took notes, I laughed, I even wept. It felt like the culmination of a life, a life that knew things, sweet things, devastating things. It knew about wandering through Paris, it knew about love, it knew about animals and about the ugliness of men.
Lately, I’ve been wondering what Jerry would think. He’d be enraged at the state of the world. I imagine him going on a tirade about the President, ICE, the great evil that maybe he thought his pre-teen self had witnessed once and never would again. The idea that all that dancing held by that tiny living room on Beechwood Boulevard would be frozen in time. The Philco with the automatic eye and the trinkets all there, because the world can be a beautiful place, but it can also be terror and capturing that is as much the job of the artist as is capturing the celebration.
When my first book was published, Jerry’s only advice was this: “don’t be a one-hit wonder.” I took that to heart. I took that to mean the world will try to pump the brakes on my poems. I will get distracted by fear. I will get distracted by rage. To survive what’s here, I need Ravel’s “Bolero” with its woodwinds in that perfect C as a point of reference. I need to know that this too shall pass and that my job is to get it all down right, like Jerry. Recalling how he once said that to become an artist was 30% skill, 20% luck, and 50% will. There go those percentages again.
*
Edward Hirsch
Ferocious Compassion
I love Gerald Stern’s poetry for its ferocious compassion, its comic obsessiveness and wild flights of fancy, its Whitmanian chutzpah and elegiac tenderness. Many of his poems begin in second-hand shops and abandoned city lots, in waste places of nature. He focused on the neglected and forgotten. His politics originated with “the dignity of isolation” and a dream of community.
I discovered Stern’s work in the early 1970s when I came across Rejoicings, a prelude to his breakthrough books Lucky Life, The Red Coal, and Paradise Poems. Here was a middle-aged visionary transforming loss into exaltation. “Rejoicings” is the name of the tractate on mourning in the Talmud, and all his work is infused with an ecstatic commitment to mourning, a desire to save a personal and historical past from namelessness and oblivion. He was committed to the memory and concept of the Jew as a stubborn outsider, an ethical dreamer.
Many Stern poems are embedded in my memory, but one that keeps returning to me is the one-sentence lyric “The Dancing.” Jerry was twenty in 1945. He recalls a paradise of three losing themselves in their Pittsburgh living room. The specificity of place matters. In the family’s frenzied joy, the world transforms into a “meadow”. But the year reverberates—the lyric unexpectedly becomes a holocaust poem. The speaker summons the oxymoronic city of his childhood, “beautiful filthy Pittsburgh,” but also that “other dancing.” Thus, dancing now becomes metaphorical—not just an experience in America, but also a liberation in Europe. Here Stern becomes a historical as well as a personal poet, remembering that one family’s heaven exists alongside another’s hell. While one branch was dancing crazily in Pittsburgh, another was being freed in Poland and Germany.
Gerald Stern teaches us that this world is our paradise, a place of ironies and ecstasies, of joy tempered by sorrow. He was an American original, a romantic with a sense of humor, an Orphic voice living inside of history, a visionary crying out against imprisonment and shame, singing of loneliness and rejuvenation, dreaming of justice.
*
THE DANCING
by Gerald Stern
In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
I have never seen a postwar Philco
with the automatic eye
nor heard Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did
in 1945 in that tiny living room
on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum,
half fart, the world at last a meadow,
the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us
screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
as if we could never stop–in 1945–
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home
of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
from the other dancing–in Poland and Germany–
oh God of mercy, oh wild God.
Excerpted from This Time: New and Selected Poems. Copyright (c) 1984 by Gerald Stern. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
*
Michael Waters
Poem previously published in SALT and forthcoming in Pagan Sky: New & Selected Poems 2000-2025 (BOA Editions, 2026).
MOUNT HOPE CEMETERY
Lambertville, NJ
We form a line in cold rain
Until it is my turn
To grasp the shovel, left hand
On the shaft, right on the handle
To heft a small heap of dirt
From the graveside pile,
But I skip the shovel, wanting
To feel soil, its cool,
Granular texture, &
Summon for a moment
His kindness & tics & humor &
Affection for small mammals,
Summon the single, unadorned
Room where he endured
Slow diminishment,
Then let the dirt seep
From my fist onto the oaken urn
Within which the gray chalks
Of American poet Gerald Stern
Settle into their deep,
Abiding discipline.
1925-2022
*
Carey Salerno
Enduring Echoic Memory
There are poems we carry in our heads. There are poems we wake to. They appear to us in our dreams, perhaps even are read by apparitions. They arrive like unbidden thoughts. They bloom within us in response to fresh encounters with art, or to a song that echoes deeply. And like these internalized verses, certain poetry readings can become anchors in our imaginative existence. A poet’s voice, mighty and unforgettable, its sound a true earworm, has the power to return us to the precise space where their words first took hold.
I can count on one hand the enduring echoes of voices that remain strikingly clear to me, their particular tones, their subtle inflections indelibly imprinted, still dwelling within. Among them, the resonant voice of Maxine Kumin as she recited “Night Swimming” from the stage in Concord, New Hampshire. Her eyes, unwavering and deeply focused, seemed to gaze into an invisible starscape in the distance, seeking a far-off place that stretched infinitely beyond the back wall of the darkened hall. With each metered line, she appeared to manifest a complete return to the setting of her poem, as though she had, in a moment of pure concentration, mentally journeyed back to the exact location of that singular night swim, reliving it before our very eyes.
And it was in New Hampshire, as well, that I first came to know and hear the poetry of Gerald Stern. That snowy evening lingers, strikingly vivid, in my mind. I could never, and will never, forget the almost instantaneous way he utterly transfixed an entire room with his presence, taking the podium. In that moment, the subtle details of our surroundings sharpened: the crisp New England air seemed to stiffen even further against our necks; the shared weight of poets gently nestled on the worn rows of college couches became more tangible; and the earthy, mingled scent of wool and jeans, still damp from the snow outside, seemed to deepen, all forming a palpable sensory tapestry over which the palm of his singular voice outstretched.
‘Hypnotic’ is an apt term to capture the essence of his voice and the spellbinding way he delivered his poems. Among Stern’s vast repertoire, one poem, in particular, lingers persistently in the soundscape of my mind, “The Dancing.” Especially, the lines leading up to and through the poem’s breathtaking volta.
This particular aural memory, born of the captivating depth of his voice and the ardor in his tone as he delivered the line, “in Pittsburgh, beautiful, filthy Pittsburgh,” is one I’ll hold onto forever. I replay it with immaculate clarity, along with Stern delivering “half drum, / half fart,” his voice bellowy, bemused, benevolent, and brazenly proletarian.
I imagine myself decades from now, perhaps in my nineties—if granted the same long and fortunate life as Stern—still conjuring the exact sound of him reading these words, still witnessing him utter them in my mind’s eye, illuminated from within, a conduit of the poem’s electricity, its very embodiment.
Could he have known the true extent of his influence? That he could so utterly sway the collective energy of an entire room, connect so intimately with individual souls, and leave such an indelible mark with his words? My deepest hope is that he did. My deepest hope is that he truly understood how immensely he inspired me and countless others through his sheer authenticity and through the powerful, expansive nature of his presence, inherent uniqueness, and resplendent candor. And, of course, through the singular power of his voice. Through the enduring beauty of his poems. Through the unforgettable resonance of his unparalleled readings.
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Campbell McGrath
Kissing Jerry Goodbye: Two Memories
I first met Jerry Stern at the Miami Book Fair in the early 2000s, during the Iraq War fomented by Bush the Younger, though I’d been an avid reader of his work long before. That year—it must have been 2003 or 2004—the Book Fair held its author party at a downtown Miami hotel, which on the same night, by exotic coincidence, hosted a gala ball for the US Marine Corps. At some point Jerry and I were headed down the escalator together when up the opposite escalator came a cadre of Marine officers in their formal dress uniforms, several of them adorned with tasseled swords in shining scabbards. As our two contrarian groups approached and then sailed past each other, Jerry let loose a fusillade of angry denunciation. “What the hell are you doing here! Baby killers! Get your ass over to Iraq!” Etcetera. A deep-dyed individualist, Jerry was not a fan of institutions generally and the military ranked near the top of his shit list, that was one lesson I took from the encounter. Another was: Jerry was not afraid to shout at men carrying swords.
Of course, I already “knew” Gerald Stern from his inimitable poetic voice. In 1987, when I was a student in the MFA program at Columbia University, Robert Pinsky came to teach a one-week intensive poetry workshop. One of his assignments was to memorize a favorite poem for recitation in class. I chose Jerry’s poem “Kissing Stieglitz Goodbye,” from Paradise Poems, one of the series of great books he published in that era. The poem burns with urbane linguistic and aesthetic passion, zigging from the Jersey Turnpike to Georgia O’Keeffe to “a lizard under a boojum,” and its concluding five stanzas compose a bravura meditation on relinquishment that leaves the narrator (and at least one reader) “shaken” and transformed. It was not a very sensible poem to memorize, given its swerving tropes and erratic ecstasies, and yet I have never regretted the choice. Just this year, when the Academy of American Poets asked me to record a poem for their archives, I once again chose “Kissing Stieglitz Goodbye.” Sadly, I could no longer recite it from memory, but I carry that coda everywhere. “What is the life of sadness worth...”
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In 2012, or thereabouts, Elizabeth and I hosted a small dinner at our home for Jerry, Robert Pinsky and Li-Young Lee, all of whom were in town once more for the Miami Book Fair. The four of us were friends from different times and places in our lives—Pittsburgh, Chicago, New Jersey—and Li-Young had been Jerry’s student long before, just as I had once been Robert’s. It was a wonderful night, despite some unforeseen eventualities: for some reason, as dinner time arrived Li-Young was stuck at a martial arts dojo on the far side of the city, and a complex set of phone calls and Book Fair interventions were required to rescue him; later, after we’d moved outside for a post dinner drink, I returned to clear the table and found it on fire. Jerry had inadvertently tossed his napkin onto one of the low candles we’d left burning, and the ensuing conflagration, while entirely accidental, seemed metaphorically fraught: Jerry believed in starting fires.
As a writer, Jerry contained multitudes; he could code-switch from Robert’s cosmopolitan intellectualism to Li-Young’s mystical imagism in the space of a few lines; “he wore a library/ on his chest, he had a church on his knees,” as he declares of Stieglitz, “he was truly a city.” Thinking of Jerry, I’m reminded of a Hayden Carruth line—“How can poetry be written by people who want no change?”—from a poem in which Carruth is thinking about Adrienne Rich. No, Jerry was not shy about starting fires, he was not intimidated by men with swords, he was not even afraid of the Angel of Death, whom Jerry had outwitted, per a long story he was fond of telling, by means of a fortuitously timed real estate transaction. The point of these reflections, I suppose, is that poets impact each other in complicated ways. I was learning from Jerry long before I met him and I’ve continued to learn from him now that he is gone. Also: books endure. The copy of Paradise Poems in my hand today, a hardcover first edition, once belonged to the poet Michael S. Harper: I found it in a used bookstore in Providence, RI, along with several others donated after Harper’s death. I’m not finished with it yet, but I look forward to passing it on.
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KISSING STIEGLITZ GOOD-BYE
by Gerald Stern
Every city in America is approached
through a work of art, usually a bridge
but sometimes a road that curves underneath
or drops down from the sky. Pittsburgh has a tunnel–
you don’t know it–that takes you through the rivers
and under the burning hills. I went there to cry
in the woods or carry my heavy bicycle
through fire and flood. Some have little parks–
San Francisco has a park. Albuquerque
is beautiful from a distance; it is purple
at five in the evening. New York is Egyptian,
especially from the little rise on the hill
at 14-C; it has twelve entrances
like the body of Jesus, and Easton, where I lived,
has two small floating bridges in front of it
that brought me in and out. I said good-bye
to them both when I was 57. I’m reading
Joseph Wood Krutch again–the second time.
I love how he lived in the desert. I’m looking at the skull
of Georgia O’Keefe. I’m kissing Stieglitz good-bye.
He was a city, Stieglitz was truly a city
in every sense of the word; he wore a library
across his chest; he had a church on his knees.
I’m kissing him good-bye; he was, for me,
the last true city; after him there were
only overpasses and shopping centers,
little enclaves here and there, a skyscraper
with nothing near it, maybe a meaningless turf
where whores couldn’t even walk, where nobody sits,
where nobody either lies or runs; either that
or some pure desert: a lizard under a boojum,
a flower sucking the water out of a rock.
What is the life of sadness worth, the bookstores
lost, the drugstores buried, a man with a stick
turning the bricks up, numbering the shards,
dream twenty-one, dream twenty-two. I left
with a glass of tears, a little artistic vial.
I put it in my leather pockets next
to my flask of Scotch, my golden knife and my keys,
my joyful poems and my T-shirts. Stieglitz is there
beside his famous number; there is smoke
and fire above his head; some bowlegged painter
is whispering in his ear; some lady-in-waiting
is taking down his words. I’m kissing Stieglitz
good-bye, my arms are wrapped around him, his photos
are making me cry; we’re walking down Fifth Avenue;
we’re looking for a pencil; there is a girl
standing against the wall–I’m shaking now
when I think of her; there are two buildings, one
is in blackness, there is a dying poplar;
there is a light on the meadow; there is a man
on a sagging porch. I would have believed in everything.
Excerpted from This Time: New and Selected Poems. Copyright (c) 1984 by Gerald Stern. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Toi Derricotte
Poem written for the occasion of this tribute, previously unpublished.
TODAY I WILL CELEBRATE THE DEATH DAY
Today I will celebrate the death day
of Jerry Stern, whether or not
it is true that he will die today. I will celebrate
it by reading his poems. I have been given
all of his language—the
dead dog, the opossum, the hundreds
of swatted mosquitoes, their blood splotching
the walls, & his parents performing the heartfelt
swinging-out dance, the swinging-
in dance, the fart-
sound-under-your-arm
dance, in beautiful,
filthy Pittsburgh, while,
five thousand miles away, Jews
danced in the death
camps, the death
dance in Germany.
Today, when his kidneys
run out of
time, when he sits upright
& stiff in bed refusing
to write more poems, refusing
to see guests, saying “Oh
shit!,” when an old friend
walks in the door. Mitigating
circumstances; waiting only for
the faithful & glorious server,
refusing liquid & solid,
& smiling only when he sees
a picture of the saved dog, Milly.
Today I will hold the
sorrow and terror
of the work you are taking
yourself away from;
here where you leave me
with no choice but your books.
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How he liked (sometimes) one whole long sentence on a line. How sometimes he liked each line to
make a
treacherous leap to the next. Between
now & then, life & death, the time the little white spider
bit his ankle & he almost died. Jer,
I can bear almost as much loneliness
as it takes, that much
before you can come back again
& I can come back—who knows?—dressed
as the little white spider?
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Anne Marie Macari
Warbler In the Freezer
When Gerald Stern died in 2022, we had been together for almost twenty-five years. His mischief, his singing, his rants against injustice and stupidity, and his devotion to reading and writing, were our normal. From ecstasy to political rage, Jerry lived an emotional, art-filled life. His life-force graced us, fed us, with his public persona of comic disruption, his storytelling, and in quiet moments his wisdom and simple love of the world. In his poems, as in life, Jerry could create a feeling of intimacy between strangers, which, after all, is one of the great joys of poetry.
His late poem, the comic gem “Warbler,” offers a small window into our life together. Jerry wasn’t with me when I found the dead bird, nevertheless he begins with an affectionate description of me lifting the bird from the sidewalk, not forgetting that I am left-handed, as he was. He then brings the reader into our home and everyday life, even explaining the contents of our freezer, down to the flavors of ice cream.
Always working, Jerry wrote “Warbler” before I even realized that there was a ready-made poem in my freezer. Honestly, I was a little annoyed, as if I had rights to the poor creature, which I’d picked up for my ornithologist son. Jerry opened the freezer, studied the bird, asked me a few questions, and in a short time, and to his own delight, the poem appeared.
“Warbler” is a kind of love poem, and it’s also Jerry’s way of talking to himself, and to me too, about his death, since he was over 90 when he wrote it. Jerry could go back and forth in his work between tenderness and rage, also sarcasm, philosophy, religion, and great historical knowledge. But “Warbler” is all tenderness, with a nod to my caretaking, however crazy it comes across to be collecting dead birds from the sidewalk and sticking them in the freezer. “Alas poor warbler.”
When Jerry talks about the warbler dying “as all birds do,” I can feel him nodding his head at me, alluding to his own death, preparing us both with his absurd image of the bird singing in the freezer, carrying on in its Jerry-like way. “Warbler” is a coy acknowledgement that at some point in the future he was actually going to leave this life, abandon his poems and books, his stories, his pens and scraps of paper covered with notes. That one day his incredible life force would be gone. And so, like the bird in the freezer, Jerry imagines he will keep singing “a rising trill” from his cold grave. Maybe he’s somewhere singing now. And didn’t Jerry love to sing? He couldn’t leave the worms out of the story, the ones coming for his body, any more than Dickinson could leave out her fly.
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WARBLER
by Gerald Stern
The dead warbler started to sing
as she whom I love
bent down to pick him up with two reluctant fingers,
maybe the small finger (of the left hand)
curling, as at dinner,
and carry him home
and quietly put him
into a see-through plastic bag
as she did for salmon and roast chicken and pie.
I want to say “alas poor warbler”
but warblers die too,
of disease, of age, of accidents,
as all birds do.
And like all birds
they sing when they’re buried,
in this case in the freezer,
a cold graveyard,
two cartons of ice cream,
one vanilla, one dulce de leche,
to remember him by.
He was lifelike stiff and unapologetic
and he sang from time to time, dead or not,
a “rising trill,” as the book says,
in the upper levels where the worms are.
Excerpted from Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018. Copyright (c) 2020 by Gerald Stern. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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