POET

Gerald Stern (1925 - )

BIOGRAPHY

"If I could choose one poem of mine to explain my stance," Gerald Stern told Contemporary Poets, "it would be 'The One Thing in Life,' which appears in Lucky Life." In this poem ("There is a sweetness buried in my mind/there is water with a small cave behind it") says Stern, "I stake out a place for myself, so to speak, that was overlooked or ignored or disdained, a place no one else wanted."

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Eastern European immigrants, Stern writes his poetry from a distinct point of view, merging his all-American upbringing with his traditional Jewish heritage. This intermingling of cultures has produced in Stern a sense of "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," as Gaynor F. Bradish noted in a Contemporary Poets essay.

Though for some years he lived in the Midwest, running the creative writing program for the University of Iowa, the poet returned to his roots, settling in the Delaware River region, in a rural environment not far from the big-city inspiration of Philadelphia and New York. In poetry collections that cover more than two decades, Stern has established a clear voice, according to Grace Schulman, writing in a Nation piece: He "brandishes surreal images in a chatty tone. At times he is a gabby country neighbor, at others a streetwise companion, spinning out odd tales that begin with animals and move into wisdom. When he confronts horror, he is terrifying."

More than one critic has compared Stern to Walt Whitman. Bradish remarked that Stern ably carries on Whitman's uniquely American romantic tradition "with its emphasis on the writer himself as contemporary Everyman and its celebration of place." Southern Review writer Kate Daniels had a different perspective: "We might like to think of [Stern] as our quintessentially Whitmanian American poet," Daniels stated, "but he is far too literate, too worldly to seem typically American. Perhaps it would be more accurate to think of him as a post-nuclear, multicultural Whitman for the millennium—the U.S.'s one and only truly global poet."

New York Times Book Review critic Vernon Shetley wrote that "Stern's poems lay bare his emotions while revealing almost nothing about their origins." They achieve their effects, the reviewer continued, "through accumulations of rhetorical weight or sudden flashes of disjunctive memory." His poems, too, reveal "his refusal to look beyond the self," said Shetley. "For Gerald Stern," noted David Wojahn in Poetry East, "nothing possesses us as wholly as the past." This is the general theme of his poetry collections, The Red Coal and Paradise Poems, which also focus on "the purpose of the poet, suffering, death, redemption, and the definition of paradise," according to Literary Review contributor Jane Sommerville. In addition to these books, the poet's earlier collections, such as Lucky Life and Rejoicings: Selected Poems 1966-72, are all written with Stern's characteristically "exuberant style," as Sommerville called it. His book Lovesick, however, also seems "to express a stronger note of finality, than those in earlier collections," remarked a Publishers Weekly reviewer.

Leonard Michaels, in a New York Times Book Review article, found Stern's poetry "very subtle at times and often marvelous," further contending that he is "a very brilliant [and] moving poet." Harper's critic Hayden Carruth also appreciated Stern's work. He wrote: "It is extremely difficult to bring off the kind of poem Stern writes, doomsday among the tricycles and kittens. Most poets who try end up with trite magazine verse, predictabilities of faded irony. But Stern succeeds. His low-voiced, prosy syntax gives us direct statements, simple and true, moving almost monotonously toward the hysterical outbreak of silence, the twisted smile. But he draws back; he doesn't push to that catastrophe—not quite. Instead he resumes, again and again, poem after poem."

In 1998 Stern produced This Time: New and Selected Poems. Deborah Garrison's strong reaction to the collection was the subject of a New Yorker piece: "It isn't often you come across poetry that makes you want to turn to the stranger next to you on the bus, grab him by the collar, and say, 'You have to read this!' But that's how I felt when I read a small poem called '96 Vandam' [contained in This Time ]." Garrison wasn't alone in her praise: This Time won not only critical kudos but also the 1998 National Book Award in poetry. The work "demonstrates just how comfortable [the poet] is in shuttling between cultures," said Daniels. "Again and again, Stern transports us all over Western civilization, revealing in his marvelously humane way 'the suffering and the sadness,' 'the weeping and the wailing' that coexist with the beauty and ecstasy that all civilizations share." The only question arising out of the collection, declares Garrison, is "why more of us haven't been aware of this work over the past two and a half decades." Stern followed This Time with a 2000 collection, Last Blue, which was assessed in a Publishers Weekly review this way: "While there are few surprises here, the quality of the poems is consistently quite high, and the voice behind them remains winning and companionable."

CAREER

Lake Grove School, Lake Grove, NY, English teacher and principal, 1951-53; Victoria Drive Secondary School, Glasgow, Scotland, English teacher, 1953-54; Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, instructor in English, 1956-63; Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA, associate professor of English, 1963-67; Somerset County College, Somerville, NJ, professor of English, 1968-82; University of Iowa, Iowa City, professor of English, beginning 1982. Lecturer, Douglas College, spring, 1968; visiting poet, Sarah Lawrence College, spring, 1978, University of Pittsburgh, fall, 1978. Visiting professor, Columbia University, 1980, Bucknell University, spring, 1988; Fanny Hurst professorship, Washington University, 1985. Chairman of creative writing, University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, 1984. Conducts poetry workshops and gives readings at colleges, universities, theaters, and art centers. Consultant in literature to Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pineys, Rutgers University Press, 1971.
The Naming of Beasts, Cummington Press (Omaha, NE), 1972.
Rejoicings: Selected Poems 1966-72, Fiddlehead Poetry Books (Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada), 1973.
Lucky Life, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1977.
The Red Coal, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1981.
Paradise Poems, Random House (New York, NY), 1984.
Lovesick, Perennial Library (New York, NY), 1987.
Selected Essays, Harper, 1988.
New and Selected Poems, Harper, 1989.
Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems, Harper (New York, NY), 1990.
Bread without Sugar: Poems, Norton (New York, NY), 1992.
Odd Mercy: Poems, Norton (New York, NY), 1995.
This Time: New and Selected Poems, Norton (New York, NY), 1998.
Last Blue: Poems, Norton (New York, NY), 2000.
American Sonnets: Poems, Norton (New York, NY), 2002.
Not God after All, drawings by Sheba Sha, Autumn House Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 2004.
What I Can't Bear Losing: Notes from a Life (essays), Norton (New York, NY), 2004.
Everything Is Burning: Poems, Norton (New York, NY), 2005.
Also author of "Father Guzman," a long poem published in Paris Review, spring, 1982. Contributor to anthologies; contributor to poetry journals and popular magazines, including New Yorker, Nation, Paris Review, Poetry Now, American Poetry Review, and Poetry.